It offers a discreet space where self-care, protection and healing might be sought from the threat of heteronormative hegemony. Courtesy: © Evelyn Yard, London photograph: Tom Carterįor artists as diverse as Elijah Bergher, Juliana Huxtable and Linda Stupart, witchcraft is intrinsic to an understanding of queer and gender politics. ‘NEO-PAGAN-BITCH-WITCH!’, 2016, curated by Lucy Stein & France-Lise McGurn, installation view, Evelyn Yard, London. But when the incense clears, what differentiates the current artistic engagement with the occult from the ‘life-style’ choices of previous periods? Indeed, the perennial allure of secret doctrines has been offering initiates, adepts and casual thrill-seekers alike the promise of self-knowledge since the counterculture gobbled down tarot cards and the teachings of Carlos Castaneda in the ’60s. With its evocation of animate matter and the transformative potential of ritual, paganism presents some fundamentally lucrative tools. Group exhibitions like ‘NEO-PAGAN-BITCH-WITCH!’, curated by the artists Lucy Stein and France-Lise McGurn at Evelyn Yard last year, or ‘Witchy Methodologies’, a symposium organized by artist Anna Bunting-Branch at the Institute of Contemporary Art, both in London, suggest the relevance of witchcraft to a range of contemporary artists.
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Courtesy: would seem that every generation is due its occult revival. Portland at the Womens March Portland, Oregon, US, 21 January 2017. had invoked the image of the enchantress in essentialist gendered terms, the contemporary ‘witch bloc’ assembled in Portland, embodied a distinctly intersectional sentiment evidenced by their monochromatic placards: ‘Trans Women Are Women’ and ‘Witches for Black Lives’. Using schlocky Halloween props, they redeployed the stereotype as a subversive currency, highlighting the kinds of behaviour still deemed inappropriate for women independence, aggression and the right of refusal, qualities that Trump himself would neatly disparage when he termed Hilary Clinton a ‘nasty woman’ during the presidential campaign of 2016. notoriously reclaimed the image of the ‘crone’, a figure central to the demonization of women during the inquisitorial purges of the Middle Ages. (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy From Hell), a second-wave feminist group founded in the late 1960s responsible for such playful and pertinent actions as the hexing of Wall Street and the cackling harassment of bridal fairs and beauty pageants. This was, ostensibly, a resurrection of W.I.T.C.H.
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When a certain group of anonymous activists gathered at the women’s march in Portland, Oregon, to protest the inauguration of Donald Trump last month, their decision to don crooked witches hats and billowing black robes tapped a complex history of persecution and activism. ‘The new socialism is not just political, it is magical and sexual.’Īrthur Evans – Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture (1978)