Before/After (1997)

With Elizabeth Stephens

14 posters, 80 continuous slide projections, magnetic word labels, questions stamped on napkins

In response to an invitation from the conveners of Transformations, an international feminist conference at Lancaster University in England, Elizabeth Stephens and I collaborated on an installation called Before/After. Our role as artists was to inject a different kind of presence into the usual academic conference proceedings. Using the metaphor of before and after images, we used email to solicit pictures in advance from people depicting “Before and After your encounter with feminism.” These images, paired with words, became both posters and projections in the central hall.

In the tradition of Happenings and Fluxus performance, we also staged two social interventions: magnetic labels for the bathroom stalls – 122 theoretical buzz words that people could arrange and rearrange into complex and often humorous identity labels, and provocative questions secretly stamped on the underside of the napkins at a formal banquet. Each person at a table would discover a different question such as “When does your Ph.D. conflict with your pedigree?”, “What forms of patriarchy do you find most exhausting? , “How has racism affected your guest list?”).