woman holding framed artwork by Prem Chandra

Who is Prem Chandra? by Alina Khakoo

Content note: this post contains mentions of domestic violence and suicide.

I first encountered Prem Chandra when I worked on a display of her husband Avinash Chandra’s work at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge in 2019. I was looking through Avinash’s artworks in the attic of Kettle’s Yard, when I found a screenprint in sunset-hued paint on black paper, featuring Avinash’s signature conglomeration of snake-like and ovular forms. In the left margin, there was an inscription in white pencil reading ‘Jim + Helen [Ede, founders of Kettle’s Yard] – Greetings – Happy New Year – from Prem – Avinash – Alita – 64’. I was intrigued by the mention of two women’s names, Prem and Alita. At the time Saidiya Hartman’s book Wayward Lives Beautiful Experiments had just been released and was in my head. I took Hartman’s endeavour to imagine the ‘everyday anarchy’ of early twentieth-century Black women, in order to ‘press at the limits’ of archival documents, as permission to radically speculate about Prem and Alita. Who were they, and what was their relation to Avinash? At first I read the inscription symmetrically, assuming that Prem and Avinash were married like Jim and Helen, and that Alita was their child. Having deduced that the inscription was in Avinash’s handwriting – since it corresponded to his signature on other works in the Kettle’s Yard collection – I wondered why he had written Prem’s name before his. Was it a gesture of humility – akin to that effected in the phrase ‘my better half’, or, more ambiguously, ‘the boss’ – or was it a subtle attribution of authorship?

ink drawing by Prem Chandra on brown envelope
Envelope marked ‘PREM’S Drawing’ with drawings by Avinash Chandra, undated. Copyright of the Estate of Avinash Chandra and Osborne Samuel Gallery.

I learned more about Prem Chandra in December 2022, while conducting research in Avinash’s archive on Indian artist collectives in 1960s–80s London. Amid the mass of ephemera was an empty manila envelope marked ‘Prem’s drawing’, again in Avinash’s handwriting, revealing that she had made art. I then found an ink drawing of veiled and turbaned figures playing musical instruments, which doesn’t resemble Avinash’s drawings, and may be traceable to Prem.

ink drawing
Drawing, undated, possibly by Prem Chandra. Copyright of the Estate of Avinash Chandra and Osborne Samuel Gallery.

I also found a letter dated 18 February 1959 – posted to the house she shared with Avinash at 76 Woodstock Avenue in Golder’s Green – responding to Prem’s request for a prospectus for courses on administrative and secretarial training for foreign students in London. This told me where she lived, and that she was exploring the limited possibilities for an Indian woman in 1950s London to earn a living.

letter to subject regarding secretarial course
Letter from Miss Gibbs, Acting Registrar, St. Godric’s College, London to Miss Brenlata [Premlata Chandra], 18 February 1959. Copyright of the Estate of Avinash Chandra and Osborne Samuel Gallery.
I also came across a photograph of Prem, Avinash and their extended family, taken by Rungoon Studio in New Delhi on 5 October 1972. This showed me what she looked like. The photograph is official-looking, capturing the family like a school class or sports team lined up in rows on a tidy lawn. Prem is smartly dressed, wearing a sari with a brooch pinning the pallu to her blouse, accessorised with a brilliant jewellery set, while her hair is neatly parted to one side. She wears neither the easy smile nor the sour look of her other relatives, but instead directly faces the camera with a look that, to me, seems frank and knowing.

mounted black and white photograph of family group
Photograph of Prem Chandra, Avinash Chandra and family, Rungoon Studio, New Delhi, 5 October 1972. Copyright of the Estate of Avinash Chandra and Osborne Samuel Gallery.

Avinash’s former gallerist, who now keeps his archive, filled in the gaps for me: Prem’s full name was Premlata Chandra, and she was an artist. She and Avinash left India in 1956 to establish their artistic careers in London, where Prem faced bleak prospects of commercial success. Reflecting the broader culture of misogyny and machismo in Indian modernist circles in London, if not modernism at large, Avinash grew jealous, controlling and violent towards her, including stopping her from practising as an artist. Eventually Prem and her daughter went back to her family home in India, where she died shortly afterwards.

