Zanny Begg

Zanny Begg is a Sydney-based artist and filmmaker who is interested in exploring the archaeology of contested history/ies and the architecture of social change. She works with film, drawing and installation to explore ways in which we can live and be in the world differently: this has included working with macro-political themes, such as alte-globalization protests, and in micro-political worlds, such as with kids in prison. She is currently working on a film project about one of the first feminist texts, written in Paris in 1402.

Proposing a work for New York, a city I have only visited very briefly once, and with Anya, an artist I have only met through skype, was a challenging experience. As I began research on this project I chanced upon a collection of speeches by Emma Goldman. As I re-read one of her speeches from New York I was struck by a collapsing sense of time. One hundred years ago Emma Goldman was arrested for distributing information on birth control for women. Today this question has reinserted itself into the political landscape with renewed force. History loops and twists and turns. Victories are won and defeats endured. Struggles grow and grow. This action pays tribute to a fighter who imagined the city of New York differently. – Zanny Begg For full report see blog post here