About
The life and work of Barbara Steveni (1928–2020), who described herself as an artist–activist, embodied an archive and pioneered a diffused art practice that resists clear definition. Invisible threads interlink the various roles she played in the contexts within which she was situated and responding to. As with other women artists of her generation she combined childrearing and managing domestic chores with the production of work, and was frequently overshadowed by her male partner's success.
Steveni conceived the idea for Artist Placement Group (APG) in 1965, becoming its spokesperson and primary strategist. The group organised placements for artists in industry and later public institutions with the aim of improving society through the creative potential of the artist. The importance of Steveni's role in APG was often marginalised by gender-inflected terms such as 'honorary secretary', her practice rarely recognised as having a value in its own right. The exhibition I Find Myself intends to redress this imbalance and encompass her life's work, drawing together her practice and her experimentation with materials, media and strategies across a career spanning more than seventy years.
Steveni's complex practice is simultaneously deeply personal and intimate, whilst also grand enough in conceptual scale to aim to change policy at government level. It is a dematerialised and research-based practice, married to the collection of objects and matter. Her work is unconstrained by a studio and clearly embodied in the material of her own home. Her diaries, extensive note taking and archiving reveal an artist conscious of the value of her own legacy, and yet she only later in life accepted she had an 'art practice' at all. Her collaborative approach was at once discrete and all–encompassing, often defining the terms of a piece after its production, drawing in bystanders and audiences as performative partners by effect.
What makes this exhibition particularly relevant today is the generosity of Steveni's practice. She privileged discussion, and in particular conversation, as a platform to produce work. It is a practice probably best exemplified by how in later years she would welcome new relationships, through conversation over borscht at her home in Peckham, south London. The sweeping multidisciplinary discussions that took place there encompassed anything from the personal to the geopolitical, while sharing a soup that was very much a part of her past and her familial history. The proposal that an art form can exist in the world, outside of art contexts, with the artist's role and practice framed around discursivity is an important precursor of socially engaged art practice today.
An exhibition catalogue and reader on Barbara Steveni's work has been published to accompany the show and is available for purchase or to read at VOID Art Centre.
