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When an exhibition promises to do away with a singular narrative in favour of presenting ‘multiple histories’ the result can often be confounding and lacking in cohesion Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance at Nottingham Contemporary vows to ‘discard linear models of process’ and is indeed a sprawling show presenting the history of feminist resistance from the nineteenth century to the present day, with over 100 exhibits from 50 practitioners However this exhibition, which is ‘Act One’ of a two-part survey (the second opens at De La Warr Pavilion, East Sussex, in February), manages to deliver an insightful viewing experience With no fixed route or timeline visitors are encouraged to wander the four thematically arranged galleries with the aid of a mind map which unifies the artists through seemingly disparate terms such as ‘rituals’, ‘process’ and ‘sci-fi’ The tool is more akin to a flow diagram than the rigid leaflet guides that usually accompany extensive shows   My self-directed journey begins in room three of four – titled ‘A Dance’ – where work engaging with the natural world and the physicality of the land is displayed One of the most striking exhibits comes from Judy Chicago, whose photographic series, ‘Smoke Bodies’, depicts women with brightly painted bodies sitting among plumes of coloured smoke in the Californian desert She created this body of work as a reaction to the male dominance of land art created in the 1960s, a dialogue shared with Ana Mendieta’s Silueta series (where the artist created imprints various landscapes by using her own body) and a selection of poignant images produced by photographer Pamela Singh As the photographs attest, Singh travelled to the Himalayas in the 1990s to witness elderly members of the Chipko ecofeminist movement hugging trees to stop them being chopped down   In a gallery titled ‘A Rumour’, protest posters from the 1970s are displayed alongside other historic examples of public dissent These include Suffragette Mary Lowndes’s beautifully crafted banners, designed for the 1908 National Union of Suffrage Societies procession, and a selection of prison photographs of female anarchists affiliated with the Paris Commune of 1871 There