Archiving the Women Artist: Historiographic Negotiations in the Global South

This session explores the archive as a locus of negotiation in writing the histories of women artists in the Global South whose artistic modernity has been a colonial and post-colonial experience that is different from the Euro-American hegemonic understanding of Art. The new art historical discourses in the post-pandemic and post-humanist world demand new methods to locate the art history of the global south wherein the women artists, including their struggles against patriarchal histories, the survival strategies within their capitalist economies and their everyday negotiations with climate changes do reflect in their own terms. There is an intriguing ‘everydayness’ in the art practices of women of the global south that scholars in the field can deliberate upon by unlocking the duality of the global and the regional. The erasure of histories is to be resisted by creating spaces for debates, deliberations and archival strategies.

Archives have historically been shaped by colonial, phallocentric, and institutional frameworks that often obliterated the creative lives of women. This panel invites discussions that engage with why archives matter in feminist historiography, and how methods of archiving including the textual, digital, oral, and curatorial affect the visibility and interpretation of the artistic endeavours of women. The session addresses questions such as: How has the archive, as a colonial construct, engaged with women artists and their works? How to redefine the archive under postmodern and feminist lenses? How have digital archives, counter-archives, and radical archival practices shifted our access to and understanding of the intellectual and creative lives of women? What are the roles that curatorial practices play as forms of feminist archiving? How can we think about archiving the body, the ephemeral, or everyday life?

We welcome papers that investigate vernacular experiences, embodied memory, and feminist modes of resistance within and beyond the archive. The contributions that reflect on erasure, absence, and the politics of presence in the historiography of women artists and the critical engagement with the challenges and possibilities of reimagining the archive as a feminist, decolonial tool are of particular interest.

Submit your Paper via this form. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:

Dr. Kavitha Balakrishanan, University of Calicut, Kerala, India, balakrishnan.kavitha@gmail.com

Amalu Shaji, Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, Kerala, India, amalushaji95@gmail.com