The Suffrage Avant-Garde
Exploding Appendix
Artform: Combined arts
Event date: Tue, 17th Mar 2026
Remote
- Conference
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Fri, 13 Mar 2026 "> published -
Event Summary
We'll explore the suffrage era as a site of artistic and political experimentation, tracing how struggles to extend the vote to women
Event Description
This event explores the suffrage era as a site of artistic and political experimentation, tracing how struggles to extend the vote to women and the working classes intersected with modernist aesthetics, revolutionary politics, and lived experience. Moving from the moral and social imaginaries of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury milieu, through the feminist and formal innovations of Mina Loy, to the raw immediacy of Emmy Hennings' semi-autobiographical novel Branded - shaped by her experiences of poverty, imprisonment, and sex work - the session considers how ideas of freedom, flourishing, and social transformation were negotiated across literary and artistic forms. We will also situate these movements within broader revolutionary currents through figures such as Sylvia Pankhurst and Rosa Luxemburg, while opening the discussion to transnational and racialised perspectives, including Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Senedu Gebru. Rather than advancing a single thesis, the event invites participants to think across these constellations, asking how suffrage might be understood not only as a political demand but as a field of avant-garde practices and competing visions of emancipation, suggesting that the reorganisation of form and the expansion of political voice may be understood as intertwined historical processes rather than separate developments. The Southern Belle, Hove, England & online Tuesday, Mar 17 from 7 pm to 9:30 pm Free entry, book via Eventbrite required
Event Overview
- Event Title: The Suffrage Avant-Garde
- Type: Conference
- Date: Tue, 17th Mar 2026
- Location: Remote
Useful Links
How to Book
Book via evenbtrie
- Contact name: Bradley
- Contact email: [email protected]
About Exploding Appendix
Organisation Description
Exploding Appendix is both an online magazine and a connected collaborative group of artists and researchers (the Exploding Appendix Avant-Garde Art Practice and Research Group), who meet regularly to explore ideas and share in the process of creation. Our mission is simple: the radical application of all arts, and all culture, in the service of a renewed avant-garde that responds intellectually and critically to the vital needs of our time.