Sumitomo：

Then how many years have you been working with these six contents priorities?

 

Ersoy：

So the way that the team articulated, it was around 10 years ago. So 15 years after the establishment of the organization itself. But when I speak with my colleagues who have been with AAA for about two decades, we have several people who have been working with AAA for 20 years. We have another generation who have been working for around 12 to 15 years. So there are many colleagues who actually know the institution's history. I only joined eight years ago. So they were able to tell me that these were the areas that they were working on, but some of them came much more organically. But right now, I would say around 10 years ago, this was the moment when the team sat down and said, we really have to articulate what the research priorities are. Because again, if we are dealing with this impossible project, we also have to be very articulate about our methodology. So the methodology starts with again, asking where are the areas in which we can make the biggest impact? We can create resources, we can create archives, we can develop archives, and we can open them up. We can do research projects around them.

 

　And the second criteria that we've been thinking about, especially when it comes to the archives that we work with, is if they come from artists themselves. We look at artists as connecting points, or what we'd like to call them the nexus artists, artists who wear many different heads. So you can think about practicing artists who would be organizers. Maybe they organize festivals. Maybe they are writers. Maybe they write about contemporary art, or they are publishers. Or they might be organizing exhibitions. They can play the role of being curators on top of what they do as artists, as practicing artists. Or perhaps they work in independence, educational initiatives. Or maybe they shape the curriculum at the universities. Or they go around and they document festivals. Or they document, let's say, the example that I will share with you today. I will speak about two artists who documented the women's movements. So not only in the visual arts, but how do they participate in civil society? Or artists who also become archivists of their peers' work. So these are some of the examples of the types of artists, practicing artists that we are interested in. And the idea is that even if it's a personal archive, when you look at the archive, it's never about one individual, but you will be able to see all these evolutions, or all these developments about a much larger arts ecology that these artists are part of. Going back to what you were saying about decentralization of narratives, rather than having one narrative, that's precisely the reason why we try to work with personal archives. Personal stories, and sometimes anecdotes. We're also interested in what is not documented and what is not archived. So it's always a much larger conversation that we'd like to be part of.

 

I would like to illustrate this point by giving an example of a late artist from Hong Kong, Ha Bik Chuen. And then I will start speaking about the recent exhibition. I will be going more into the details. But this is, for instance, an example of how an artist can document an incredible artistry that's about one place. So Ha Bik Chuen lived between 1925 and 2009. He was born in the Guangdong area of China, and he moved to Hong Kong in the late 1950s. Primarily, as an artist, he was known as a sculptor and as a printmaker. When we started working on the archives, we had heard of his archive itself, but we did not know the richness of the archives. So this project, one of the reasons why I wanted to also highlight it, is that we worked on his archive for seven years. It's one of the longest archival projects that we undertook as the Asia Art Archive team. And it really shows how, through one individual's perspectives, how we can have an incredible, comprehensive artistry about one place. But first, I wanted to introduce him as the sculptor. This is also himself. He took so many photographs starting in the 1960s. He took many photographs of himself, many photographs of other peer artists and artist gatherings, and also the social life of the art scene in Hong Kong. And these photographs are from 1986.And this is how his studio, his archive,  looked like when we started working on the archive.

 

 As I mentioned, he passed away in 2009, and the family reached out to the Asia Art Archive, asking if we would be able to work on this very particular place. And as you can see from the ceiling, from the condition of the documents, and thinking about the humidity in Hong Kong, we realized that most of these materials were deteriorating. So the first thing that we needed to do was to move them to a project space. Oftentimes, when we work with archives, we always stay where they are. I mean, in this case, we are based in Hong Kong, and this archive was in Hong Kong. But let's say if there's an archive that we work on in the Philippines, we make sure that we go to where the archive is, and we work with the archive. We try not to move any of these places, any of these archives, out of where they are located. But in this case, mostly because of preservation reasons, we had to move them into a project space. So it looked like this for several years. As I mentioned, this project took about seven years. And this was a project space that we rented. This is not our library. Because of the volume of the archives, we're speaking about more than 600 boxes of materials. And our team started creating an inventory. An inventory did not exist. And one thing that we also did was to start a residency program, where we invited artists and researchers to come and to work with us. And also, this is a small group. I think I can also share the anecdotal part of these processes as well. Several art historians in France criticized us. They said that, first of all, you are an archive, your mission and your specific goal for this project should be to create an inventory. You should not do a residency program. You should not do small exhibition projects on the side. But you really have to put all of your energy into creating an inventory of what is in these boxes. And you should immediately start digitizing them for preservation methods. But we said that we don't want to be in that position to be the only people who would have access to this archive. And it's something that's very much related to how we think about how we work. I was talking about collaboration. It's really something that's part of the work that we do. And we want to do it as we move with the process. So we could have opened the archive after seven years, after the digitization was over, after the organization was over. We really wanted to work with artist friends and researcher friends to go through the boxes together. So it's something that I really wanted to mention.

