12.30pm – 1.30pm Wednesday 4 May 2022

The Curtin University Gender Research Network (GRN) invites you to remember and honour bell hooks, through critical reflections.

The passing of bell hooks rattled many of us. The Curtin University Gender Research Network (GRN) invites you to remember and honour bell hooks, through engaging in critical reflection at the John Curtin Gallery. Mandy Downing, Peta Dzidic, and Samantha Owen, all influenced by the works of bell hooks, join to deliver an artist talk entitled Finding Comfort Through Discomfort. The talk serves to illuminate intersections between hooks work and that of acclaimed British film maker and installation artist Isaac Julien, both of whom challenge audiences to think critically about gender, race, and their intersection.

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About the speakers

Mandy Downing is a Yindjibarndi woman and the Research Development Advisor for the Faculty of Humanities at Curtin University. Additionally, Mandy is the Co-Chair of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies National Research Ethics Committee and the Senior Indigenous Facilitator for the National Environmental Science Program’s Sustainable Communities and Waste Research Hub. Mandy is an applied scientist in Indigenous Australian research and an applied ethicist whose research interests are institutional racism and the decolonisation of research policy. Additionally, in the community, Mandy co-facilitates an Emerging Leadership program through the Western Australian Aboriginal Leadership Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth aged 18-25

Dr Peta Dzidic (she/her) is a Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of Psychology, School of Population Health, and the Social Justice and Community Mental Health Program Lead, Mental Health Domain, of the Curtin enAble Institute. As a discipline expert of community psychology, Peta adopts a critical, ecological, and intersectional standpoint. Peta conducts substantively driven and community-based research that seeks to develop knowledge and strategy to prevent and address community mental health issues that arise from systemically driven social disadvantage. Her current program of research examines gendered safety work, structural violence, vulnerability, climate change, and their intersection.

Dr Samantha Owen is a Senior Lecturer in Humanities and Social Sciences in the School of Education at Curtin University and the co-Lead of the Curtin University Gender Research Network. Samantha is an historian who works on the narratives nations and communities write and tell about themselves. She is interested in how these narratives travel and percolate and translate across national, transnational and colonial spaces and she approaches the analysis as a gender historian. Samantha’s current work is on contested histories, care-full spaces and gender research.

Isaac Julien The Lady of the Lake (Lessons of the Hour), 2019 Framed gloss inkjet photograph mounted on aluminium 160 x 213.29 cm Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Isaac Julien, The Lady of the Lake (Lessons of the Hour), 2019 Framed gloss inkjet photograph mounted on aluminium 160 x 213.29 cm Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

ADDRESS

John Curtin Gallery, Building 200A, Curtin University, Kent Street, Bentley WA 6102

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EXHIBITION INFORMATION

Open until 8 May 2022

Mon-Fri 11am-5pm, Sun 12pm-4pm

ISAAC JULIEN >> 

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