Woman's Reappearance. Rethinking the Archive in Contemporary Art - Feminist Perspectives (original) (raw)
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Miejsce (Place) journal published by the Faculty of Management of Visual Culture of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw., 2021
URL http://miejsce.asp.waw.pl/telling-stories-about-feminist-art-in-socialist-europe-or-the-archive-as-aplace-of-cross-generational-remaking/ Abstrakt In my paper I propose a reflection on the processes of the feminist openings of the archives of political and emancipatory art from CEE, which were created by female neo-avant-garde artists. The term "opening" is understood here as a material
Dear Sister Artist: Activating Feminist Art Letters and Ephemera in the Archive
Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, 2020
The 1970s Feminist Art movement continues to serve as fertile ground for contemporary feminist inquiry, knowledge sharing, and art practice. The CalArts Feminist Art Program (1971–1975) played an influential role in this movement and today, traces of the Feminist Art Program reside in the CalArts Institute Archives’ Feminist Art Materials Collection. Through a series of short interrelated archives stories, this paper explores some of the ways in which women responded to and engaged the Collection, especially a series of letters, for feminist projects at CalArts and the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths, University of London over the period of one year (2017–2018). The paper contemplates the archive as a conduit and locus for current day feminist identifications, meaning-making, exchange, and resistance and argues that activating and sharing—caring for—the archive’s feminist art histories is a crucial thing to be done: it is feminism-in-action that not only keeps this work on the table but it can also give strength and definition to being a feminist and an artist.
Titled Archival Practices in Contemporary Visual Arts: A Model and a Source, the conference aims to gather contributions on archival art and archival research for contemporary art, considering them as two complementary aspects of a broad and complex field of investigation. On one hand, the archive serves as a structural model for artists from diverse backgrounds and engaged in various fields. On the other hand, authors' archives provide essential resources for historiographical studies on contemporary art, offering valuable information and direct testimonies. This dual focus necessitates engagement not only with the present but also with a relatively short historical span. The 5th edition of the International Conference Reframing the Archive invites scholars at any stage of their careers, as well as visual artists and other professionals in the field of visual arts, to reflect on contemporary archive-based visual arts and contemporary archival sources and collections. We welcome proposals for 15-minute theory and practice-led presentations (followed by 15-minute panel discussion) from various disciplines, including: photography, cinema and new media, art history and theory, anthropology, museology, philosophy, cultural studies, visual and media studies, and fine and graphic arts. These presentations should offer an in-depth investigation into the conference topic.
Critical Feminism in the Archives
Through the use of feminist historiography this article examines some of the myriad ways in which feminist praxis has pushed against, challenged, enriched, dismantled, assimilated or otherwise affected archival theory and practice. We contend that archival theory and practice have yet to fully engage with a feminist praxis that is aimed at more than attaining better representation of women in archives. We begin this piece by tracing the ways in which archives became embedded in feminist social movements and can be understood as critical tools and modes of self-representation and self-historicization. In the second section, we consider the explicit presence of feminist theory in archival studies literature and contemporary practice and the key focal points and arguments that have challenged traditional understandings of archival work around gender. We then address, in the third section, the expansive figure of the archives in humanities and social science literature. This piece contributes significantly to thinking on the ways in which these conversations in the archival turn can, at their best, expose blind spots within the archival literature and provide us with theoretical tools to tackle what we take for granted. Finally, we offer ways in which we see critical and intersectional feminist theory can contribute to existing archival discourse and practice, critiquing concepts that have remained unquestioned such as community and organization. This piece exposes the transformational potential of feminism for archives and of archives for dismantling the heteronormative, capitalist and racist patriarchy.
