Women’s Art Library – Animating Archives

Animating Archives Workshop 4: Creative Captioning in the Archive

This workshop, organised by Beth Bramich and Hatty Nestor and led by the two co-founders of The Art of Captioning, Hannah Wallis and Sarah Hayden, aimed to introduce PhD researchers and others to a range of creative approaches to captioning, exploring what this can bring to working with art and activist archives.

The Art of Captioning is a British Art Network research group that brings together artists, curators, researchers, activists and access workers to address the state of captioning and access awareness in British Art. This workshop began with a presentation about The Art of Captioning’s ongoing work on access as ethos, which was available for participants to join remotely as well as in-person at 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, Brixton. Below is a recording of Hannah and Sarah’s presentation introduced by Catherine Grant and live-captioned in the gallery by Kate, a stenographer who works for the company 121 Captions.

This presentation was followed by an in-person workshop at 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, during which Sarah and Hannah led the participants in a series of activities looking at material from the Women’s Art Library collections, including a selection of ephemera from artists’ projects, audio tapes of interviews and talks, an artist’s film on DVD, and posters advertising various events and activities.

Recommended Resources

Hannah and Sarah compiled a few resources that they recommend for approaching accessibility.

Perkins Learning has produced a short clear guide to writing alt-text and image descriptions. This is endorsed by Rooted in Rights, a disability rights programme based in Washington State, USA.

A more expansive, but still eminently teachable approach is offered by Alt-Text as Poetry a collaboration between Bojana Coklyat and Shannon Finnegan, supported by Eyebeam and the Disability Visibility Project.

Further reading suggestions include Carolyn Lazard’s Accessibility in the Arts: A Promise and a Practice and Rooted in Rights’ Accessibility Resources.

To learn more about The Art of Captioning please see their research group page on the British Art Network website.

FURTHER INFORMATION:

The Art of Captioning is a research group co-led by Hannah Wallis (Artist and Curator; Assistant Curator, Wysing Arts Centre) and Sarah Hayden (Associate Professor in Literature and Culture, University of Southampton, AHRC Innovation Fellow: Voices in the Gallery) that explores what creative captioning can bring to art while advancing vital work around access, equality and inclusivity in the sector. The aim of the research group is to bring together artists, curators, researchers, activists and access workers to address the state of captioning and access awareness in British Art, and builds on Wallis and Hayden’s previous programme, Caption-Conscious Ecology, at Nottingham Contemporary in 2021.

198 Contemporary Arts and Learning is a centre for visual arts, education and creative enterprise. Their work is framed by their local communities and the history of the Brixton uprisings; informed by a policy context that calls for greater action on equality, and shaped by unfulfilled demand for diverse visual arts and new pathways to creative careers.

The Women’s Art Library began as the Women Artists Slide Library, an artists’ initiative that developed into an arts organization publishing catalogues and books as well as a magazine from early 1983 to 2002. WAL collected slides, ephemera and other art documentation from artists and actively documented exhibitions and historical collections to offer a public space to view and experience women’s art. As part of Goldsmiths Library Special Collections and Archives, the Women’s Art Library continues to collect, with thousands of artists from around the world are represented in some form in this collection.

This workshop was generously funded by CHASE Doctoral Partnership.

Animating Archives Workshop 4: Creative Captioning in the Archive

Saturday 25th June 2022, 14:00-16:00

198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, 198 Railton Road, SE24 0JT

Presentation online and in-person / workshop in-person only
Access Information: Presentation (and workshop tbc) will be live-captioned. There will be a 10 minute break halfway through the event.

We are pleased to share the details and open bookings for our fourth workshop entitled Creative Captioning in the Archive. This session aims to introduce PhD researchers and others to a range of creative approaches to captioning, exploring what this can bring to working with art and activist archives, with guidance from The Art of Captioning research group co-leads Hannah Wallis and Sarah Hayden.

This event will take place in person, with an option to access presentation online. In-person workshop numbers will be limited and booking is essential. Please register via Eventbrite.

The Art of Captioning is a British Art Network research group that brings together artists, curators, researchers, activists and access workers to address the state of captioning and access awareness in British Art. Hannah Wallis and Sarah Hayden will begin the workshop by delivering a presentation about The Art of Captioning’s ongoing work on access as ethos, which will be available for participants to join remotely as well as in-person at 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning. This will then be followed by an in-person practical workshop on access-thinking in archives, with the opportunity for participants to work directly with materials held in collection of the Women’s Art Library and 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning.

