Helen Kaplinsky

Helen Kaplinsky (she/her) is a curator and writer based between Finland and the UK. Over the past decade her projects have spanned questions of postdigital identity, femininity and ownership. She has curated several projects involving cyberfeminism(s) and its echoes in current feminist art practice - the focus of her current PhD studies at the Exhibition Research Lab, Liverpool John Moores. In recent years she has worked on events and exhibitions with HAM (Helsinki Art Museum), Tallinn Kunstihoone, Helsinki Biennial, Barbican, Tate (Modern and Britain), Whitechapel Gallery and Transmediale Festival. She co-directed London project space Res between 2015-2020 and has curated collection-based exhibitions with the Contemporary Art Society and the Arts Council Collection. Her writing has been published by Routledge, Artmonthly, Institute of Network Cultures, Liverpool University Press and Bristol University Press among others.

PROTOfemmes

PROTOfemmes is about shifting positions, grounded in following peer artistic practices. The project reformulates proto-feminism, once used in literary criticism and art history to describe figures appropriated by modern feminism, such as the Medieval court writer Christine de Pizan. While the term has been critiqued for projecting narrow modern, Western perspectives onto the past, PROTOfemmes reclaims “proto” for its kinship with “prototype”—a way of testing, practicing, and remaking without finality. Here, femme exceeds “woman,” carrying queer histories and signalling overflowing, nonlinear, and sometimes monstrous forms of femininity.

Iterating with PROTO, this short talk will discuss how artists change their positions. Defective feminisms – while insisting on their accountability – are given value as sites of risk and resistance. The scale of dehumanisation today exposes the limits of current feminist posthumanist frameworks, which often emphasise interspecies or relational ethics. Feminism is understood as situated and this reading takes account of changes in context, that lead to an always insufficient status of feminism, not yet responsive to shifts in needs, demands, and allowances.