Inspired by the cassette audio records of Audio Arts, an influential sound art magazine conceived in 1972, Women Artists in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s Reading Group will host an event of excerpts, response and dialogue. Recordings of Margaret Harrison, Mary Kelly and Susan Hiller, which were originally featured in the magazine, will be paused or interrupted by readings taken from historical, fictional or theoretical texts, images and discussion by participants. The juxtaposition of recording, text, images and live discussion aims to destabilise the relationship between past and present offering a different model of intergenerational dialogue.  We intend to question the value structures of primary evidence versus memory as well as to erode barriers between the individual and the collective, researcher and historical text, fiction and history, art and society.

Women Artists in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s reading group is held at Flat Time House. Our members include artists, artworkers, writers and researchers, our topics range from Women and the Destruction and Art Symposium, Textiles, The Body and Technology, House Work/Social Reproduction, Nature, Ecology and Cosmology, and Administration. Artists include Annea Lockwood, Margaret Harrison, Annabelle Nicholson, Tina Keane and Liliane Lijn. Texts include excerpts from Rozsika Parker’s Subversive Stitch, Lucy Reynolds’, ‘British avant-garde women filmmakers and expanded cinema of the 1970s’ and Silvia Federici’s, ‘Caliban and the Witch'.