Future Feminist Archive, an introduction

Future Feminist Archive (FFA) is a year-long project to mark the 40th Anniversary of International Women’s Year, wherein artists and researchers engage with and speculate about feminist histories in archives and collections to create exhibitions, workshops, performances and publishing outcomes. The project comprises nine artist-led projects across NSW to forge connections between diverse community histories and current ideas relating to feminism in response to growing interest in the role of archives.

 

 

 

By this means hidden or neglected information and new knowledge about artists and their communities will ultimately create over two hundred new entries in DAAO (Design and Art Australia Online) with a regional focus.

 

 

 

Contemporary Art and Feminism

 

 

 

Contemporary Art and Feminism is an independent platform for art, scholarship and activism with links to the Contemporary Art and Feminism Research Cluster at Sydney College of the Arts (USYD); the School of Letters, Arts and Media; and the Power Institute at Sydney University. It responds to the groundswell of interest in feminism’s role in the development of contemporary art and its current relevance to art- making and analysis. It is part-funded by ArtsNSW and run by Sydney College of the Arts, Department of Art Theory (USYD) and The Cross Art Projects. See: http://contemporaryartandfeminism.com

 

 

 

Future Feminist Archive is a project of Contemporary Art and Feminism in collaboration with The Cross Art Projects; Design & Art Australia Online; and Dr Gillian Fuller, UNSW’s National Institute for Experimental Arts (NIEA). Contemporary Art and Feminism is co-convened by Dr Jacqueline Millner, Dr Catriona Moore and Jo Holder. FFA is curated and coordinated by Jo Holder and project managed by artist and educator Catherine Hickson. See: http://crossart.com.au/home/index.php/contemporary-art-and-feminism

 

 

 

FFA Symposia & Workshops — DAAO (Design and Art Australia Online)

 

 

 

From March 2015, workshops designed to enable participation and exchange with local artists and archives were held in Sydney (AGNSW), Wollongong, Dubbo, Bathurst and the Blue Mountains. These DAAO How to events were led by artist and academic Dr Gillian Fuller from Art & Design, UNSW, and former research director of the DAAO at University of New South Wales. The DAAO is an open source e-Research tool, freely accessible and scholarly, that presents over 14,000 records on Australian artists, designers and curators, on over 23,000 works and on over 20,000 exhibitions. The DAAO is built upon the foundations of the late Joan Kerr’s Dictionary of Australian Artists (1995) and Vivien Johnson’s Aboriginal Artists of the Western Desert (1994).

 

 

 

Creative / Collaborative Visual Art Archives

The use of dedicated spaces for archive exhibitions as catalysts for research, new work and exhibitions is growing. Important examples of visual art archives in Australia include The National Art Archive at the Art Gallery of NSW currently holding the histories of over 220 artists and Roger Butler’s remarkable digital archive at Australian Prints + Printmaking: http://www.printsandprintmaking.gov.au

 

 

 

Examples of art and feminism archives: Brooklyn Museum, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/about/index.php. In Australia Women’s Art Register in Melbourne is funded by local government at http://www.womensartregister.org/ celebrating its 40th Anniversary (October 2015) with ASIF Festival at http://womensartregister40years.info

 

 

 

Artist-initiated feminist activist projects: CoUNTess blog launched by Elvis Richardson in 2008 is now an authoritative source of statistics on gender representation in the Australian visual arts sector and is partnering with Cruthers Art Foundation from University of Western Australia to undertake the first online resource to benchmark gender representation for CAF: http://countesses.blogspot.com.au/; Soda_Jerk (Dan and Dominique Angeloro) have a two-sister archival image practice at http://sodajerk.com.au

 

 

 

Independent Archives: Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, established 14 years ago, collects contemporary source material and combines with programs that harness their archives, for example, http://www.aaa.org.hk/PropertyProtestCommons; in Yogjakarta, IVAA Indonesia Visual Arts Archive at www.ivaa-online.org. Many smaller archives exist such as Umbrella Movement Visual Archive and Research Collective in Hong Kong at facebook.com/umbrellaarchive and Whitechapel Gallery Archive at http://archive.whitechapelgallery.org

 

Other independent Australian art activist archives include REMIX project: https://ariremix.com.au/ on Brisbane artist initiatives, and Michael Organ’s guerilla blog at the University of Wollongong Archives, which includes the important Mary Callaghan Posters and Graphic Art and Steel City Pictures: http://www.uow.edu.au/~morgan

 

 

 

Some activist contemporary art and social history projects: Green Bans Art Walk is now gathering art and architectural documents on the Green Bans and actions to stop the sell-off of public housing in Millers Point, Dawes Point and the Rocks in Sydney: http://www.greenbans.net.au/; Parramatta Female Factory Precinct Project in Sydney engages those who once resided in these institutions to participate at http://www.pffpmemoryproject.org/ London-based artists Otolith Group created The Radiant for dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012, exploring the aftermath of the March 11, 2011 tsunami killed many thousands and caused the partial meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan: http://otolithgroup.org

 

 

 

Digital Artists working with Big Data Archives: Tim Sherrat, digital historian and cultural hacker, manages TROVE (National Library of Australia, http://trove.nla.gov.au), http://discontents.com.au/about-me/ and test works http://wraggelabs.com/; Ben Ennis Butler (University of Canberra) manages the new NGA Prints and Printmaking site at http://beneb.com; Mitchell Whitelaw (University of Canberra) theorises data practice / visualisation with NGA, National Archives of Australia Award for “The Visible Archive: Visualising Archival Collections”: http://www.canberra.edu.au/faculties/arts-design/courses/undergraduate/media-arts-and-production/media-arts-and-production-staff/whitelaw-mitchell