Launch event rearranged to 14th January 2022, 6 – 7.30pm, Durham Castle
The Re-Imagine Project is a feminist activist art collaboration between Las Illuministas (Mexico) and Pink Collar Gallery (UK), which seeks to challenge and change the narrative on femicide.
Over 100 artists from Mexico and the UK have come together to create artwork telling a different story about femicide – above all one that blames the perpetrator, not the victim and highlights that femicide is a global pandemic.
The artwork created for this project was exhibited in two online exhibitions. 10 of the exhibiting artists were commissioned to develop their work into pieces of public art – 5 in Mexico, and 5 in the UK.
Newcastle-based artist Rosie Stronach is one of the UK public commissions selected by Durham Castle to create an activist artwork in the historic Tunstall Gallery, presenting work that changes the narrative on femicide.
Rosie has been motivated by the misrepresented female narratives in our media and the many hidden or missing female histories in our historical records. By replacing some of the artefacts in the Tunstall Gallery with contemporary works addressing the startling statistics of femicide in the 21st century, we can confront the sometimes invisible or erased histories of women in our world heritage sites. This work is an attempt to begin to amend these missing histories by inserting female stories into plain view, shoulder to shoulder with existing narratives.
Women have left a powerful and lasting impact on the historic environment, despite their lack of visibility. This exhibition gives female histories space to start conversations about the way women have been, and continue to be, mistreated, how this violence is deeply ingrained in our history, and how we choose to remember that past. Most importantly, we must decide how we will take this information forward with us and make lasting change for the better.
History starts now.
On display until early 2022.