 

After seven years, if you look at the website, you will see that there are more than 7,000 records that are organized in this way. On the left-hand side, you will see what we call the tree structure. And you will start seeing that it starts with the artist's portrait and artwork documentation. So this is more about the individual himself, Ha Bik Chuen himself, than there are exhibition files, photographic materials, visual research materials, than periodical books and modified books and personal records. It's something that I also wanted to emphasize because every archive comes with their own logic of organization. We don't want to start with a manual and say, this is how we want to organize these materials. Every single time we work with an archive, we listen to the archive owner. And oftentimes, these are living artists. I mean, in this case, Ha Bik Chuen, unfortunately, had passed away already. So we had to work with scholars and artist friends to think about an organizational logic. We try to understand how they think about their materials, how they organize themselves, and how we can reflect this in the way that we share these resources with researchers, with anyone who is interested in looking at these materials themselves.

 

As I was saying, Ha Bik Chuen had a camera, and he documented many things, artworks, the places that he visited himself. But the reason why we were fascinated by this archive was he decided to go to exhibitions in Hong Kong, starting with the 1960s, and he documented every single show that he saw. Imagine we are speaking about five decades, around five decades of documentation of an artist visiting all these shows happening in this place. So in the end, what happens is that single-handedly, one person creates the most comprehensive archive of exhibition histories of Hong Kong. So that was the reason why we've been extremely passionate about this particular artist and his personal archive. And that's the reason why he's this incredible example of an artist not only creating an archive of his own artwork, but of creating an archive of the much larger arts ecology and arts community that he was part of. It's an international one as well, absolutely. So in this case, for instance, there are photo books. These are already the ones, photo albums, that he printed. But in certain cases, we also have different types of materials, like contact sheets like this one. And this is an example that I also wanted to share with you, because this one is from 1987. You can say that it's from the night of October 1987, and it belongs to an exhibition that was called Out of Context. This is an exhibition that's quite crucial for Hong Kong's recent artistry, not only because it was only for three days and it was independently organised, not in an art space. It was organised by a group of artists in an abandoned house in Hong Kong, and it involved many artists, choreographers, dancers who were part of this project, knowing that it would only last three days. And one of the most important performance artworks for the 80s for Hong Kong, it actually happened, and this is the specific contact sheets that documents that performance. So a close-up of the contact sheet, it shows us that there is this artwork by Ricky Yeung, who's an incredible artist and educator still based in Hong Kong. And Ricky Yeung was one of the participating artists in Out of Context, and you will see that he created this cage for his performance. He painted his face with white, and he locked himself into this cage. This was a moment for a political transition for Hong Kong, so a lot of artists were really thinking about what their Hong Kong identity is, how it's changing, and what are the implications of political transitions on the way that artists define themselves, on the way that they think about containment, on the way that they were thinking about how to create a space for themselves. So for three days, what Ricky Yeung did was to live in this cage, to mostly crawl and make sounds like he was an animal trapped in this cage. It was his friends who fed him, but he wanted to stay in the cage and never leave until some of his friends decided to drag him out at the end of the third day.