This workshop is open to all, although aimed in particular at PhD researchers who are working creatively and politically with archival material. Spaces are limited, please register via Eventbrite. We encourage participants to take a lateral flow test before attending and to observe guidelines on face covering and social distancing. Any questions can be sent to Beth Bramich or Hatty Nestor.

Further information:

Animating Archives is a project between the Women’s Art Library and the Jo Spence Memorial Library Archive at Birkbeck University, which keeps materials belonging to Dennett and Spence as well as a collection of books relating to Spence and a section of Dennett’s personal library.

Image description: Research display at the Jo Spence Memorial Library, 2020. Photo taken by Alexandra Symons Sutcliffe

This workshop is generously funded by CHASE Doctoral Partnership.

Hannah Kemp-Welch: Voice, Glitch Feminism and community engagement with archives

Glitch Feminism proposes that an error in a social system is a moment for revisioning and change. ‘This glitch is a correction to the “machine”, and, in turn, a positive departure.’ (Russell, 2012). Transposing this idea to archives: if the social system is the institution and the glitch is its forced closure during the pandemic, how can we use this moment to reassess our work? Libraries and archives often attract audiences with high levels of cultural capital; the ‘glitch’ in normal operations invites us to consider who is not present and how this can be addressed. As the Women’s Art Library was not able to invite guests in, the question of how to take the experience out was timely.

In late 2020, the Women’s Art Library (WAL) awarded me the Art in the Archive Bursary. My artistic practice is focused on listening, considering sound as a way of knowing. Though archives are predictably quiet spaces, I could imagine voices speaking from within the boxes. As a first-timer at WAL, I was keen to work with others to explore the materials together and to learn more about the archive through the diversity of our hearings. I wrote to community organisations operating within 10 miles of the WAL – organisations supporting elders, carers, migrants, families, young people and other groups. I asked how their members are able to engage with projects during lockdown, noting different access needs. There was no single way that worked for everyone, so flexibility was crucial for the project. Community organisations sent my invitation to explore the WAL out to their members; nine women got in touch.

As access to the library was limited during lockdown, the WAL curator Althea Greenan provided me with scans of archive materials, which I supplemented with related images and texts I found online. I organised these materials into (initially digital) packs, each relating to the work of one artist whose work is held in the collection. The materials included press releases, invitations to private views, newspaper clippings and photographs of the artist and their work. I was keen for each pack to have some common materials, including a photograph of the artist and their biography. I also selected images of their work and contextual writing about it. This was hard to find in some cases – the Women’s Art Library was founded in the early 1980s in response to the lack of documentation of the work of women artists, before our lives were archived on the internet.

Three box files of pamphlets — Archive of Women’s Artist Slide Library Journals at the Women’s Art Library

I wondered about my search for materials that provide ‘context’ in relation to the archive. Would it be OK to send a local resident a picture of an artwork from the archive on its own? Perhaps this would create an openness, freedom for the participant to have their own experience without sifting through layers of existing interpretations and ascribed meanings. On the other hand, would this appear obtuse; would it lack an entry point or frame through which to formulate a response? Digging deeper, the photograph of the artwork is not the artwork. How does the experience change when looking at representations of art, rather than the art itself? What is the experience of looking at archived ephemera from exhibitions, when the exhibitions are over and the artworks are elsewhere?

Ten packs of materials, each relating to one artist, resulted from my work with Althea. I printed these and sent a pack to each community participant via post or email, with an invitation to meet me online, on the phone, or on a park bench to explore it together. My first trip was to the Co-oPepys Community Arts Project in Deptford. There I met Luciana, Limor and Mila, all artists, who worked under the collaborative ‘We Women’ banner. We spoke about some of the artists in the packs. I asked them if they connected to the artists’ works, and if they had a favourite. I was struck by how freely they connected their personal experiences to the subject matter of the artworks. Personal stories were shared and recorded. Their responses were generous and they engaged deeply with the ideas present in the archive materials – they agreed that talking about what we could see helped to build meaning. I had a similar experience meeting Lucy and Laura on a park bench in Peckham, they intuitively linked their personal histories with their chosen artworks. Beatriz recorded her responses on voice notes and emailed them to me. She explored several artists’ packs before selecting an artist she shared cultural heritage with and spoke about her feelings of crossing multiple cultures. Finally, I arranged two sessions with members of Meet Me, a social and creative programme for over 60s in Lewisham. Rosaline, Moira and Dahlia have minimal access to digital technologies, so we arranged a group phone call linking up landlines to speak together. Conversations were lively and Dahlia’s laughter was a bright spot of the project.