To ask ‘who is Prem Chandra’ is to shake the foundations of art history. Prem’s story, and how it is represented in the archive, demonstrate the scale of patriarchal pressure on an artist’s life, practice and historicisation. Although feminist and decolonial critiques of modernism are now widely accepted in the discipline, and work is underway to recover artists excluded from a patriarchal and colonial canon – including the recent exhibitions Helen Saunders: Modernist Rebel at The Courtauld Institute of Art and Althea McNish: Colour is Mine at the William Morris Gallery and Whitworth Art Gallery – Prem’s obscurity shows us the distance we have yet to cover.

It is significant that I first came across Prem in the Kettle’s Yard attic, where Avinash’s works were kept as part of the Student Loan Collection, an initiative running since 1957 to lend students artworks to hang in their rooms. The Student Loan Collection is also an index of the lower-value work in the Kettle’s Yard collection, and as such is housed in the attic rather than in the newer, professional art store, or on the walls.[1] This gets us to the heart of the problem: if Avinash’s work is relegated according to a metric of artistic value rooted in European aesthetic philosophy, which reserved genius for white artists and positioned the colonised other as incapable of producing anything but naïveté or barbarism,[2] and if Prem suffered additionally from patriarchal suppression of creative activities, then she is the shadow of a shadow in art history.

If this blog post calls for anything, it is for recovery work to defy the logic of Prem’s double exclusion by ideologies of race and gender. Rather than assessing Avinash’s contribution to art history, and then undertaking a deeper excavation to recuperate his wife – which would follow the still persistent pattern of secondarily treating artists who bore the brunt of race and gender – let’s analyse them at the same time. Let us put into practice the now established understanding that race and gender are mutually constitutive. It is high time that we expand existing work on international modernism to appreciate the significance and critique the masculinism of Indian modernists in Britain – such as Gajanan Bhagwat, Balraj Khanna, Yashwant Mali, S V Rama Rao, Lancelot Ribeiro and Ibrahim Wagh, who staged the exhibition Six Indian Painters at India House in 1964 – as well as the women who received less recognition then and now for building art worlds with them. Prem Chandra is merely a starting point in this project, which must also include the painter Fatima Ahmed, who exhibited at Five Contemporary Indian Artists at The India Tea Centre, London in 1976, as well as Maria Souza, the fashion designer, gallerist and network builder who ran Gallery 38 on Homer Street from 1975–85 as ‘an international gallery for unestablished artists’.[3] To tell their histories, and explore how they exert pressure on the categories ‘artist’, ‘history’ and ‘archive’, is to begin securing ‘epistemological justice’ for the women who struggled to live as artists under patriarchy in the former colonial metropole.[4]

 

This blog post emerges from conversations with David Ewing, Peter Osbourne, Symrath Patti, Sarah Carne and Dr Amy Tobin, to whom I extend my sincere thanks.

[1] Avinash Chandra’s works have subsequently been moved from the Kettle’s Yard Student Loan Collection to the Loan Collection.

[2] See for instance Partha Mitter’s Much Maligned Monsters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977)

[3] See Naseem Khan, ‘Interview with Maria Souza’, Bazaar no. 3, Winter 1987, p. 17.

[4] Gurminder K. Bhambra, ‘Decolonizing Critical Theory?: Epistemological Justice, Progress, Reparations’, Critical Times, Volume 4, Issue 1, April 2021, pp. 73–89.

For further information please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avinash_Chandra

A muddy cover of a magazine titled Radiator, with the text "Welcome to Greenham Common" across the front

Mud: Greenham Common at the MayDay Rooms by Alexandra Kokoli

The women’s peace camp at Greenham Common (1981-2000) was born out of fear of the prospect of nuclear war and frustration at the misguided wastefulness of the arms race. Private nightmares (Cook and Kirk 1983, 12) were transformed through feminist mobilisation into creative non-violent direct actions, a growing international network of feminist anti-nuclear activists, and a string of encampments around the United States Air Force (USAF) base at Greenham Common, a piece of common land that had been requisitioned by the Ministry of Defence during World War 2 and then lent to Britain’s American allies in the Cold War. With the threat of nuclear war looming again (https://www.icanw.org/will_putin_use_nuclear_weapons), revisiting Greenham makes good feminist sense: its sprawl across public and private archives, physical and digital records, academic and activist collections, both facilitates and complicates our retrospective access to the peace camp. In this blog post, I focus on a stained item from an important archive, chosen for its material eloquence and ambiguity.