 

And when you think about the documentation of the specific performance, this is one of the very few photographic documentations that we have, and most of the time, it's the narrations that we have about that particular day. I remember going to a talk at Parasite, another independent art space in Hong Kong that started in the 1990s, and this was several years ago. They organized this panel discussion with several artists who participated, and Ricky Yeung was one of them. At that point, Ha Bik Chuen was not there, unfortunately. He was no longer with us. But it was quite interesting to think about how we document an event like this. There was another choreographer, for instance, who was part of this event, and I remember being struck by how he participated in this panel discussion, because, for instance, Ricky, almost like an oral history project, he said, "This is what I wanted to do.”"This was the reason why I built this cage.” "This is how I built the cage.” "This is how my friends dragged me out of the cage." But when it came to this choreographer, who made another performance that is not documented here, he kept using the word "I don't remember." So the moderator for the panel discussion, she would go around and ask every single artist who participated, "What do you remember? What was your contribution?" He kept giving the same answer, "I don't remember." And at the end of the panel discussion, for me, it turned into a performance piece about the choreographer artist almost resisting to give any traces, and perhaps for him, his position is to forget. So this is quite interesting. That moment or that performance is not recorded. Maybe he chooses not to be documented. Maybe he chooses not to be remembered. So this is something I also wanted to share with you. So it's not only about having documentation and saying that we have to record everything, but sometimes it's also fine to let it go. And for me, it was so important to hear from this choreographer artist that he chose not to be remembered in this very particular way.

 

But if you ask what happened to the space or what happened to these boxes, it's something that I also wanted to highlight because the expertise that we have is not the preservation of original materials. So it's quite different from what you would expect from a more conventional archive in the sense that after we organize these materials, after we create the inventory, after we digitize, annotate, and upload everything on the website where it is accessible to anyone from any part of the world, we always give the materials back to the archive owners. Sometimes they say we want to keep the original materials with us, and then you can keep a digital copy with the archive that's accessible to anyone. So it's really about the generosity of these people saying that I want my archive to be publicly and freely accessible to anyone who is interested in this archive. But it also means that they share the custodianship with us. In our case, if you go to our website, all the materials, you will see that they are copyrighted, and the copyright owners, they are the archive owners. It's not us, so we don't hold any rights to these materials. So if, as a researcher, as an artist, as a curator, if you want to use any of these materials, let's say, in a publication or in an exhibition that you are working on, we will always put you in touch with the archive owner if they have the copyright. And after their blessing, we will share with you the high-resolution version. So what we do on the website, it's actually a publishing platform. We only are thinking about how to make these materials as accessible as possible, how we can circulate them in the widest way possible, but when it comes to the use, we would always ask you, as the users of the archive, to go back to the archive owner and consult with them when it comes to the use of the materials. So it's a digital custodianship model that we have, and it's also a shared custodianship.

 

Sumtiomo：How about the library collection part, do you also digitize them?

 

Ersoy：

If we have the right to do it, sometimes we do it, but for the ISBN, let's say, cataloged publications, oftentimes they would want to limit the circulation. So for the library books, most of them, they are a reference library and... These are multi-editioned books, so it's a library collection. But for instance, as I was saying, we collect zines, and in terms of the zines, they resist being cataloged and documented and archived when you think about the logic of creating these zines. They are meant to circulate in a much more informal way. So it's something that we started actually six years ago, and we've been challenging our own way of cataloging, because when we have, let's say, a book for the library, an exhibition catalog, we often go to the ISBN number, we look at the overview, or we look at the backside of the book, and this is how we catalog. But when it comes to the zines, we cannot do that, because it will be against the ethics of circulating these zines. So every single time we have a zine, we have a zine librarian who's dedicated to cataloging this type of records in particular, and they always reach out to the zine makers themselves and say, "How do you want us to catalog your zine?" And they would say, "Please write this." Sometimes they prefer to become anonymous as well, and we follow their wishes and their requests, and we also ask, "If you wanted to think about a free distribution of the zine, would you be open for us to digitise it and put a PDF on the website as part of the cataloging system?" If they say yes, we also do that as well. And some of the exhibition catalogs, I'm thinking of some of the recent examples, a couple of arts dancers from Thailand, for instance, they said that we wanted to send you a hard copy, but this is also a PDF that we want to share with you, so you can keep both copies. So some of the records that you will find in the library collections have the digital versions as well, but we really want you to follow the wishes and the requests of the owners. Most of the books, they might not have it at the moment, but all the archival collections, they exist as digital records.