Armchair and microphone in artists' studio space — Studio space at Co-op Pepys Community Arts Project.

The simple act of arranging conversations between people new to the archive opened a space for connection that deepened curiosity about the archive. We took on the voices we thought we heard in the archive as we exchanged our interpretations of the materials. These recorded encounters were endlessly rich. Seven hours of women’s voices responding to documentation of women’s artworks. To extend the invitation to new sections of the community, I edited the collected recordings together and submitted this as sound work Voicing the Archive for broadcast on local London community radio station Resonance FM. I hope the warmth of the voices within will act as a calling card, a heartfelt welcome to the archive.

Several colourful zine covers laid out on a wooden table. — Zines produced by Hannah Kemp-Welch as part of the project at the Women’s Art Library.

The spirit of community, creativity and conviviality that comes from collective working really came across. This was what felt missing from our institutions as doors were shut during the pandemic, but also this is what feels increasingly rare and squeezed out as austerity cuts public engagement programmes. Only one of these nine women living within ten miles of the Women’s Art Library had visited the archive before. Given that funding for outreach projects is unlikely to increase in the current political climate, what are our options to share the resources we have outwards? In this collaboration with the Women’s Art Library, I prioritised hyperlocal connections and the production of creative takeaways for communities near to the WAL. As the project ended, I produced a series of simple zines providing an introduction to the WAL and an artist represented within. These zines will be posted to community organisations operating locally, and I hope that these small snippets of the archive end up in jacket pockets across the borough.

Hannah Kemp-Welch was recipient of the Art in the Archive Bursary 2020, funded by the Women’s Art Library and Feminist Review. Hannah is a sound artist with a socially-engaged practice. She produces audio works with community groups for installation and broadcast, using voices, field recordings and found sounds.

To visit the Women’s Art Library and access the zines printed as part of this project, please email special.collections (@gold.ac.uk) or phone Special Collections 020 7717 2295 to make an appointment. Visit the Special Collections page for further information about access and related collections or email Althea Greenan a.greenan(@gold.ac.uk) with more detailed queries relating to the Women’s Art Library.

References

Russell, L. (2012) Digital dualism and the glitch feminism manifesto. The Society Pages, 10.

Listen to ‘Voicing the Archive’, an audio artwork by Hannah Kemp-Welch

Hannah Waters: Encountering the Jean Spencer Archives

The afternoon is cold and crisp. I’m a little early, so I take my time as I wander through to the Women’s Art Library, clutching a green slip of paper with my name and the time of my appointment scribbled on it in biro. I’m met by the curator of the Women’s Art Library, Dr Althea Greenan; I introduce myself and the reason for my visit. I am a PhD student, and my practice research project centres around the archives of my great aunt, constructivist artist Jean Spencer. My position is one of multiplicity: researcher, great niece, practitioner, childlike observer. I grew up with Jean’s paintings and relief works displayed around me in my family home, but without the artist herself: I was only a young child when Jean passed away in 1998. My interest now is in encountering her archives, the traces she left behind, and the pull I feel to activate her work in the present moment. I want to understand the principles of her work through physical engagement with them as part of a movement practice, using my body to explore the rules and systems that guided her: geometry, repetition, shape, line, mathematical sequence. My practice aims to embody these principles whilst also exploring my relationship to Jean herself: the memories that arise, the associations that emerge. It is a process of accessing the insights that are held in the archive, activating them, and sharing my experience of them through a mode of performance.

Two square canvases painted with colourful triangles — Jean’s paintings in the family home. Photos by Hannah Waters

Althea tells me that she remembers my grandmother bringing Jean’s archival material to her when the Library was situated at Fulham Palace. There is something of that same contraction of time in my presence here, now, ready to encounter her archive over twenty years later. The Jean Spencer folder is laid out for me on the desk, the anticipation building as I open the cover.

I am drawn to the slides first; they hold me for a long time. I recognise my grandmother’s handwriting on the labels, some of the paintings depicted in the tiny frames. Jean’s work is meticulous: geometric, straight lines and angles systematically constructed through precise calculation and colour theory. There is something transient about holding the slides up to the light – the trace of the work, but not the work itself, both there and not there: my experience of Jean. The slides themselves are little windows into rooms where Jean’s work hung.

Sheet of slides showing geometric paintings, handwritten captions on slide frames — Slides of Jean’s work in the Women’s Art Library. Photo by Hannah Waters

The way the light filters through the transparency reminds me of an essay by Jean where she wrote about her paintings having “different, changing effects… made anew in each hanging/space/light (performance) and in each viewing subject (response)” (Spencer, 1994). Her work performs here, too, each painting reanimated in its frame, as responsive to space and light as the full-sized canvases that hang in my family home.

