Simryn Gill & Diana Thater | the Evening Standard
Fern Shaffer, Nine Year Ritual of Healing - 9 April, 1998, 1998
By Ben Luke
This important and timely exhibition about ecofeminism and art across several decades, gathers 50 international women and gender-nonconforming artists who explore the links between the oppression of women and environmental collapse. An exhibition titled RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology undoubtedly risks preaching only to the choir, but that would be a shame. It is both ambitious and admirable, if uneven in places.
Mostly through film and photography, it treats the climate emergency as systemic and intersectional; connected to widespread abuses of power relating to the extractive impulses of colonialism and capitalism, to racism and the exploitation of indigenous communities. Organised thematically, it has distinctive focuses within this vast subject, from the effects of industrial extractivism, to histories of protest and artists’ reimaginings of the connection beneath the Earth and womanhood.