 

And especially in this case, the reason why I want to bring this example is also because the family itself, Ha Bik Chuen's own family, said they don't have the resources to keep the archive. And in this case, what we do is that we tell them, these are some of the potential custodians that you might be in conversation with. And we just make suggestions. And of course, it's the estate, it's the family in this case, that made the decision of working with two institutions in Hong Kong, one of them is M+ Museum, and the other one is the Art History Department of the Hong Kong University. So the archive doesn't exist in one place, but the family decided to donate the physical materials to two different institutions based on their research interests. So right now, if you come to Hong Kong and if you want to consult with the archive, you can always go to the website and consult with the digital materials. But if you want to see the physical records based on the materials, M+ has some of the materials and the Hong Kong University, they have the rest of the materials. And as you can see, they are in the process of being cataloged or in progress in both of the institutions.

 

And I was saying that we had started the residency program as we were working on the archive. We tried to think about different ways of activating at the same time. So our work is not only about creating these resources, but making sure that they are open, they are accessible, but they are also approached by artists and researchers that are not part of the Asia Art Archive team. And that's precisely the reason why we work with exhibitions, we work with publications, we do talks and workshops as we work on archives. Just wanted to give an overview of some of the projects that we worked on, especially related to the Ha Bik Chuen archive. So on the top, you will see two exhibition views from Portal Stories and Other Journeys. This was an exhibition that was organized by Asia Art Archive curated by one of our researchers, Michelle Wong. And it took place at Tai Kwun Contemporary. It also did not take place at Asia Art Archive in the library. But another art institution wanted to host this show, thinking about the scale of the exhibition that we wanted to organize. This is another type of collaboration that we are also interested in. Not only archival work, archival research or archival custodianship type of collaborations, but also thinking about programs and exhibitions.

 

We have a workshop with artist Zheng Bo, who was part of the residency program. And the idea was to think about going around the city and doing, making drawings of plants, thinking about the idea of a living archive. And on the bottom right, you see a pop concert by Sophie Wong. And this was the result of another residency by Chow Yiu Fai, an artist and a lyricist based in Hong Kong, responding to the Ha Bik Chuen archive by writing lyrics for pop songs. And Sophie was the person who basically performed these songs. So we are really thinking about different entry points, different creative responses to what an artistic response to an archive might be. Sometimes it's installation, sometimes it's a drawing workshop and sometimes it's a pop concert. So we try to think about the range of creative responses when it comes to engagement with artists and with archives.

 

So these are primarily four ways in which we think about these activations. Research is also the foundation of all of this archival work, but it is also the result, because every single archival project leads to new types of research projects. So research becomes something that's recurring and ongoing and developing all the time. Curatorial team works on exhibitions with artists, thinking especially about the artistic interpretations and artistic engagements with the archive. We have a learning and participation team that works closely with secondary schools and universities, thinking about how we can, as an art archive, support the educators themselves. And we have an editorial team that runs an online journal at the moment.

 

It's another area that we can speak more about if you're interested. We started publishing monographs in the early 2000s. If you look at the, if you think about the publishing practice of Asia Art Archive, and more recently, we do editorial collaborations with other research centers and think about publications, print publications together, or we think about our website as a source for online publishing. So if you go to, again, to the website, you will see "Like a Fever," which is the name of our online journal, where you will not only see scholarly articles, but you will also encounter artist projects, poems, and visual responses to archives as well.

 

And this is the case study that I wanted to bring for our discussion today. It's the recent exhibition that we organized this year called "In Our Own Backyard." This was another type of collaboration with our India team. And maybe this is a moment when I can also say that the, as we'd like to call it, the mothership, the biggest team, around 35 people. We are based in Hong Kong, and this is the library that I was showing you the photographs of. And we have a small team in India, and we have a small team in the US. So if you go to Brooklyn, we have a space with two to three people. It's a much smaller team. And if you visit India, again, please let me know. I would love to put you in touch with our colleagues in New Delhi, and they are five people. Again, a much smaller team. But we try to think about expanded networks and expanded ways of approaching the region and its diaspora, and that's one of the reasons why we have these different branches. So this project was a very close collaboration with our India team. So Sneha Ragavan and Samira Bose, we worked very closely with them to realize this project.

