SESSION: 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 change, 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 women’s artistic endeavours. The session addresses questions such as: How has the archive, as a colonial construct, engaged with women artists and their works? How can we redefine the archive through 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 on the critical engagement with the challenges and possibilities of reimagining the archive as a feminist, decolonial tool, are of particular interest.
Session Convenors:
Kavitha Balakrishanan, University of Calicut, Kerala, India
Amalu Shaji, Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, Kerala, India
Speakers:
Markia Liapi, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
The sewing machine narrative: the Istorima archive and the women artists
The following paper discusses the concept of the sewing machine, as a tool of labor, creation, storytelling and surviving, as it appears in the digital archive of oral history Istorima in Greece. The archive offers an outstanding number of oral histories from the period of the Population Exchange (1923) and beyond that. The paper focuses on how the sewing machine became a valuable item for the refugees, women in the majority, transporting a family heritage item that served, at times, as the only surviving object from the previous life. Having in mind the archival storytelling but also the content of the cloths and pieces of art that these machines produced, the paper supports the idea of an object-based narrative, where the sewing machine serves as a guide to “weave” the stories told by their possessors and to inform us about their surviving status before and after the Exchange. Comparing the oral histories with the work of the textile artist Giwta Andriakaina and her work Crafted Narratives (2016) which tries to depict the story of the refugees and wandering craftsmen in Thessaloniki, the paper uses oral history, archive-concept methodology, but also art history tools, like textile aesthetics, to support a different way of seeing micro and macro historical narratives and relationship between arts and crafts.
Talía Bermejo, National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Argentina – National University of Tres de Febrero (UNTREF)
Archives and Disobediences: The Agency of Argentine Women Artists in the Twentieth Century
During the first half of the twentieth century, Argentine women artists navigated a context marked by male dominance and the marginalisation of female creators. The
creation and care of personal archives were crucial for each artist’s critical recognition: the ability to build and preserve an archive often determined their inclusion or exclusion from art historical narratives, and the ways their stories were told.
This paper analyses three case studies —Cecilia Marcovich, Emilia Bertolé, and Raquel Forner— to explore the tensions between gender, the art market, and archival practices in modern Argentine art. It examines the strategies of visibility and self-promotion through which these artists challenged gender conventions and redefined artistic roles in modernity. It also considers the impact of gender difference on the valuation of artworks, access to training, and participation in exhibitions. While Forner consolidated her own archive, sustaining her recognition, the cases of Marcovich and Bertolé require reconstructing trajectories from dispersed materials, oral memories, and indirect traces.
From a feminist and decolonial perspective, this paper rethinks the historiography of modern Argentine art and recovers overlooked histories, reaffirming women’s agency within the narratives of art from the Global South.
Laíza de Oliveira Rodrigues, Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora
Contesting the Jury: Georgina Vianna and Women’s Agency in 1920s Brazilian Art
In the August 1925 report of the Conselho Superior de Belas Artes, part of the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, we find, among the advertisements from exhibitors at the official Salon, an appeal submitted by painters Ruth Machado and Georgina Vianna against the decision of the Painting Jury. Although it constitutes a routine record within institutional practice, this document stands out as a formal challenge by the artists to the rejection of their works for that year’s official exhibition. Archival research conducted in the institution’s holdings—now preserved at the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes — revealed only one of these appeals: a petition signed by Mrs. Vianna, in which she expresses her dissatisfaction with the injustice committed by a jury composed mostly of the school’s professors. This paper examines the nature of the argumentation developed by the painter from Pernambuco, an active figure in the artistic scene of the 1920s who nevertheless remains largely obscure in Brazilian art history. Motivated by the debate about the importance of archives as spaces for reclaiming the trajectories of artists like her, our proposal seeks to explore this record, emphasizing how institutional documents can recover the voices and actions of women marginalized by official narratives. Vianna
Presented a well-reasoned critique of the partisanship she believed persisted within the institution, thereby shedding light on the mechanisms behind the functioning of Brazil’s most important art salon at the time, while also revealing the standpoint of a woman artist within that context.
Kavitha Balakrishanan, University of Calicut, Kerala, India
Amalu Shaji, Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, Kerala, India
Archiving the Feminist Spatial Imaginaries: The Ideological, Physical and Ephemeral
The paper aims to archive and analyse the feminist spatial imaginaries in the twentieth and the twenty-first century Kerala, India. The study tries to address the shifting paradigms of women artists’ spaces, both ideological and physical. It archives and analyses the imagination of spatiality in the Indian context of regional modernity and the negotiations and subversions that feminist spaces brought forth during the neo-liberal cultural turn in 1990s. Generating an archive of feminist historiography through the frameworks of interdisciplinary cultural studies, this paper tries to record, represent and read artists’ imagination of space through their works, studio spaces, mediatic representations, public interactions and exhibitionary practices. The paper argues, firstly, that the artists T K Padmini and Sajitha Shankhar have generated powerful counter-narratives to the modernist artistic practice in this region. Secondly, by following the critical arguments of social-reproduction feminism’s re-scripting of labour today, the paper analyses the works of three artists, namely Sreeja Pallam, Devu Nemmara and Satyabhama for their rescripting of care-labour life and artistic life. Thirdly, the paper argues that women artists turn the everyday into a form of resistance and discusses how they make the space itself into an artwork that must be archived. Proposing a counterarchival method to represent the ephemeral, the paper advances understanding of the politics of representation, women-artist identities, public life, creative engagement, and archival practice, with special reference to gender dynamics in the region.