Irina Aristarkhova
I have good news for you: we still deliver miracles,1 after all… After the comfortable, transparent and always-already anti-Western, antimen or generally oppositional rhetoric that has over-determined our practices and discourses; After unrestrained quotations that mimic without subversion or local appropriation fashionable Anglo-American and French poststructuralist and postcolonial figures; After being consumed by antipathy towards anything not ‘ours,’ that is negated or embraced in accordance with the logic of sameness; After being taught how to compete with each other under a “phallic” sun without respect for female genealogy, continually denying feminist history and the radical creativity of our fellow-women; After being left without feminist education, theory, ethics and aesthetics as part of our curriculum, and still not teaching it when we have an opportunity; After “cutting off the tree branch on which we sit” by reproducing jealousy, ignorance and disrespect towards other women’s achievements; After having no positive articulations of/for the word “woman” and for women in our lives; After having no mediators for professional long-term and short-term relationships that would still leave a space between us to breathe and to create in all our radical otherness among ourselves; After all that has stood between you and me. As you may have noticed by the preceding statements, I am by no means unaware of the obstacles that surround us and surely cannot be blamed for being “too optimistic” about doing feminism in, so-called, “non-Western con - texts.” It is exactly this measured caution that leads me to consider the enactment of any complex and fruitful professional relationships between us as an engendering of miracles, where we co-evolve a new language, new art and new writing, that many other women can partake of (and happily, they do—sometimes acknowledging us, sometimes not). Here I would like to share with you two of my constructive and happy engagements with women artists in Singapore, presented in the collaborative form in which they developed.2