 

The exhibition was based on two artists, Sheba Chhachhi and Lala Rukh, the late Lala Rukh. Sheba Chhachhi is an artist from India. She is currently based in New Delhi. And we've been working on her archive. We have a very small selection of records that are around 100 only. And this is something that we are still working on. So it's, again, another point I would like to highlight. This exhibition responds to two artists' archives that we are still working on. We are actually in the beginning of the process. So the exhibition doesn't come at the very end of the archival work, but it is as part of the research process. And Sheba, she studied design and she started producing artworks in the late 70s and early 80s. And Lala Rukh, she unfortunately passed away quite early in 2015. She was primarily based in Lahore and she was also an educator. So both of these artists, they were educators, they were documenters, they were practicing artists at the same time. And the reason why we wanted to work with this pair of artists was that both Sheba Chhachhi  and the late Lala Rukh, they are known as one of the very few practicing artists who documented the women's movement in South Asia for decades, similar to Ha Bik Chuen, documenting decades of exhibition histories in Hong Kong. They documented the women's movement in this particular geography for several decades. And that was the reason why we wanted to bring these two personal archives together to see what are the similarities or what are the divergences of these two artists' methodologies and also sensibilities when it comes to their involvement with the women's movement in the region.

 

Sumitomo：

So basically they didn't know each other?

 

Ersoy：

They met each other several times because I would say Sheba Chhachhi was much more involved with the movement in India and Lala Rukh was much more involved in the movement in Pakistan, but they did regional workshops. They participated and led regional workshops. And there was a network of not only artists, but organizers, scholars, and activists thinking about the women's movement for South Asia and they met each other, but they never formally collaborated. So that was something that was quite interesting for us. And before I moved into the next slide, I also wanted to highlight that in the photograph on the right-hand side, you will see Lala Rukh. And also there is a young person. Her name is Maryam Rahman and she is the niece of Lala Rukh. And currently she is the person who's taking care of the estate and of the archive. And she was the person that we worked very closely with for this particular exhibition. And I will bring another anecdote involving Mariam. And imagine this is 1987. So you can see that she was, as a child, part of some of these regional workshops herself. This is an example of the workshop that Lala Rukh herself organized in her own backyard, therefore the title of the exhibition as well, of a printing and poster-making workshop that was open to children and women from different parts of South Asia. And Mariam was there as a child at that point. And later she also became an artist and an educator. Currently she teaches at the National College of Art in Lahore.

 

So this was the entrance of our library. Again, a view, as you see, as you walk out of the elevator on the 11th floor. And we wanted to start with a photograph of not of the two artists that are the highlights of the two archives that I was talking about, but one of the photographs of the printing workshop that Lala Rukh organized, this printing workshop that I was speaking about from 1987. And we all wanted to think about how do you make an exhibition like this? Because we could go the chronological way. We could say, this is what happened in the early 80s. This is what happened in the late 80s. This is how it has evolved over time. But we said that if you're interested in comparing these two artists, their sensibilities about documentation, maybe the way to think about it is about forms of gatherings. So we wanted to, in the end, make the decision of organizing all these materials, especially from the 1980s and 1990s, into three parts. One of them was the most intimate format of gathering, which was the workshops, workshops that would be closed door, workshops where everything would be hands-on, people would be learning from each other, and they would be the smallest scale of gathering. 

 

The second one was what happened on the street level, how these artists put their, let's say,

prints on the streets, how they did singing on the streets, how they were bringing what they created in the workshops into the street level. And the last level, the largest scale of gathering, was the regional and international gatherings and conferences. So we really wanted to start with the closest, most intimate, smallest scale of gatherings, and we wanted to think about how it has grown over time. So the examples that I'm speaking about in this part, this is the entrance of our library as well. The first thing that you encountered is you entered the library space. You would have these two enlarged photographs of two photographs from two artists' archives. On the left, you see a black and white photograph from Sheba Chhachhi's archive, and on the right, you see a photograph from that 1987 workshop on printing. 

