Feminist archiving and the institution
International Women’s Day 2019: feminist time
Saturday 9 March 2019 2 - 3pm
The Benjamin West Lecture Theatre, Burlington Gardens, Royal Academy of Arts
£10, £6
Explore feminist archival practices today and their relationship to the past, present and future of art history with Dr Althea Greenan, Curator of the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths.
The feminist archive is more than a byproduct of feminist political activism. The practice of archiving is a strategic feminist activity, which is used by artists and archivists to produce knowledge.
In this talk Althea Greenan will use her own experience in curating the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths to highlight the importance of the feminist archive today and how the archive might be seen to confront traditional art historical and cultural narratives. Using the Women’s Art Library as a starting point, this talk will explore questions such as; what is a feminist archive? How does a politicised archive function in an institution? Does this change the feminist archive and diffuse the artists’ desire for political change? Or does the feminist archive begin to redefine the institution?
Dr Althea Greenan works in Special Collections and Archives at Goldsmiths University of London and curates the Women’s Art Library (WAL) collection there. She works with artists and academic researchers to help realise new projects based on the Women’s Art Library collection, in particular those that position the collection in contemporary practices. She has written on the work of women artists since the 1980s and her doctoral research will feature in the forthcoming anthology Of Other Spaces (edited by Sophia Hao, Sternberg Press 2019) and in a special issue of the journal Women: a cultural review (edited by Dr Victoria Horne, Taylor and Francis 2019). She has written on the Women’s Art Library for Feminism and Museums (edited by Dr Jenna C Ashton, MuseumsETC 2017) and elsewhere including the magazine Orlando (edited by Philomena Epps 2017).
International Women’s Day 2019: feminist time
What is feminist time? How have scholars, activists and artists interrogated the concept of time to overturn hegemonic narratives of art history? What can challenging and reimagining history do for future artists? How can we collect and curate women’s art?
Through 10 days of discussion, musical performance, talks, workshops and tours, we will explore these essential questions and look to an art world that includes feminist time.