The Tamesis
As every year, the festival offers a selection of publications to help visitors develop a deeper understanding of the themes explored throughout the festival’s four days of exhibitions and talks. This year, the library is displaying books and magazines that explore the presence and absence of women in art and media from different angles. Some focus on how the female gaze and its meanings have evolved over time; some examine the role of women in still and moving images; others question our definitions of girls and women, and the boundaries and limitations we impose on them.
All of these texts ask us who gets to inhabit the streets, the galleries, the imagination, and all the physical and conceptual spaces that we often think of as fixed, but sometimes subtly, sometimes more overtly, always gendered. Yet gender is not the only lens through which women can be viewed: issues of class, race, and environment intersect to form a dense web of concepts, solutions, imaginative avenues, and open questions.
Paying attention to how women see, think about, and represent themselves is not a way of closing themselves off to others, to men, and to everything that is often antithetical to the female world. Nor is it an oppositional act, trapped in a reductive binary relationship with the masculine energy. Rather, it is an act of self-knowledge, understanding one’s own past, and examining how others see oneself in order to discover a new perspective in which one feels comfortable and can then open oneself up to others and fully consciously know and understand them. These publications avoid simplistic solutions and easy answers and, in line with the festival’s approach, invite readers to ask questions, especially the questions we are least afraid to ask ourselves.
Titles included in the library:
The female gaze in art and photographyAnita Selzer, published by Hardy Grant, 2023
heroineKate Zambreno, Corsair, 2024
Women in Pictures: Women, Art, and the Power of SeeingCatherine McCormack, Icon Books, 2021
Visual Pleasure and Narrative CinemaLaura Mulvey
A Woman Looks at a Man Looks at a Woman: Essays on Art, Sex, and the MindSiri Hustvedt, Simon & Schuster, 2016
Girls on girls: How pop culture turned a generation of women against themselvesSophie Gilbert, 2025
Love and Lightning, Queer and Feminist Manifestosedited by Sarah van Binsbergen, Liz Allen, Jessica Giesel, Sarah Kaman, 2025
Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist ArtLauren Elkin, Chatto & Windus/FSG, 2023
Embodiment: A Genealogy of Black Feminist Art and PerformanceUri Mcmillan, New York University Press, 2015
The flight of the witch. Movies, Black Women, and Common Sense ImagesKara Keeling, Duke University Press, 2007
Girl on Girl: Art and Photography in the Age of Female PerspectiveCharlotte Jensen, Orion Publishing, 2017
Girls: About boredom, rebellion and everything in betweenElisa Wyngaert, Claire Marie Healy, Wim Mertens, Alex Quincho, Chatto & Windus/FSG, 2025
gaze magazine
blatant magazine
mother tongue magazine
time magazine
“Baizhan Tianworm” magazine
polyester magazine
During the festival, the exhibiting artists’ collections of books will be available for inspection.
All magazines are kindly provided by the Reading Room.
