Reparative Histories and Feminist Curating from the Archive: Curators Zanna Gilbert and Elena Shtromberg on Transgresoras
When:
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Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
'Transgresoras: Mail Art and Messages, 1960s–2020s' is an exhibition project that surveys artworks made and exchanged by Latinx and Latin American women artists from the 1960s to the present. As a mode of artistic production that relied on the postal service for the circulation and exchange of artworks, mail art allowed artists in repressive societies to evade strict censorship measures, providing platforms for circulating their work and for political protest. Latinx and Latin American women artists used the postal system to transgress a varied set of restrictive systems, ranging from gender expectations to authoritarian regimes. ´Transgresoras´ presents historic works—including visual poetry, drawings, prints, performance, video, and photography—in dialogue with the work of a younger generation of artists who employ facets of correspondence in their work. This intergenerational approach brings to the fore overlooked historical precedents to restore a lineage of artistic production that has been little known in ensuing decades, enhancing our perspective on central issues of today’s media and political landscape. The exhibition is organized around constellations addressing broad thematic groupings such as state control of communications media, censorship, and authoritarian violence; gender constructions and feminist ideals; migration, interconnectedness, and community at a distance; state bureaucracies and the legacies of colonialism; and decolonial approaches to ecology.
Supported by Birkbeck's Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies (CILAVS).
Contact name: Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra
Contact phone: 07426808752
Speakers-
Dr. Elena Shtromberg
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Dr. Elena Shtromberg is Professor of Art History at the University of Utah specializing in contemporary Latin American visual culture. Her book, Art Systems: Brazil and the 1970s (University of Texas Press, 2016) explores visual forms of critique and subversion during the height of the Brazilian dictatorship. She has curated a number of exhibitions, among them, “Video Art in Latin America” at LAXART, co-curated as part of the Getty Foundation’s initiative PST: LA/LA in 2017 accompanied by the co-edited volume, Encounters in Video Art in Latin America (Getty Pubs, 2023). Most recently, she co-curated Transgresoras: Mail Art and Messages, 1960s-2020s, focusing on an intergenerational group of Latin American and Latinx women artists working with mail art (September 2025) at the California Museum of Photography.
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Dr. Zanna Gilbert
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Dr. Zanna Gilbert is a senior research specialist at the Getty Research Institute. Her research focuses on transnational conceptual art and feminisms, with a particular focus on Latin America. She received an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award to complete her PhD at the School of Philosophy and Art History at the University of Essex and Tate Research (2013). She was Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, where from 2012 to 2015 she led research on Latin America, and was founding co-editor of the online publication post: notes on modern and contemporary art around the globe. At the Getty, she is co-lead of the Latin American and Latinx Art History Initiative (LALAI), as well as several research projects. She is co-curator of the exhibition Transgresoras: Mail Art and Messages, 1960s-2020s (California Museum of Photography, UCR ARTS, 2025-6), as well as How to Be a Guerrilla Girl (Getty Research Institute, 2025-6). She is co-editor of the publication Ed Ruscha's Streets of Los Angeles: Artist, Image, Archive, City (2025) and is currently working on an exhibition and publication titled Pioneers of a New Image: Women Artists and Xerography, forthcoming in 2027-8.
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