I like the idea that experiencing a painting can be a performance, and that this performance is co-created through painting, viewer, space, and the changing light of the day. The interaction of all these contextual elements blurs the boundaries between energy and inertia. Matter comes alive here, and I recognise this feeling. I have felt this liveliness in my engagement with Jean’s paintings all my life, something drawing me in, persisting.

There are programmes from Jean’s exhibitions in amongst the archive material, shows in 1969, 1974, 1996. As I hold them in my hands, I wonder who has held them before: Jean herself, maybe? I feel a pull towards holding what she held, leafing through the same book, a repeated gesture across the years, across generations. Tightening threads in the fabric of time.

Memories arise as I sift through the material: a proportion is memorial documentation, copies of readings and tributes. I remember my mother telling me that she’d read at the funeral, telling the story of when Jean took her to a Monet exhibition at the Royal Academy. It was packed, but Jean led them around to the end of the gallery, telling them to work backwards against the flow of the crowd. They would experience something unique this way, something different to the masses, moving at their own pace. My mother saw this as a metaphor for how Jean lived her life: going against the grain, against expectation.

There are a couple of photos of Jean, with colleagues, working. My mind wanders to my only real memory of her: a sunny day spent with the family at the Isabella Plantation in Richmond Park, London, the azaleas in full flower, then back to Jean’s for a lunch of dippy eggs and soldiers. I remember the colours: brick red, a deep purple, and the golden egg yolk.

I think about how the physical act of engaging with these archives, touching, sharing space with them, gives rise to these memories, to a mind constantly making associations. I imagine a transfer happening in the interface between materials: my interaction with them as activating, animating, feeding forward. A continuance of creative life.

A figure performing a sequence of ten poses — Practical exploration of Jean’s work. Photo by Hannah Waters

In my research and my practice, I am interested in the activation of archival material, of going beyond the fixed repository of the archive and into a creative process of ‘anarchiving’ (Massumi in Murphie, 2016). To me, anarchiving is a process of animation: activating dormant matter and accessing the knowledge that is held in an archive through physical engagement with it. Touching, holding, allowing memories to arise, moving with and through the materials and their creative potential, taking these ideas into the body and experimenting with them practically. The term ‘anarchive’ speaks to “that which is not contained by archive, that which is without archive, particularly those things that cannot be captured by documents, fragments, and text” (Zaayman, 2014:319). I like this way of understanding the anarchive because it encompasses both presence and absence, and it is the intermingling of the two that characterises my experience of Jean throughout my life: the presence of her work, her archives, the presence of memory, but the absence of Jean herself.

For me, this anarchival impulse is physical, it’s a call to action and interaction, a feeling of being pulled towards something. I am pulled to touch, hold, examine, to think deeply, to try to understand the rules, systems and underlying structures present in Jean’s work. I am pulled to experience this knowledge in my body: I take this impulse into my practice, using movement to think through my experiences with Jean’s archival material. How does this angle, shape, repetition, feel in my body? It is a moment of encounter, and a meeting of bodies – in this case human and archival – the site where dormant matter is animated, spurred forward. It happens in the present, but the pull I feel is also temporal: the sense of the past interweaving with the present, persisting into the future.

I close the folder, but my engagement with Jean’s work lingers on. I turn over ideas in my mind as I leave the Library and walk back towards the station: geometry, duration, relationship. I wonder what I will take into the studio with me: a repeated gesture, a particular shape, that feeling of the unfolding of time. In the fading light, the sky just verges on the promise of deep violet; the colour makes me think of Jean.

Pink and purple sunset over a residential street — Photo taken upon leaving the Women’s Art Library, 06/01/22. Photo by Hannah Waters

Hannah Waters is an artist-researcher and PhD student in Visual and Material Cultures at Northumbria University.

REFERENCES

Massumi, B. (2016) ‘Working Principles’ in Murphie, A. [Ed] The Go-To Book of Anarchiving, Montreal: SenseLab.

Spencer, J. (1994) Looking Long and Hard At, essay accessed via Jean Spencer Archive, London: Chelsea College of Arts.

Zaayman, C. (2014) ‘Anarchive (Picturing Absence)’ in Hamilton, C. and Skotnes, P. [Eds] Uncertain Curature: In and Out of the Archive, Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jacana Media.

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 co–Chair 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/