Rachel Garfield

Just as punk created a space for bands such as the Slits and Poly Styrene to challenge 1970s norms of femininity, through a transgressive, strident new female-ness, it also provoked experimental feminist film makers to initiate a parallel, lens-based challenge to patriarchal modes of film making. In this book, Rachel Garfield breaks new ground in exploring the rebellious, feminist punk audio-visual culture of the 1970s, tracing its roots and its legacies. In their filmmaking and their performed personae, film and video artists such as Vivienne Dick, Sandra Lahire, Betzy Bromberg, Ruth Novaczek, Sadie Benning, Leslie Thornton, Abigail Child and Anne Robinson offered a powerful, deliberately awkward alternative to hegemonic conformist femininity, creating a new “punk audio visual aesthetic”. A vital aspect of our vibrant contemporary digital audio visual culture, Garfield argues, can be traced back to the techniques and forms of these feminist pioneers, who like their musical contemporaries worked in a pre-digital, analogue modality that nevertheless influenced the emergent digital audio visual culture of the 1990s and 2000s.

Feminist Audio Visual Culture in the 1970s and 1980s

Experimental Filmmaking and Punk

Courtney J. Martin

Hammad Nasar

Shezad Dawood

Iftikhar Dadi

Layering postwar geometric abstraction with Arabic calligraphic forms, Anwar Jalal Shemza's rich and imaginative body of work is surveyed for the first time in this comprehensive volume.He then moved to London in the mid 1950s to study at the Slade School of Fine Art, where his art underwent fundamental transformation.His subsequent work in painting, drawing and printmaking rigorously deploys geometric and calligraphic forms to engage with dilemmas of identity, culture and place in the modern and contemporary era.Born in India in 1928, Shemza attended art school in Lahore, Pakistan, and was soon recognised there as a leading artist and literary figure.Accompanying over 100 illustrations of works and rare archival material, a text by Iftikhar Dadi provides an overview of his career alongside essays by Shezad Dawood, Rachel Garfield, Courtney Martin and Hammad Nasar that offer perspectives on his work, contemporary reception and influence on a younger generation.

Rachel Garfield

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