DM Withers (2016, 848) argues that collecting and curating the archives of women’s movements is rarely a purely academic pursuit, since such “memory resources” cannot be classified as “historical evidence alone” but “examples of feminist cultural heritage”. Some hope of reactivation, if not concrete plans for it, similarly shadows the uses of such archives by researchers like myself, even though my relationship to the peace camp at Greenham Common is highly mediated and almost entirely academic. In this context, the definition of ‘academic’ as scholarly is haunted by the other meaning of the word in modern English: purely theoretical, with no impact, and unrelated to real life.

A muddy cover of a magazine titled Radiator, with the text "Welcome to Greenham Common" across the front

The New Radiator: Souvenir issue on Greenham Common, 21st March, 1982, from the MayDay Rooms Collection

My research into the visual, material, and activist cultures of the women’s peace camp at USAF Greenham Common led me to a transdisciplinary and ever-growing network of academic texts, published testimonials, and an archival sprawl of ephemera, correspondence, images, and even fence fragments among other material traces. An item that stood out, not because of what it was but thanks to its obvious damage, was a muddied copy of The New Radiator: Souvenir issue on Greenham Common, 21 March 1982. I found it among Gwyn Kirk’s papers at the MayDay Rooms, an ‘archive, resource and safe haven for social movements, experimental and marginal cultures and their histories’ (https://maydayrooms.org/). These papers were on the top of my list, not only because of the on-going political activism of the archive that hosts them, but also because Kirk is responsible, alongside Alice Cook, for a unique book that had already proved illuminating in my Greenham research. Greenham Women Everywhere: Dreams, Ideas and Actions from the Women’s Peace Movement (1983) is a slim, collectively authored and sparsely illustrated volume, albeit including now iconic photographs of Greenham actions such as woven spider webs by Pam Isherwood, among others. The book’s subtitle turns out to be a factual description rather than rhetoric: it includes actual nightmares about nuclear war by numerous women who explain their motivations for joining the peace camp, as well as stories and observations about activism from people on the ground. Dream narratives, thoughts, strategies and tactics bleed into one another in ways that question any implied hierarchy or even distinction in a book that must have functioned principally as a recruitment tool in the early years of its circulation. Although texts are attributed to their authors, they are not typographically separated from one another, making it difficult for the reader to find what’s written by whom, and to question, in the process, whether it really matters. Here, form is truly inextricable from content.

The inextricability of form and content, materiality and discourse, does not only shape Cook and Kirk’s book but also Kirk’s archive. With this in mind, I shouldn’t have been taken aback by the discovery of a muddied copy of this publication by CND South, the South England branch of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The cover of this special issue is dominated by the female symbol flanked by a tipee and a hut, in both of which the home fires are kept burning. On the female symbol is the inscription ‘Welcome to Greenham Common’, partly covered by the drawing of a very young white woman, placed between and a little above the two primeval dwellings, and who is literally barefoot and pregnant. What is missed in this cover – or, rather, what is covered up – is that Greenham Common complicated and unsettled the established maternalism of earlier women’s pacifism, not by turning its back on care, but by taking it out of the nuclear family, materially and ideologically. Greenham pioneered a revolution of and in care, by insisting on the right to survival outside of social reproduction, by dethroning the (“innocent”!) child as the privileged and assumed recipient of care, by foregrounding reciprocity and interdependence, and by decentring the human in the ecosystems that needed and deserved protection from nuclear violence. Its ecofeminist consciousness was expressed in the media and aesthetics of its time but, politically and conceptually, foreshadowed contemporary understandings of ecocide and how to stop it.

Published in the first few months of the peace camp, the issue is stained by the experience of a winter spent outdoors, but also marked by the ambivalent relationship between Greenham and the CND, at times supportive but also marred by misunderstandings, stereotyping, underestimation, and exclusion. Even though many Greenham women credit the CND as the foundation of their anti-nuclear activism (https://greenhamwomeneverywhere.co.uk/muswell-hill-women/), it is widely acknowledged that Greenham’s tactics, including its brave self-designation as a feminist space (as Sasha Roseneil has often explained, Greenham wasn’t feminist because it was women-only, but that it became women-only because it was feminist) were not always taken seriously nor met with approval by their anti-nuclear allies. In their attitude to Greenham, CND central and CND local groups did not see eye to eye, with the latter showing more sympathy and support (https://greenhamwomeneverywhere.co.uk/rebecca-mordan/ and https://greenhamwomeneverywhere.co.uk/lynette-edwell-2/).

