Melanie Manchot, Kathy Battista, Gill Perry, Gavin Butt, Dorothy Rowe and Catherine Grant, Discussion 8  A discussion between Gavin Butt, Dorothy Rowe and Catherine Grant along with questions from the audience.

Catherine Grant, Baby Butches and Reluctant Lolitas: Performances of Adolescence  Collier Schorr and Hellen van Meene are contemporary photographers who are both known for their seductive, glossy portraits of adolescent girls, coming to prominence in the 1990s with a number of other women photographers who focus on the adolescent in their photography. Their portraits play with traditional voyeuristic modes of looking, with the older female photographer taking the place of the voyeuristic male and the model taking the place of 'Lolita'.

Melanie Manchot, Artist's Presentation  Melanie Manchot will talk through a selection of recent works in relation to a performative approach to photography and portraiture. She will discuss her use of cameras, both moving and still, as tools to create encounters on the threshold between staged and documentary practice. Many of these works are made with strangers, often in public spaces, and aim to articulate relationships between the individual and collective space.

Kathy Battista, Women Artists, Pain and Self-Portraiture  Kathy Battista explores how women artists have used pain (both physical and emotional) as a medium. She considers three historical moments: Frida Kahlo’s works from the 1940s including Without Hope, 1945, Tree of Hope, Keep Firm, 1946, and The Broken Column, 1944; feminist artists Hannah Wilke and Jo Spence’s work from the late 1980s and early 1990s including Intra Venus (Wilke) 1993 and Narratives of Dis-ease (Spence) 1989; and Tracey Emin’s work from the late 1990s.

Lara Perry, The substance of the subject: representing identity in contemporary portraiture  Many of the starkest examples of 'performed' gender in contemporary art have been delivered through the genre of portraiture: the works of Cindy Sherman and Yasumasa Morimura can certainly be understood to work in this context.