Chloë Brown’s ‘A Soft Rebellion in Paradise’ reviewed in Corridor8

A Soft Rebellion in Paradise is a new short film by artist and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art Chloë Brown. The film was shot on location in Sheffield’s Paradise Square and being internationally premiered in the form of an outdoor screening in partnership with Sheffield Doc/Fest on Saturday 08 June 2019, in the Square itself.

A review of the screening was recently posted by Holly Grange on Corridor8, the not-for-profit  platform for contemporary visual arts and writing in the North of England. Please find the article online here.

A Soft Rebellion in Paradise was conceived in response to Sheffield’s proud history as a city known for its political activism and where, in 1851, the Sheffield Women’s Political Association was the first organisation in Britain to call for female suffrage. It focuses in particular on the voices of women that are too often silenced and lost in the retelling of histories around the world. Following in the wake of the Me Too movement, the film questions the systematic contemporary and historical silencing of woman’s voices. The film was created with an all-female crew, production team and cast.

Chloë Brown is an artist and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. She has an MA in Sculpture from Chelsea College of Art, London (1994), and a BA in Fine Art from the University of Reading (1987). She has exhibited internationally over the last 30 years including three international biennials (Istanbul Biennial, Mardin Biennial and the British Ceramics Biennial) with work recently included in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA).

Using a range of media including film, sculpture, book works and drawing, Brown’s research examining the relationship to sociopolitical questions that focus on the post-industrial city from an auto-ethnographic feminist perspective.  She has become interested in how acts such as dancing, eating and applauding can be seen as a playful subversion, a form of liberation. This was explored in her exhibition Dancing in the Boardroom at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) from 15 January to 24 April 2016 and has gone on to inform her ongoing research and practice.