‘IMA READʼ is an artist collective based in Northern Norway, established in 2015 through a local urgency for the visibility of intersectional, queer feminist discourses in the North.
The group, consisting of artists Georgia Munnik (SA), Calder Harben (CA) and Madelen Eliasson (SE), provides a platform for a collective education on predominantly non-western, non-white LGBTQ2I+ discourses.
IMA READ is borne of a mutual exhaustion of white, mainstream, queer feminism. One of the drawbacks of mainstream visibility for queer feminist discourse is that it has tended to be a specifically white visibility; therefore, often subsuming the struggles of those who are not white-identifying, or non-gender binary, under the same banner, while simultaneously delegating them to the place of the other. IMA READ is therefore for an un-education of queer feminism exemplified by a hegemonic, western mainstream. The three founding artists met as students at Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art in 2014, where we shared a concern for the lack of conversation within the academy - and the larger arts community of Tromsø - on the politics of representation and othering within mainstream queer feminist discourse.
