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“Not Yet Written Stories – Women Artists’ Archives Online” – new innovative art project to fill European lacuna 

Lidija Laforest, Bruxelles, 1958.

International female avant-garde art exhibitions in 4 cities: Ljubljana, Riga, Warsaw, Zagreb and innovative on-line repository that will contain around 1.550 sorted graphics, drawings, paintings, art installations, personal notes, poems and photographs will be made among the European art project “Not Yet Written Stories – Women Artists’ Archives Online” that just have started in Poland, Croatia, Slovenia and Lithuania. The project based on rich collection of European woman art has plans for workshops, international conference and publication.

For several years Arton Foundation, based in Warsaw, with partners has been implementing archive digitisation projects concerning the European avant-garde art of the second half of the 20th century. The main idea of that art bridge is to create an innovative database – public cross-border online repository that is made by collaboration of international students who learn about digitization of art and working with artists’ archives. The upcoming project called “Not Yet Written Stories – Women Artists’ Archives Online” is dedicated to avant-garde women artists and lacuna of their art in European heritage.

“As art historians and professionals from the visual art sector, we find as extremely important to include into public discourse on visual arts works created by women artists, to avoid further discrimination against women artists consisting of their elimination from European history”, says Marika Kuźmicz, the curator of the project. “The digitisation by using the interactive innovative tool, like common database will help enrich the European heritage of modern art and save a significant part of it from extinction”, she explains.

The scholarly “sin of omission” and exclusion of work by women from the canon of history art resulted in erasure of achievements of numerous artists. Such omissions were common place, and occurred regardless of the socio-political situation. However, women artists in culturally and economically ‘peripheral’ countries of the Iron Curtain, outside the mainstream of the art world, were at risk of double exclusion, due to issues of both geography and sex. The project is aimed at counteracting this situation, as well as educating a new generation of researchers, art historians and cultural experts who are aware of this state of affairs and have the knowledge and tools to remedy it.

The European project involves the organization of workshops with the participation of students from various countries, next based on their work will be organized an international exhibition in Warsaw, Ljubljana, Riga and Zagreb. Four workshop groups made of students, under the supervision of four teams of tutors, in each of the partner countries, will conduct research aimed at examining the scale of the phenomenon of exclusion of women artists in their countries and the consequences of that exclusion. The repository will contain approximately 1550 of sorted and classified archives. Such rich collection of female art will be presented to public completely for free.

The opening of the exhibition in Salon Akademii gallery is already scheduled for 16th of May 2020.

 

Finally, the participants of the workshops will have the opportunity to attend the conference with institutions from Poland, Croatia, Slovenia and Latvia to present their own opinions about reception of the archives. The effects of the conference will remain published for the international public.

 

Partners:

Arton Foundation, Warsaw

Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art Artists Database and Archive, Riga

Office for Photography, Zagreb

SCCA – Ljubljana Centre for Contemporary Arts, Ljubljana

 

Workshops:

dr. Marika Kuźmicz curator of Arton Foundation and academic tutor

dr. Ewa Kociszewska curator and academic tutor

Tomasz Weresa, head of the Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw

Barbara Borčić, DIVA Station at SCCA – Ljubljana, Slovenia

Peter Cerovšek, DIVA Station at SCCA- Ljubljana, Slovenia

dr. sc. Sandra Križić Roban, PhD, scientific advisor, Institute of Art History, Zagreb

Lana Lovrenčić, Office for Photography, Zagreb

 

Co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.