A Woman’s Right to Choose – Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art

Ella Whelan

is a freelance journalist, commentator and author of What Women Want: Fun, Freedom and an End to Feminism. Ella is the co-convenor of the Battle of Ideas festival, an annual festival of public debate which holds free speech as its core motto. She is the commissioning editor of Letters on Liberty, a radical pamphleteering campaign published by the Academy of Ideas to make the case for freedom and liberty in the 21st century. She is a columnist for spiked and writes regularly for The Critic and the Telegraph. Ella appears on TV and radio, including Question Time, Today, NewsTalk, Sky News Press Preview, GMB, GBNews, LBC, Woman’s Hour, Any Questions, RTE, Moral Maze, The Tonight Show, Politics Live, Channel 4 and others. She has written for the Sunday Times, The Economist, the Irish Times, the Sun, Conscience, the Spectator, City Am, the IBT, Grazia, Standpoint and others. Her interviews, including Slavoj Zizek, Fiona Shaw, Camille Paglia and Lionel Shriver, are published in the spiked review. Ella is one half of Lobster Films – a new production company making political documentaries about thorny issues that others shy away from. Their first doc – The F Word – is out now.

Claudia Clare

trained as a painter in the 1980s before becoming a potter, via a traditional apprenticeship in the early 90s. Her PhD, (University of Westminster, 2007,) resulted in, ‘Shattered,’ her first signficant work and exhibition that explored how ceramics might be used to communicate women’s stories of surviving sexual violence. In 2019 a major Arts Council funded project with women@thewell prompted a growing interest in social and performance collaborations with feminist and community organisations, mainly working with survivors of the sex trade. She is also involved in the campaign to decriminalize all prostituted persons and get their convictions removed from the police national record. She is the author of, ‘Subversive Ceramics,’ 2016, and, with Edmund de Waal, co-authored, ‘The Pot Book,’ 2011.

Nina Power

is a writer and philosopher. She has written regularly for The Telegraph, Art Review and The Spectator, amongst other publications. She is the author of One-Dimensional Woman (Zero Books, 2009), which the New Statesman called 'a joy to read’, and the confessional essay-poem Platforms (Morbid Books, 2020). Her latest book, What Do Men Want? Masculinity and Its Discontent (Penguin, 2022) was praised by The Times newspaper as “a refreshingly sympathetic view of men and masculinity”.

Manick Govinda

is an independent writer, artists mentor, lecturer, curator and arts consultant. He has written for The Critic, Index on Censorship, Arts Professional, Open Democracy and Spiked. He is the co-curator, alongside Agnieszka Kolek, of Culture Tensions, a new series of public discussions and conversations at Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. Manick describes himself as an Eclecticist, open to different ideas and thoughts, open to unresolved contradictions. He was cancelled in 2019 by many English arts institutions for his gender critical comments and humour on social media and for his vocal criticism against the European Union.

Agnieszka Kolek

is an artist, curator and co-founder of the Passion for Freedom Art Festival in London. Through supporting artists forbidden to exhibit their art, she exposes the silence of many and challenges the comfortable position of those who inhibit “safe spaces”. Agnieszka survived the terror attack in Copenhagen in 2015. She continued the meeting on art and blasphemy after the attack by saying: “They not only want to kill us. They want us to stop talking, so we should continue.”