The project centres on the question of archiving as an emancipatory tool for political participation. While state archives and other official archives have functioned as technologies of domination, community archives, counter-archives and “archives from below” have sought to document and give voice to histories and subjectivities that are typically excluded and marginalised in the production of history.
The Women’s Art Library (WAL) is a rich collection of all forms of art documentation dating from 1900 to the present. It includes archives of historical organisations as well as individuals, with an emphasis on women artists’ collective work in the UK through the 20th century to the present. The collection was founded in response to the lack of educational resources on women’s art, and as a mechanism for community building supporting women artists. Since the WAL’s transfer to a university library setting, Dr Greenan has worked to maintain the collection as a resource for practitioners outside as well as inside the academy. The question of access to information has led to a programme exploring different ways to “make the archive travel”. A selection of archival boxes/holdings from WAL will become an archive in residence at Ruhr University Bochum – selected on the basis of some common themes (labour relations, health, migration) – and these will become the basis for workshops and discussions. This will be the first time the WAL collection is used to support other archive initiatives in an analogue or hybrid transpositioning that enables the re-planting/propagating and distribution of community knowledge/histories.
Working with Professor Tahani Nadim, this collection will form a starting point for discussions inviting publics and interested people to bring their own materials to converse with the WAL's history and methodologies and support new collections. These encounters will in turn be documented offering the material for a student project to develop some form of hybrid publication that will feature in the Women’s Art Library blogs and form a paper-based work to be accessioned to the Women’s Art Library collection. This would supplement the work of creating an exhibition display as a critical proposition to be held in partnership with a local museum to be confirmed.
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© Catarina Rodrigues
Dr Althea Greenan
Goldsmiths University of London (UK) | Curator
E-mail: althea.greenan@college-uaruhr.de
Dr Althea Greenan works in Special Collections and Archives at Goldsmiths University of London curating the Women’s Art Library (WAL) collection. She programmes artistic research supporting artists, students and academics working with the wide range of materials and archives in the WAL. This work is the subject of a film by Holly Antrum commissioned by the Art360 Foundation titled “Yes to the Work!: The Women’s Art Library”.
Additional roles include co-curating the Animating Archives and advisory to “Feminist Art Making Histories” (an oral history, digital humanities project, funded by the Irish Research Council and the AHRC), and “Women in Revolt” (Tate Britain 2023-24, curated by Linsey Young).
She has written on the work of women artists since the 1980s and her doctoral research on the 35mm slide collection features in the anthology “Of Other Spaces” (edited by Sophia Hao, Sternberg Press 2019) and special issue of the journal “Women: a cultural review” (edited by Dr Victoria Horne, Taylor and Francis 2019). Writing on the Women’s Art Library includes a chapter in “Feminism and Museums”, volume 1 (edited by Dr Jenna C Ashton, MuseumsETC 2017) and the forthcoming article “We’re in the Library!: welcoming creative practices, sharing responsibilities of access” in Art Libraries Journal July 2024.
Althea Greenan will begin her fellowship at the College in November 2024.
Prof. Tahani Nadim
College for Social Sciences and Humanities & Ruhr University Bochum | Sociology of Science, Empirical Cultural Studies
E-mail: tahani.nadim@college-uaruhr.de
Prof. Tahani Nadim
College for Social Sciences and Humanities & Ruhr University Bochum | Sociology of Science, Empirical Cultural Studies
E-mail: tahani.nadim@college-uaruhr.de
Tahani Nadim holds the research professorship ‘Curating Digital Objects of Cultural Knowledge and Memory’ at Ruhr University Bochum and the Collegefor Social Sciences and Humanities. She has previously held a junior professorship in social and cultural anthropology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in a joint appointment with the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (MfN). At the MfN she co-lead the ‘Centre for the Humanities of Nature’, which she co-founded in 2018. She was spokesperson and coordinator (together with Meike Hopp, TU Berlin) of the joint research project ‘Museums and society: mapping the social’ (2020–2024). She has worked as a programme manager at the Women’s Art Library in London, an editor at Black Dog Publishing and a researcher in Goldsmiths Library (Open Access, data models and institutional repositories). She also curated exhibitions, collaborated with artists and runs the experimental research unit ‘Bureau for Troubles’.
Tahani Nadim holds a PhD in sociology of science from Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. Her interdisciplinary research has focused on the politics of data, digitisation and collections, specifically in the context of natural history and biodiversity sciences. Her recent work engages with questions of conservation and preservation, silences in/of memory cultures and the role of archives in human-environment relations.