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In my youth, I never thought of myself as a feminist. The feminists I knew from TV were all academics (smart), or activists (strong), and women much older than me. To my mind there was no way someone of my sort - a dropout from an ostensibly academic high school who had avoided competition by going to art school, and not only lacked the relationship - building confidence required for any kind of fellowship or social movement, but was barely comfortable with the very idea of being female and simply struggling through life - could qualify as a feminist. Nor did I actively desire to become one.

Yet when I finally started making works, invariably those works would reference some sociological issue, and especially, the kind of problems addressed by feminism. Still I failed to declare myself a feminist, or refer to my works as feminist art. In the 1990 s there were many artists (across many different genres from the visual arts to music and literature) like me, struggling with life and gambling on self - expression for their survival. Among them were those who proudly called themselves feminists, those who didn't see themselves that way, and those who declared themselves to be definitely not that way. In short, one could say third-wave feminism demonstrated that feminist praxis is not solely the province of "feminists".

I contacted nine artists that I, the lackluster feminist, arbitrarily viewed as "on the same side" and brought them together with the aim of reinterpreting their respective art practices from a feminist viewpoint. How does a feminist exhibition come about, what kind of people are feminists, what is the relational nature of solidarity, of bonds between associates? I hope you too will enjoy the tentative response to these questions with no right answers clumsily hammered out in our everyday chats, social media exchanges, late-night phone calls and trifling debates.

NAGASHIMA Yurie

【Contents】

009 To those of you who do not see yourselves as feminists NAGASHIMA Yurie
012 NAGASHIMA Yurie
032 [Dialogue] KIMURA Yuki × NAGASHIMA Yurie
038 SATO Risa
048 KIMURA Yuki
058 HAN Ishu
066 FUJIOKA Aya
080 MIYAGI Futosh
090 Miyo STEVENS-GANDARA
100 KOBAYASHI Kohei
114 IWANE Ai
128 WATANABE Go
145 Towards a new age of us, where the stars connect and acknowledge one another' s light Feminyan
163 To be (a feminist) or not to be, that is not the question NAGASHIMA Yurie
180 Gross Rabbits, Aliens, Strange People KANAI Fuyuk
184 Considering Countermeasures Against Awkward Discourses: From the Perspective of an Assistant Curator IKEDA Ayumi
187 Biographies
206 List of Works
210 Acknowledgements
211 Photo credits