 

Printing was something that we really wanted to start the exhibition with, just to show that it was about circulation of ideas, and the artist themselves, they were committed to supporting people with screen printing. At that point, one of the cheapest ways to organize it, organize this type of distribution.  And this was one of the biggest contributions that they made into the field. And as you can also see that all the materials are just sitting on the ledge without any protection, and some of them are enlarged on the window. And again, this goes back to our opportunity to work with digital materials. When we make these types of shows, we try not to show original materials, I can say. We try to play with the reproductions so that we can enlarge them. We can really think about, let's say, what are the first things that you would see as you enter a space? We would think about the hero images, the most, let's say, highlight images that we wanted to have in the exhibition. And working with digital materials really allows us to be very playful and to have this type of reproductions, of course, with the consent of the archive owners. But also when it comes to very rare materials like this one, this is the manual that Lala Rukh created for the workshop that I was speaking about. After she organized this workshop, literally in the backyard of her house in Lahore, having all these participants making prints and making posters together, she said that these skills should be circulated in Pakistan itself and also more widely in South Asia. And that's the reason why she created this manual that she titled "In Our Own Backyard" in Urdu, that you can see on the right-hand side and also in English. And we wanted to create the replicas of these catalogs so that anyone would be able to go through them. Again, something that we're able to do because we have the digital materials themselves.

 

We also wanted to think about workshops in an expanded way. This is an example that I would like to highlight. This time, it's not printing, but it's a theater workshop that took place in India in 1989. And in this case, we see participants coming together in Kasauli in an artist's retreat and spending around 10 days together speaking about the representation of women in mythologies and literature in India. And we have these archival materials that are photographs, that are the brochures of the theater productions, but also a documentary that was made by a journalist, Navina Sundaram, also the late journalist thinking about not only celebrating all these conversations, discussions, heated dialogues about the workshops, but the disagreements. It's something that was very important for our team. So the documents, they're not only about giving information about that time, but also showing how these conversations, they included, they hosted, they held space for disagreements among the participants, among the artists. So again, thinking about the document, it's something that's very important for us, that it does not only give information about what happened on that particular day, during this particular workshop, but they give us relationally what was happening, what type of conversations, what type of agreements and disagreements were there among the artists and among the participants.

 

So for the second section, this is the beginning that we wanted to create. We did a selection of posters from the 1980s and 1990s. And this was quite interesting for us because when these posters were created, they were not meant to be documented and archived. Of course, they were created just to circulate and then eventually disappear. But thanks to these artists' archives, we are able to get a sense of these materials and they are the digital versions. Again, that's the reason why you can see them in a grid like this. And they are the enlarged versions on the two sides of the column. And this is the reading room that you were able to see from the first photograph of the library. And they give us a lot of many traces about how artists themselves, they were thinking about not only their artistic work, but how they contributed to the women's movement as well. In this case, I wanted to highlight two posters from the top row that I was showing in the previous photograph. On the left-hand side, you have a poster by Lala Rukh from 1985. And on the right-hand side, you have another poster by Lala Rukh from 1993. And immediately, you would be able to see what connects them. So she uses collage as one of the artistic methodologies. She uses text and she uses the graphic language of the street. You can think about how to create collage and how to create this assemblage, putting and pasting all these different materials on top of each other. And this is something that we don't see in the artist's practice. This is also something that I would like to share. When we think about Lala Rukh's artistic work, oftentimes it's one of the most minimalist artistic languages that you can see. But when it comes to the posters that she created at that time, in the 1980s and 1990s, you will see that there's a much more direct and straightforward language that she uses.

