Our next speaker, Dr Dawn Woolley will discuss her critical engagement with consumerism, queering the visual language of selfies, and the feminist activism she undertakes through her work in Rebellious Art Practices. Join us on Tuesday, 2 December at 5:30pm UK-time. Tickets are on sale now!

Dawn Woolley is an activist artist. She is interested in contemporary consumerism and the commodified construction of gendered bodies, and she is paying particular attention to the new mechanisms of interaction afforded by social networking sites. Gendered experiences of visibleness have been a particular focus of her own self-portrait and performance artworks during the last 20 years. This concern has become more pressing with the rise of social networking sites and smart phones with cameras, both of which have contributed to the popularity and pervasiveness of self-portraiture in recent years. Dawn’s artistic practice encompasses performance, photography, video, and installation. She examines popular and consumer cultures using a queer, anti-capitalist lens with an aim to raise awareness of gender and beauty ideals that predominate in selfies and to co-create alternative visual languages of self-presentation. It is a form of activism and a feminist critique of representations of gender.

Dawn is an artist and research fellow at Leeds Arts University. Solo exhibitions include; “Rebel Selves”, Castlefield Gallery: New Art Spaces Warrington (2024), RupturEXHIBIT, Hampton Wick (2024) and Left Bank Leeds (2024); “Joy and Revolution: Rebel Selves”, Diskurs Gallery, Berlin, 2023; “Consumed: Stilled Lives” bildkultur Gallery, Stuttgart, (2022), Perth Centre for Photography, Australia, (2021), and Blenheim Walk Gallery, Leeds (2019), among others. Her current project #Rebel Selves is an interdisciplinary project that aims to queer the visual language of selfies and self-portraiture. The project encompasses installations, self-portrait photographs, contemporary dance performances and videos, participatory workshops and a smartphone app.

Her book Consuming the Body: Capitalism, Social Media and Commodification was published in 2023 by Bloomsbury.

Join us at [c]CC Art School for The [c] Word with Dr Dawn Woolley on Tuesday, 2 December at 5:30pm UK-time.