It might seem jarring to represent Greenham by a neatly (originally!) printed publication that did not originate in the peace camp but outside it, rather than the hand-drawn, pasted together, and photocopied newsletters, leaflets, and posters by Greenham women. Anna Feigenbaum (2013, 2), among others, has rightly remarked on the significance and richness of the DIY print media of Greenham: “The poetry, cartoons, sketches, songs, intricate drawings and haphazard doodles generate images of Greenham as a place rich with creativity, spontaneity, political experimentation and self-reflexive thinking.” My chosen object is not worthier than Greenham-made zines, far from it, but it is the material manifestation of a fault line. I wonder whether this copy of The New Radiator would have been kept were it not muddied. At the peace camp mud mattered, as Greenham woman Nicky Edwards explores in her semi-autobiographical novel Mud, where the narrator reflects on her own ambivalence about NVDA  (non-violent direct action) while researching a play about World War 1. This stained item manifests the tensions between mainstream anti-nuclear campaigning and Greenham’s anarchic feminism, captures something of my own ambivalence (https://amkokoli.wixsite.com/greenhamcommon/post/greenham-common-and-race-a-collection-of-resources-in-progress), as well as bearing a piece of the peace camp itself.

REFERENCES

Cook, Alice, and Gwyn Kirk (1983) Greenham Women Everywhere. London: Pluto Press.

Feigenbaum, Anna (2013) ‘Written in the Mud’, Feminist Media Studies, 13:1, 1-13, DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2011.647964

Withers, DM (2016) ‘Theorising the Women’s Liberation Movement as Cultural Heritage’, Women’s History Review, 25:5, 847-862, DOI: 10.1080/09612025.2015.1132871

 

 

 

invitation card for Jagrati exhibition

Consistently present: Alice Correia on South Asian women artists

To celebrate South Asian Heritage Month Althea Greenan interviewed Alice Correia about her research on South Asian artists in the Women of Colour Index, part of the Women’s Art Library.

colour slide illustrating Shareena Hill painting called Juicer
Shareena Hill was included in the third “In Focus” exhibition, which ran from 7 to 23 March 1990. She exhibited alongside Yashwant Mali, Sohail and Shafique Uddeen. These artists were (most likely) grouped together because they were all primarily painters, but the show also included drawings, photography and installation, with works that veered towards the surreal, intangible or oblique. Hill presented recent paintings depicting magnified domestic utensils, including, “Juicer” (1990), in which a shiny metallic orange juicing machine is compared with an imagined hairy one. Although I had seen examples of Hill’s work elsewhere, finding the Time Out exhibition review and a colour slide of “Juicer” in the Women’s Art Library felt like a momentous discovery. The vibrancy of Hill’s painting was beyond my expectations
magazine clipping
Research image of review in WAL file on Shareena Hill – Alice Correia 2020

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As a Mid-Career Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for the Study of British Art in 2017, Alice Correia initiated her research project, “Articulating British Asian Art Histories”, which continues in her research discussed below. The following was excerpted from a conversation tracing lines of enquiry and the overlap of art practice and activism.

Alice Correia: I’m researching South Asian women artists who were active primarily in the 1980s and into the 1990s […] I knew that there were lots of South Asian artists participating in group shows, but weren’t entering into the mainstream narrative of Black British Art […] So it was really a case of wanting to draw out those stories of South Asian artists active in the 80s and I was interested in women artists especially because I have an interest in feminist art histories. I was looking again at Griselda Pollock’s and Rozsika Parker’s book[1] and in the introductory essay they identify a show called Four Indian Women Artists that was staged in 1982[2] curated by Bhajan Hunjan and Chila Burman […] as the first group exhibition of black women artists.

AG: Wow!

AC:  But, but, all they did was identify the show. […] I think they list the four artists, but they don’t talk about what was in it or anything about it or its reception. It’s just one sentence, and it was, like, ‘wow’! This is really significant. That show then becomes a really important marker for Black feminism and Black feminist art history. Obviously we think about Black feminist shows and what Lubaina (Himid) was doing at Elbow Room and The Thin Black Line and those things, but here’s a really early example before Lubaina was working on those exhibitions. So I just started investigating what other group shows of South Asian women artists there were to map on to a more widely known history of Black feminist exhibition.

colour image of artwork
Slide from Symrath Patti’s file in WAL  – image Alice Correia 2020

