Reimagining Opposition | Imperfect Utopias

This online exhibition explores divisions related to gender, sexuality and/ or abortion. We invite you to consider the existence of people who disagree with your positions related to gender, sexuality and/ or abortion; and imagine ways of sharing space without trying to resolve these disagreements.

The exhibition is based on a series of artist-led research workshops held in Dublin (visual art), Vancouver (music) and Glasgow (theatre) in 2023. The workshops were part of a larger research project (Beyond Opposition) interested in social differences related to genders, sexualities and abortions. The project ran in Ireland, Canada and Great Britain from 2019 to 2025. Through our research and project writing, we are developing new ways of thinking about differences related to gender and sexualities.

Find out more about the project here.

See publications and coverage of the research here.

Details on workshops (and discussion groups) here.

Information about the researchers here.

Web Design & Development is by Fallow Media

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction of the work without further permission provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

Funding for this project was provided by the European Research Council.

Project name: Beyond Opposition. Funding Number: 817897.

https://erc.europa.eu/homepage

This website includes references to people’s positions related to gender, sexuality and abortion. This is what we mean here when we use this term:

1. Positions is a term we use in order to name points of view, identities, opinions, attitudes and experiences specifically related to gender, sexuality and abortion. It isn't perfect because people hold their positions differently, and this doesn’t always capture how people see themselves. We are thinking and writing more about the variety and complexities of these positions — see our project writing here.
2. There are positions introduced here that you may not be comfortable with, please take care of yourself.
3. In the workshops we asked people to be respectful of each other and each other's positions (e.g. pro-life, use of pronouns, etc) even where they disagreed and/or found them oppressive or egregious. In the workshops this meant using the terms that people used to describe themselves. We follow this ethos through this online exhibition. For more details on the ethos and methods of our discussion groups and workshops, please see our website here.

Culture Junction

Culture Junction is a partnership of three independent community artists based in Scotland: Fraser MacLeod, a freelance theatre artist, director, facilitator and project manager whose work often utilises drama and theatre to creatively explore socio-political themes; Karen McGrady-Parker, a creative producer and theatre maker who works to elevate the voice of communities through impactful corporate social responsibility engagement programmes; and Kat Wilson, a freelance participatory artist, project coordinator and audio describer who has coordinated and delivered a range of creative arts programmes for arts organisations, charities and corporate sector organisations.

As a team, Culture Junction designs and delivers creative community engagement projects through collaborations and commissions. For the Beyond Opposition project, Culture Junction worked with the Beyond Opposition research team to devise and deliver a theatre-based workshop in Glasgow, from which this Glasgow section of the ‘Reimagining Opposition’ exhibition draws on.

culturejunction.co.uk

Tim Fish

Tim Fish is an American writer and artist whose comic work has been published by Marvel, Vertigo, Image, Dark Horse, and more. He co-created the graphic novel Liebestrasse, which was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award. After completing his Master's with a concentration in creative writing from Dartmouth College, he was awarded a Fulbright research grant in affiliation with the Department of History at Trinity College Dublin in 2023-2024.

For the Beyond Opposition project, Tim Fish created the comic strips displayed here, in the Glasgow section of the ‘Reimagining Opposition’ exhibition.

timfishworks.com