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.

Gillian Stone is a multi-instrumentalist, interdisciplinary artist, music researcher, and Vancouver Island transplant based in Toronto (T’karonto). Her vocally-driven solo project, which draws from post-rock, folk, ambient, and avant sonic landscapes, explores intersections between mental health, trauma processing, and destigmatization. Working with experimental e-cellist Michael Peter Olsen (Zoon, The Hidden Cameras), Stone co-produced singles “Bridges” (2020), “Shelf” (2021), and her November 2022 debut EP, Spirit Photographs.

She is now building her forthcoming album, Oddný, an exercise in chronicling the remarkable stories of her Icelandic-Canadian foremothers and crafting an interdependent salve to heal intergenerational, ancestral wounds of shared gender and blood, through ethnography, poetry, memoir, and inter-genre soundscape creation.