December 2025

CREA’s reconference 2025 marked a significant moment in global feminist organising, bringing hundreds of participants together in Kathmandu to reflect, regroup, and imagine new futures amid escalating political backlash. Spanning movements, regions, and disciplines, the gathering foregrounded experimentation, collective care, and the power of imagination as tools for survival and change. Within this charged and generative context, This is Gender entered the programme as a public, visual intervention.

The Exhibition

Installed on the Main Lawn, This is Gender: Photography on the Frontlines of Justice unfolded as an eight-minute curated video exhibition drawn from the evolving collection. Featuring 85 photographs from across the world, the exhibition traced how gender is lived, embodied, and contested within — and through — wider systems of power, governance, and inequality.

Accompanied by a meditative voiceover by founder and curator Imogen Bakelmun, the exhibition invited viewers into a slower, more reflective mode. It created space to sit with the images amid the intensity of the reconference programme, and to consider the politics of visibility and representation through a shared encounter.

In Dialogue with reconference

The exhibition sat in close dialogue with reconference’s emphasis on creative form as a mode of political engagement. As CREA has articulated, reconference attends not only to what is discussed, but to how ideas are staged, felt, and encountered — with installations, performances, and experimental uses of technology shaping how feminist thinking circulates and takes root.

Within this context, This is Gender functioned as both archive and intervention, situating global visual narratives of gender and justice within a space defined by exchange, presence, and collective attention.

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“This is Gender’s video-based creative vision helped shape the curated exhibits into a diverse, vibrant and lively hub for participants to interact, connect, and reflect on the varied conversations activated at reconference.”
— Ananya Patel, Creative Consultant / Curator, reconference

Reflections

Being part of reconference was a deeply affirming moment for This is Gender. Sharing space with artists, organisers, and thinkers working across feminist, disability, and justice movements underscored the power of visual work not only as creative expression, but as an active intervention in global discourse.

We are deeply grateful to the artists whose images formed the exhibition, and whose work made this collective moment of reflection and exchange possible. The exhibition’s presence at reconference reflected the energy of bringing images into conversation with people, practices, and politics already shaping alternative futures — and reaffirmed the importance of spaces where visual work can be encountered, debated, and reimagined together.

Each activation begins with the collection. Explore hundreds of works from across the This is Gender archive — tracing how artists around the world are reimagining gender, power, and justice through image.

From galleries and universities to conferences, festivals, and public programmes, This is Gender is available for exhibition, screening, talks, and collaborative presentation.

Learn more about the curatorial vision, partnerships, and global mission behind This is Gender — and how visual storytelling is being mobilised in the service of gender justice.

Interested in an interview, editorial feature, public talk, or cultural collaboration? We welcome conversations with journalists, editors, curators, institutions, and organisers across sectors.