Thames & Hudson presents: Justine Kurland & Fiona Rogers — SCUMB Manifesto and the Feminist Cut
Join artist Justine Kurland and curator Fiona Rogers for a dynamic, semi‑performative conversation exploring the radical intersections of photography, collage, and feminist practice. Anchored in Kurland’s provocative project SCUMB Manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men’s Books) and Rogers’ new book Cut Out: A Feminist History of Photo Collage, Montage and Assemblage, the event examines how women have long used cutting, splicing, and reassembling as acts of resistance. Together, Kurland and Rogers will unpack the political charge of femmage—a reclamation of craft traditions historically dismissed as “women’s work”—and consider how these methods persist as resilient strategies within feminist and socially engaged art. As they speak, both will create live cut‑paper interventions, offering an embodied demonstration of the gestures, ruptures, and reconfigurations at the heart of their work.
Justine Kurland
Justine Kurland is an artist known for her utopian photographs of American landscapes and the fringe communities, both real and imagined, that inhabit them. Her early work comprises photographs, taken during many cross-country road trips, that counter the masculinist mythology of the American landscape, offering a radical female imaginary in its place. Her recent series of collages, SCUMB Manifesto, continues to make space for women by transforming books by canonized male photographers through destruction and reparation.
Kurland’s work has been exhibited at museums and galleries in the United States and abroad. Her work is included in permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Carnegie Museum, Pennsylvania; Getty Museum, California; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, among others. She works with Higher Pictures in New York.
Fiona Rogers Fiona Rogers is the V&A Parasol Foundation Curator of Women in Photography, with a focus on contemporary artists and feminist practice. Rogers has been involved in photography for over two decades and is the founder of Firecracker, a digital platform to support female photographers.
Ticket Price: £10
Please note, talk tickets are available for purchase and require a valid Photo London Day Ticket or Weekend Pass for the corresponding day.