What I found was there weren’t very many, but they’re almost unheard of. So Symrath Patti’s [1986 group exhibition]  Jagrati was a major show.  […] A lot of that research was published in the online journal British Art Study[3]… I talk about Jagrati, but at the time all I had to go on was the exhibition essay/brochure which had the exhibition list and an essay written by Fay Rodrigues in the Panchayat’s archive which is now held in the Special Collections at Tate Britain in the Tate Library and Archive.  So I had known about Jagrati and I talked about that show with Bhajan who participated in it. […] She put me in contact with Symrath – and that was a revelatory moment only a few weeks before I was due to submit my final copy of my paper. She said, oh, the archives are at the Women’s Art Library! So at this point I just had to insert a line and a footnote saying this research will continue when I get to the Women’s Art Library.

paper file
Jagrati file in Symrath Patti’s archive box in WAL – image Alice Correia 2020

What was there was really comprehensive. You had a lot of the planning documents, minutes […] pages and pages of photocopies from the visitors’ book, black and white photographs of all of the works that were in the show, the exhibition list and pamphlet […] and then all of Symrath’s correspondence with the artists. […] It felt like a lot at the time.

typescript paper from Jagrati file
Item from the Jagrati file in Symrath Patti’s archive held in WAL – image Alice Correia 2020
invitation card for Jagrati exhibition
Invitation opening for the group exhibition Jagrati held in the WAL –  image Alice Correia 2020

AG: Did you ever find more information on the 1982 Four Indian Women Artists exhibition?

AC: Yes, Bhajan was really generous [and] gave me access to her archival materials and within that there was a review written by Errol Lloyd for the Minority Artists Advisory Service (MAAS) Newsletter […] and that was really exciting because it had photographs of some of the works, and a really amazing figurative soft sculpture by an artist called Naomi Iny. […] I’d love to be able to find out more about her.

AG: So these four women were of South Asian heritage living in the UK?

AC: Yes. There was Chila Burman, Bhajan Hunjan and Naomi Iny. Bhajan and Chila had known each other from the Slade [School of Fine Art] and I think Naomi had also studied at the Slade, but a little bit earlier. Vinodini Ebdon, who I think is in the Women’s Art Library, was a slightly older generation. […] The Four Indian Women Artists show was curated under the aegis of the Indian Artists UK collective which was a group of male painters predominantly. […]  They had secured an exhibition space in the basement of the Indian High Commission in London and had identified that they wanted to do an exhibition of women artists and they asked Bhajan to curate it. […]

AG: Bhajan seems to play a critical role in all of this. I have heard her speak about what was important back in the 1980s in order to survive as an artist.[4] Exploring the idea of how the woman artist’s career becomes subsumed in other occupations in order to sustain and develop it… [It’s] quite critical what she did.

AC: Yes, I would agree in terms of her role as someone who connected people and who gave other artists opportunities and supported them. I think that’s a story that is less known. […] A few years later she also curated Numaish which was a GLC [Greater London Council]-funded project which had Bhajan, Naomi Iny, Vinodini Ebdon, Nina Edge and Dushka Ahmed […]and then she was included in the Jagrati show. […] Indian Artists UK established the Horizon Gallery and [Bhajan] had a solo show there. Throughout that time, Bhajan was supportive of her contemporaries whilst also working at an Asian women’s refuge in Reading, and that’s how she supported herself. She’s talked about working in the daytime doing translation for South Asian women who were in need of support and then going home to her attic and finding it really hard, because the shift in mindset between those two worlds is so difficult.

Bhajan is one of those people who has, quite quietly, been consistently present throughout the history of South Asian art in Britain. It’s really interesting and frustrating that she isn’t better known and that her contribution to those stories isn’t better known.

AG: But that’s where your research is coming in.

AC: Yes, that’s where my research comes in.

artwork by Bhajan Hunjan
Confrontation (acrylic on canvas, 3½ x 4½ ft) This image is a digital scan from a slide in Bhajan Hunjan’s WAL file made by Lauren Craig for the Women of Colour Index Slide Show in 2015.

AG: You recently gave a paper about the magazine Mukti for the online conference Grassroots: Artmaking and Political Struggle in June. Were artists involved in publishing?