 

Maybe here I can share an anecdote with you. I will go back to this slide. The two posters that you can see here belong to another artist,Nilima Sheikh, who also worked on the archival.  And this was a really interesting case study for us because when we were working on the selection, we said that we'd like to have a selection from Lala Rukh, one of the artists that we are highlighting with this show. The second row and then this one, these posters, belong to Sheba Chhachhi, the second artist that I was speaking about. And we also wanted to include several posters from their peers and their artists. The dancers, poets, and also other visual artists. And in this case, we found these two posters in a book, in a resource book, but it was not attributed to any artist. It was attributed to the Women's Research Centre that it came from. But we were able to recognize the artistic language, this specific way of making drawing. We immediately knew that it had to belong to Nilima Sheikh herself. Nilima Sheikh currently lives in Baroda. She's an incredible artist from India. And she was also part of the women's movement. She was part of the theater workshop that I was talking about. We said, we worked on the archive, we know her artistic language, it has to be hers, but it was not attributed. So we went back to Nilima Sheikh and said we found these posters from the mid 1980s, but we are not able to find the attribution. Did you actually create these? And she said clearly, this is my artwork or this is my poster, but I have absolutely zero recollection that I made it. So in this case, the artist herself, she said that I did this for the research centre for the women's movement, then I gave it to the research centre that was responsible for circulating these posters. And then she just let it go. She completely forgot about it. And this was a really interesting moment when the artists were clearly thinking about these posters, not as artworks, but as something that would belong to a larger public domain. And if you look at the bottom parts, you would never find the artist signatures. In this case, this is the logo of the Women's Action Forum. It's a not-for-profit organisation and it's a feminist organisation that Lala Rukh  was part of and was a co-founder of. So Lala Rukh , rather than including her own signature, she would put the logo and the name of the Women's Action Forum. So all of these posters, they really follow the ethos of copyleft, rather than having the signature of the artist treating them as artworks. They said they all belong to the women's organisations and they basically said that these are here for circulation rather than just for keeping for ourselves.

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But sometimes there are different stories. In this case, we're looking at a poster that Lala Rukh made in 1882, called Monument to the Women. This is an enlarged version of the poster. This is how we wanted to paste it in the biggest column in the library. In this case, this was a hand-painted poster that she made again for the very first gathering of the Women's Action Forum, the not-for-profit organisation that I was talking about.  And she kept the poster because it's a hand-made one and it's not an offset print, they are not multiples. And in the end, when we were working on the exhibition, we found out that the poster is in the collection of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi currently. Of course, it's the estate that keeps the copyright at the moment, but we also had to go through Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and get their permission to recreate, to reproduce and enlarge this very particular poster. So working on these materials, it really allowed us to think about what is the life cycle of these materials that were not meant to be documented and archived in the first place. Some of them are completely forgotten by the makers, by the artists who produced them, and some of them are now preserved in museum collections. This tension is also something that we are very much interested in as an art archive.

 

Things that I would like to highlight. So this section was more about the street level, how these, whatever was created in the workshops, how they were presented in the public space. So you would see some of the posters and some of the flyers, all reproductions in this case. You will see photographs of how people were engaging with these materials. And you will also see some of the theater works that were part of the movement and that were documented by Sheba Chhachhi and Lala Rukh. And in the final section, we have these regional and international conferences and workshops. One thing I would like to highlight is this one. On the left, we see a set of materials from 1985. This is the United Nations Conference on Women that was organized in Nairobi. And all the photographs, they belong to Lala Rukh's archive, who was, as an artist, one of the participants. And you can see that there are some of the key speakers that she was documenting. We have Angela Davis here, or Nawal El Saadawi, the feminist activist of that time. But in the background, you can also see the posters. So the posters were not only on the street level, but they also traveled to these international gatherings and conferences. And on the right-hand side, you see photographs from Sheba Chhachhi's archive. This time, it's 10 years later, 1995, United Nations Conference on Women in Beijing. And Sheba was much more interested in documenting crowds, how crowds were gathering at the entrance of the convention center, how they were organizing, and holding banners outside. So again, it says something about the type of things that these two artists wanted to document and keep in their own archives. So we started with the workshop, the smallest scale. Then we went to the street level, and this is the largest gathering form that we wanted to highlight in the exhibition.