Intimating a female archive : rendering the wounds of family trauma
2019
This dissertation comprises both a practice-led artist’s book which inventively engages the notion of a female family archive, and a substantial research component which theoretically unpacks questions of femaleness, family, archive, and creative practice with the goal of intimating a female archive. The study investigates existing archival discourses while proposing female-inflected alternatives that reconfigure traditional, received forms. Both as physical object and theoretical concept, ‘The Archive’ as conventionally imagined cannot comfortably hold and embody the complexity that is women’s lives. In this dissertation, working uneasily between discussion lead by Deridean theory and experimental feminist revisioning, I investigate notions of the female archive by engaging the lives of three generations of women in my family. I create an interrelated space of oral history, embodied memory, visual record, material artefact, and vestigial traces of lived, everyday practice. In relat...
Thinking archivally: Curating WOMEN我們
Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories, edited by Amelia Jones and Erin Silver, 2015
As Tirza True Latimer notes in her introduction to the forum “Conversations on Queer Affect and Queer Archives” for Art Journal, “[m]ore than a repository of objects or texts, the archive is the very process of selecting, ordering, and preserving the past—in short, of making history.” In this way, writing art histories and curating exhibitions are both archival and deeply subjective practices. At this point, the insufficiency of archives is tautological on a theoretical level per Jacques Derrida. However, jettisoning the practice of archiving wholesale is counter-productive, especially for art historians and curators interested in making visible marginalized or unwritten histories. In this process of effectively building the archive of hegemonic art history anew, how might art historians and curators mobilize rather than veil the archive’s blind spots in productive ways? This chapter is a modest attempt in answering this question. As a case study, I examine the curatorial frameworks of and objects and materials a part of all three venues of the exhibition WOMEN我們: Shanghai (2011), San Francisco (2012) and Miami Beach (2013).
Feminist Artivism: Curating Women’s Memory
Studi Magrebini, 2020
In an age controlled by silence, imposed by the far-right regimes, artivism has become one of the most efficient means of expression, committed to the pursuit of justice. This article deals with alternative artivistic spaces/archives that subvert the dominant, shake the solid and reveal different voices. They are attempts that have emanated from the systematic efforts to marginalize new voices and theories, not to mention histories. The three spaces/exhibitions that are explored in this paper represent new forms of archiving through artivism. Since the archive has long been a contesting arena of memory, the three exhibitions chronicle another memory, an alternative one. These three exhibitions, made and curated by women, are: Doing well, don’t worry, organized in Cairo by Women and Memory Forum (WMF) in May 2017, Harem Fantasies, New Shehrazades curated by the late Moroccan Fatima Mernissi (1940-2015) in Barcelona (2003); and Kurdish Women Warriors that was held in 2018 in the Unive...
Women in Media Memory: Reflections From the Women Archives Exhibition (Book Chapter)
2023
The way a civilization transmits culture is through its memory. In terms of the protection of cultural memory, archives, where the elements of this culture are collected, serve as a cultural memory institution for protection and preservation. When it comes to archives, old and important documents, books, deeds and documents accumulated on a specific subject come to mind. Documents within the scope of the archive are generally materials that are recorded and stored by writing method. However, archives have existed in various forms since time immemorial. In the early antiquity, clay tablets were the communication material that enabled the recording and transmission of information. In later ages, in addition to paper, which has become the standard, inventions such as photographs, which have developed especially with media technologies, have begun to be seen as archival materials. Archival material can be archived to the extent that it preserves memory, and in this way it shows diversity. From Rosetta stone to medieval tapestries, Victorian house museums to African body tattoos, all kinds and sizes of different formations have the characteristics of historical archives. Thus, archives as traces of the past, created intentionally or not, are by no means limited to official institutions or state archives. Börge Justrell has pointed out that the most debated issue regarding archives throughout the twentieth century was how archival material was evaluated and sorted (Justrell, 2003). This debate is still ongoing today. With the development of communication technologies, archives and archival material have also changed. In particular, the ability to record the visual in a technical sense has brought a new dimension to archival and historical studies. The camera has become the ideal arm of a consciousness inclined to accumulate (Sontag, 2005). Although photography differs from written archives as a visual material, it provides a certainty that written archives cannot offer. In this study, the exhibition Kadın Arşivlerinden Yansıyanlar (Reflections from Women's Archives), a visual archive will