‘This Is the Future’: Feminism’s Double Gaze - A Conversation with Janine Burke

Abstract

As Ver onica Tello notes in her introduction to this issue, following the Know My Name conference in November 2020, several participants began conversations around ‘continuing the work of critiquing the gendered discrimination at the centre of Australian art institutions’. In fact, these conversations were already ongoing at that point, and they will no doubt continue. During one of the conference panel discussions, Janine Burke spoke to her frustration at the institutional amnesia and systemic resistance to feminist discourses she has encountered during a career in the visual arts that has spanned half a century. The discussion that follows was initiated to address this sense of despondency, not to provide a neat rationale but to continue picking at—or as Tello would have it, ‘unsettling’—the problems. It also provides an opportunity to bring into focus a series of personal and embodied Australian feminist art exhibition histories. During the course of our conversation, Burke proposes a ‘double gaze’ for feminism, positing that we must look back not only so that it is possible to move forwards but also so that we might understand and frame our present moment. Vikki McInnes (VM): Know My Name is a gender-equity initiative launched by the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in 2019 that has comprised numerous exhibitions and events, a conference, and a major publication to date. The project is self-described as ‘a celebration, a commitment and a call to action’. In her review, in this journal, of the Know My Name exhibition, Jeanette Hoorn pointed out that you, in fact, had curated the first ‘know my name’ exhibition in 1975, with Australian Women Artists, 100 Years: 1840 to 1940, which opened at the Ewing and George Paton Galleries, University of Melbourne, and toured nationally. Janine, you have been at the forefront of feminist pedagogies and exhibitionmaking in Australia since that time. I’m interested in unpacking some of the histories of feminism, and feminism’s relationship to institutions in Australia, particularly by looking at women’s art exhibitions and the history and trajectory of