Feminist Duration Reading Group at Mimosa House

This event is free and open to all.

Feminist Duration Reading Group @ Mimosa House

Saturday 6 December2–5pm

We are excited to invite you to join us for an out loud reading group and discussion with feminist artist Claire Fontaine and writer and somatic practitioner Anita Chari (author of A User's Guide to Claire Fontaine), on Sat 6 Dec, 2-5pm, at Mimosa House, London.

Together we will read from writings by Claire Fontaine and Anita Chari, as well as some of the feminist thinkers and activists - from Carla Lonzi to Antonella Napi and the Milan Women's Bookshop collective - who have inspired them. Conversations between Claire Fontaine and Chari, moderated by the FDRG's Helena Reckitt, will respond to issues raised in Claire Fontaine's work, including masculinist desire, property ownership and voyeurism, inherited trauma, somatic healing, and aesthetics of appropriation and vandalism.

This session takes place on the final day of Claire Fontaine's exhibition 'Show Less' at Mimosa House, the UK's only public art gallery devoted to the work of female, noxnbinary, and trans artists.

BOOKING IS RECOMMENDED! as the event is likely to be very popular and the space is limited.

As ever, FDRG events are open to feminists of all generations and genders. No advance reading is required as we will from selected texts, out loud, together on the day.

Mimosa House is wheelchair accessible.

Seating will be provided for this event.

If you have any questions regarding accessibility do not hestiate to contact us.

More information about your visit can be found on our website.

This project is supported by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture under the Italian Council program (14th edition, 2025), with the aim of promoting Italian contemporary art internationally. In Partnership with The WoW Foundation Rome ETS. Show Less is also kindly supported by the Italian Cultural Institute in London.

Find out more about the exhibition here

Anita Chari

Anita Chari is a political theorist and writer based in Portland, Oregon and is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon. Her work explores the significance of aesthetics, artistic practices, and embodiment for critical theory and practice. Identifying sensate dissociation and the commodification of desire as central features of current regimes of political domination, her work mobilizes critical theory, somatic work, movement, artistic practices, and the voice to reveal new possibilities for political subjectivity in the present.

As a somatic educator, scholar, and artist, Anita supports individuals in reconnecting the wisdom of the body with the wisdom of the mind. She offers a holistic and health-oriented approach that draws on cutting-edge work on creativity, somatic experience, neuroscience, and relationship to promote healing, empowerment, and creative integrity.

Fulvia Carnevale

Claire Fontaine is a collective feminist conceptual artist founded by Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill in Paris in 2004. Since 2017, she has lived and worked in Palermo. Her name is inspired by Duchamp’s iconic ready-made, the urinal entitled Fontaine, and a famous brand of French notebooks (Clairefontaine); it defines a space where the biographies of the artist is not directly connected to their artworks allowing their research to become a space of freedom and desubjectivisation. The use of appropriation and hijacking in her work stems from the same intention: not highlighting the excellence of the artist’s unique singularity but activating the forms and the forces within visual culture and underlining their political content. Claire Fontaine works in video, sculpture, painting and writing. 

Helena Reckitt

Helena Reckitt is a curator and researcher with extensive international experience in developing curatorial and critical research projects that focus on the overlapping realms of Art, Curating, Feminism and Sexual Politics; Affect & Relationality; and Curatorial Education.

Her research explores the undetonated potential of earlier moments of cultural and political radicalism, particularly those from the feminist and queer past. Having played a key role in defining, and arguing for the importance of, feminist and queer perspectives on art, theory and activism, recently Reckitt has focused on identifying feminisms that are under-represented within the Anglo-American canon. She explores why these feminisms have been elided, and stages research projects that revisit and reignite them through forms of translation, re-enactment, annotation, and collective reading. Drawing on theories of social reproduction and affect, her research examines the sexual politics of artistic and curatorial labour, including the implications of curators and curatorial students being interpellated as feminized. Connecting these research areas are the numerous exhibitions and discursive events that she has initiated that explore art and curating’s generative potential and relational dimensions.