Taous Dahmani on Rita Keegan’s Copy Art
The Centre for Visual Cultures at Royal Holloway, University of London is delighted to host this talk by Taous Dahmani, a doctoral student in the Ecole doctorale 441 at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne.
Taous will be introduced by Prof Eric Robertson (Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Royal Holloway).
Taous writes: At the age of 72, the American-born British feminist artist Rita Keegan will be the subject of a retrospective at the South London Gallery in September 2021. This paper will therefore focus on two main areas. First, I will examine Keegan's career, focusing on her xerographic practice in the mid-1980s. Then, I will then examine the reasons for this late recognition through the analysis of a cluster of clues relating to gender and race issues, and a reflection on the consideration of copying as a "minor art".
In 1984, in London, Rita Keegan began a long period of work with a Canon photocopier with five toners of blue, red, green, brown and black ink. During this period, Keegan produced a very large body of self-portraits incorporating photographs from family albums. Keegan's xerographic art — which she refers to as an "art of immediacy" — is a way of exploring her identity. Keegan produces a multitude of collages, experiments with layering, composition and colour.
As a Black woman using xerography as a medium of artistic expression, this identity raises the question of Keegan's exclusion from artistic and cultural institutions and her absence from official artistic narratives. Forced into marginalization for economic reasons, excluded from mainstream art networks for reasons of gender and race, and ignored by historians' narratives because of her "low-art practice", Rita Keegan is now slowly emerging from the shadows.
About the Speaker
Taous R. Dahmani is a doctoral student in the Ecole doctorale 441 at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne. Her thesis is entitled: "Direct Action Photography": typography of the photographic representation of struggles and the struggle for photographic representations (London, 1968-1989). Her chapter on Polareyes, a feminist and photographic journal published in 1987, is forthcoming in Feminist and Queer Activism in Britain and the United States in the Long 1980s, SUNY Press (2022).
In October 2020 she organised a conference for the Weston Library (Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford) entitled "Let Us Now Praise Famous Women": women's labour to uncover the works of female photographers. She is currently working, in collaboration with photographer Joy Gregory, on the first anthology of Black British Women Photographers from the 1980s/1990s to be published by MACK and Autograph ABP (Autumn 2022).
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Image credit: Rita Keegan, Love sex romance, 1984 © Rita Keegan. Image shows a xerographic-style collage artwork, with blocked red and blue colours on top of images of a child, a well-dressed woman and a laughing woman.
