16. Artists’ Archives and the making of Art History in the Global South

Art history has traditionally privileged the artwork, the museum and the exhibition as its primary sites of historical inquiry. However, the archival turn in art history and the critical study of archives have increasingly challenged the understanding of archives as repositories supplementing established narratives or sites of preservation, foregrounding instead their role as active frameworks in the production and mediation of historical knowledge. Across diverse geographical and institutional contexts, artist archives have become important sites for extending these discussions. Within the Global South, initiatives such as Ha Bik Chuen Archive, the personal archive of Geeta Kapur and Vivan Sundaram, Womanifesto Archive, the Roberto Chabet Archive, the Hélio Oiticica Archive, the León Ferrari Archive, and the Uche Okeke Archive, alongside collaborative projects such as Assembling Art Archives, represent only a selection of the many archival practices through which these questions have been explored and continue to evolve. This session proposes to examine how the particular material, relational and custodial conditions of artist archives across the Global South extend and complicate established understandings of archival research and methodology, demanding a reconsideration of the discipline’s evidentiary and methodological foundations.

We propose to examine archiving—rather than the archive itself—as an art historical method. Unlike institutional archives, artist archives emerge from the entanglement of artistic practice and lived experiences, where personal, professional, socio-political, pedagogical and material histories remain inseparable. Their formation is neither neutral, self-interested, nor merely administrative. Decisions of accession, arrangement, metadata construction, preservation, digitisation, and most importantly care, play a key role in visibilising interlacing roots of a practice, and determining the forms of interpretation that then become possible. The central question this session proposes to address, therefore, is: How are artist archives across the Global South shaping, extending, or challenging the methods, infrastructures, and historiographies of art history?

Bringing together case studies from Africa, East, Southeast and West Asia, and Latin America, this session invites panelists to ask how artists’ archives are catalysing epistemic shifts in the writing of intersectional and trans-regional histories of art. With particular attention to inter- and transregional connections, we invite contributions that examine one or more of the following:

•        The intellectual labour of archiving as an art-historical method.

•        Artists’ and family archives as sites of negotiation between personal, professional and political histories, including questions of identity, care, vulnerability and custodianship.

•        Community-led and collectively formed archival initiatives, including their engagement with marginalised, subversive, gendered or vernacular narratives and modes of knowledge formation.

Themes: Archiving, intersectional art histories, vernacular modes of knowledge

Additional format comment: The convenors hope to briefly introduce the conceptual framework of the session through a discussion on South Asian artists’ archives, before inviting panelists to present their papers.

Lead Convenor: Sampurna Chakraborty, Archival and Documentation Officer at the Benode Behari Mukherjee Archives & Research Centre (BBMARC), Kala Bhavana, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, West Bengal, India

Co-convenors: Ayana Bhattacharya, Doctoral researcher, Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, West Bengal, India

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.