AC There’s a complete run of copies in the British Library which is great and it’s a fantastic resource. As we were saying earlier, women artists were doing all sorts of different things to support themselves whether financially, intellectually, socially. Mukti arose from a network of women who were working either in education or the arts more generally, who wanted to give support to South Asian women. This is early 1980s, so this is the time when the revised Immigration Act is coming into play. South Asian women are being deported, or refused entry. There are virginity testings taking place to verify whether fiancées are virgins, and authorities were deciding that if women were not virgins that they are coming into the UK fraudulently to get a British passport. So the South Asian female migrant became on the one hand, this incredible perceived threat, but on the other hand there was this meek submissive, couldn’t-do-anything-for-herself figure who was always going to be a victim of patriarchal abuse within South Asian families. So my understanding of it is that Mukti came out of this group of women – really radical women – who wanted to give their own voice a space to discuss […] all those things that were affecting their daily lives [including] articles about immigration policy, housing issues, how to apply for funding. They listed women’s refuge shelters, had articles about how to give yourself a breast examination and what to say to your GP if you had any medical problems, and all sorts of different things. Within that there were poems and short stories, some of which were really poignant and self-reflexive about personal experiences of being a woman, in particular environments and situations.

The photographer, Mumtaz Karimjee, was heavily involved in Mukti. She wrote articles, helped with layouts – in one of the later issues she had photographic images reproduced. Likewise, Chila Burman designed one of the front covers and wrote an article about shared ownership housing – flying in the face of that whole notion that a South Asian woman was going to stay at home. […]

AG: …aimed at the younger generation…

AC: Intergenerational. And a lot of their articles – as far as I can tell – addressed some of those intergenerational disconnects. […] There’s a book about feminist magazines and Mukti is the subject of one of the chapters[5] […but the author] misses the point of what Mukti was and what it was trying to do, because her conclusion is that Mukti failed because it was trying to do too much and be too many things and address too many audiences and was too DIY and not a proper magazine. But I think that was the point of it. There was no other outlet. It was trying to do all those things and I think it was brave in attempting to do all of those things.

AG: And low-budget keeps it flexible…

AC: Completely. They used CopyArt [Community CopyArt] photocopiers I think at one point. It was very cut-and-paste on A4, typing up on typewriters and then cutting out and sticking and then photocopying and stapling.

AG: Fantastic. An Indian student recently graduated from the BA Art History at Goldsmiths, Adya Jalan had a paid internship in Special Collections to look across the collections starting with issues of Race Today. […] [She discovered] CopyArt in the WOCI files. […] The Rita Keegan Archive Project book has just come out with a chapter by Naomi Pearce on CopyArt[6] so this inspired Adya [to curate] a display in Goldsmiths Library. [7]  She would have been thrilled to know about Mukti.

AC: I first heard of Mukti when Chila Burman mentioned it in passing. She was talking, saying, “Oh I was doing this in Leeds and reading the Socialist Worker and I was doing things with Mukti…” and I’m… “What’s Mukti?” “Oh, it’s this magazine that we did and it was really great…”

Our conversation continued, expanding on the unique space Mukti offered artists like Zarina Bhimji to develop, but this important topic of the ‘broader ecology’ South Asian women artists worked in – as Alice puts it – needs another blog post to explore. Alice’s articles and reviews have appeared in Art History; British Art Studies; British Visual Culture; and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. She is the Chair of Trustees of Third Text and coChair of the British Art Network’s Black British Art Research Group. She has worked at the, Tate, the Government Art Collection, and universities of Sussex and Salford. She is currently working as a Research Curator at Touchstones Rochdale on a major project examining the history of Rochdale Art Gallery during the 1980s. 

 

[1] Parker, Rozsika, and Griselda Pollock. 1987. Framing feminism: art and the women’s movement, 1970-85. London: Pandora.

[2] Four Indian Women Artists, Indian Artists (UK) Gallery, 1981–1982

[3] Alice Correia, “Researching Exhibitions of South Asian Women Artists in Britain in the 1980s”, British Art Studies, Issue 13, https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-13/acorreia

[4] Bhajan Hunjan spoke at Mining the Gap, a Programmes’ event mapping the histories of artists’ collectives from the 1970s, curated by Michèle Fuirer with Anna Murray and co-hosted with the Althea Greenan, Women’s Art Library, Tate Britain, London 2017 featuring the Scroll and artwork multiple “I’m Not Looking for Mrs Barbara” commissioned from Sarah Carne.

[5] Laurel Forster, Magazine Movements: Women’s Culture, Feminisms and Media Form, London: Bloomsbury, 2015, pp.111-145.

[6] https://www.gold.ac.uk/goldsmiths-press/publications/-mirror-reflecting-darkly-the-rita-keegan-archive/

[7] Photocopying Yourself into History an exhibition which gives insight into the organisation, Community CopyArt, and Rita Keegan’s practice. Buchi Emecheta Space, Goldsmiths Library Second Floor, 20th July – 8th October 2021. https://sites.gold.ac.uk/library-blog/category/womens-art-library/