The publication Beginning with the Seventies binds together four exhibitions based upon the Belkin Art Gallery’s research project investigating the 1970s, an era when social movements of all kinds — feminism, environmentalism, LGBTQ rights, Indigenous rights, access to health services and housing — began to coalesce into models of self-organization that overlapped with the production of art and culture. Noting the resurgence of art practice involved with social activism and an increasing interest in the 1970s from younger producers, the Belkin connected with diverse archives and activist networks to bring forward these histories, to commission new works of art and writing and to provide a space for discussion and debate.

Categorized by exhibition, each section of Beginning with the Seventies takes a different approach to the theme, curating together over 70 artists and writers. GLUT is concerned with language, depictions of the woman reader as an artistic genre and the potential of reading as performed resistance. Circling around the embodied archive, the exhibition Radial Change explores the elusive histories of Helen Goodwin’s choreography and her influence on the interdisciplinary art scene of the 1970s. Collective Acts taps into the generative potential of archival research by artists into experiments with collective organizing and cooperative production. Simultaneously research, material, media, testimony and ceremony, Hexsa’am: To Be Here Always challenges the western concept that the power of art and culture are limited to the symbolic or metaphoric, and that the practices of First Peoples are simply part of a past heritage.

Hardcover, colour.

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