23.04.2026 Talk with Helen Kaplinsky

“Reclaiming Historical Femininity in Practice and Criticism”


at 10–11.30 on Zoom (request link via info@taidekoulumaa.fi)

Proto-feminism is typically used to describe women or feminine-coded figures who resisted, or exceeded, the patriarchal limits of their time. It refers to ideas that emerged before modern political feminism as we know it today: before suffrage and before rights-based movements. Even though, when they were alive, feminism did not yet exist as a political category, they have been posthumously labelled as feminists. Protofemmes emerges from conversations with artists and Feminist Medievalists who are in dialogue with these femme historical figures, but not necessarily in reverential ways. Why are artists and writers perpetually drawn to so-called 'proto-feminists'? What can it tell us about gendered experiences in different contexts?

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Helen Kaplinsky (she/her) is a curator and writer based between Finland and the UK. Over the past decade, her projects have spanned questions of postdigital identity, femininity, and ownership. She has curated several projects involving cyberfeminism(s) and its echoes in current feminist art practice - the focus of her current PhD studies at the Exhibition Research Lab, Liverpool John Moores. In recent years she has worked on events and exhibitions with HAM (Helsinki Art Museum), Tallinn Kunstihoone, Helsinki Biennial, Barbican, Tate (Modern and Britain), Whitechapel Gallery and Transmediale Festival. She co-directed London project space Res between 2015-2020 and has curated collection-based exhibitions with the Contemporary Art Society and the Arts Council Collection. Her writing has been published by Routledge, Artmonthly, Institute of Network Cultures, Liverpool University Press and Bristol University Press among others.


Part of a medieval illumination which shows two white women building a wall together. One in a blue dress and a wimple smooths the cement with a brick trowel, whilst the other, wearing a red dress and a crown, lifts a brick with both hands, about to place it on the wall. Their expressions are serious and focused on the work. The top of the wall is uneven, suggesting fortification and meanders in a broad C-shaped curve. The sky is bright, mid-blue, and the ground is grey-green. At the women's feet, there are flowers, a brick mould, and debris.

Image Credit: Miniature from 'Cité des Dames' by Christine de Pisan, 1405, (detail), illumination on parchment, in the collection of Bibliothèque nationale de France. Source: World Digital Library