 

The last thing that I wanted to…two maybe the last things that I would like to say is that we also wanted to keep or put this type of image. This is a photograph from 1986, a regional workshop that took place in Bangladesh in Koita, next to manifestos that these artists and organizers created. Because if you think about a manifesto about, what does it mean to become part of a women's movement in South Asia, as a regional movement, the statement would be…the manifesto would be much more consistent. And it would have this more propositional language. But when we spoke with all of these artists, one thing that they kept saying was that we also made sure to enjoy each other's presence and not only discuss, analyze things, having agreements and disagreements, but it was very important to have leisure time. So that's why there are photographs from the workshops, not from the discussion part, but people dancing with each other and also having children around, dancing. Next to the manifestos themselves, making a point that these were not mutually exclusive practices, but they were complementary. When we were looking at these United Nations conference photographs, it was also interesting, especially for 85, in the same contact sheet, a couple of photographs after these people speaking, giving speeches, they were photographs from their safari trip. Because right after the conference, the South Asia cohort, they wanted to go and they just looked at animals together. So there are a lot of photographs of giraffes and lions, which was very confusing to us as researchers because we didn't know how to make sense of them. But after speaking with Sheba Chhachhi , who also told us that she was there from India at that point, she also participated and took photographs. So she is currently looking into her own archive to find these images.

 

The last point that I wanted to make is that for the exhibitions, for us, it's very important to always put archival materials in conversation with artworks. In this case, we had two artworks from the two artists. We had this lightbug installation from Sheba Chhachhi from 2005. And we had a serigraph by Lala Rukh from 1993, thinking about how the archive sometimes is a continuation of the archival materials that we see in the archives. And sometimes it's very different. In this case, for instance, with Sheba Chhachhi , she was starting in the early 2000s, she was interested in expanding the feminist discourse and thinking about the environmental crisis as part of her feminist concerns. But when it comes to Lala Rukh, as I was saying earlier, her practice, artistic practice, is much more silent, much more oblique, much more indirect. And you would never see her feminist concerns directly articulated or represented in the artwork. This is an example where we see a serigraph that is based on a photograph that she took in Sigiriya, the archaeological site in Sri Lanka. So when you think about the formal qualities of the work, or when you think about the subject matter of the work, it has nothing to do with what I was speaking about earlier. But if we look at the social history of why she created this work, the reason why she had repeated visits to Sri Lanka, it was because she was leading printing workshops. And that was the reason she spent so much time. And she also visited Sigiriya, so she kept taking photographs. So even if her concerns related to the women's movement might not be immediately conveyed through the artwork, by looking at the social history, we are able to make these connections.

 

The last thing I wanted to mention, for us, it's also very important to not only have historical artworks and archival materials, but to keep inviting much younger artists and contemporary artists to respond to these materials. And in this exhibition, we had two new artist commissions. One of them was by Maryam Rahman, whom I mentioned earlier. She is the niece of Lala Rukh. And as an artist and as an educator, she said she wants to create a children's book that tells the life story of Lala Rukh. She said that I was part of these workshops in the 1980s as a child. And I was part of this community. I know how they talked. I know what they talked about. But I wanted to convey this incredible life story of Lala Rukh, because she is no longer with us, to a younger generation that never met her. So that's why, as a medium, she chose a children's book format, and she illustrated, and she also co-authored. And we made around 500 copies. And currently, we are distributing the children's book to schools, both in Hong Kong and also in Lahore, in Pakistan.

And the second artist commission was for AFSAR (Asian Feminist Studio For Art and Research) This is a platform that is kind of distributed across different parts of East Asia. So some of the members are in Taiwan. Some of the members are in Korea. Some of them are in the diasporas. So they worked online. They used Discord for their activities. And in this case, we invited them, a much younger generation who does not necessarily have to expertise about women's movement and feminist discourse in South Asia in the 1980s and 1990s. But they are interested in feminism and how the definitions of feminism have been changing in this particular region. So they said, we want to contribute with a radio station. So they created a radio station called Moving Humps that you can access on Spotify. Every month, throughout the exhibition, they created a new episode that included submissions online and also by the submission forms in the library. Thinking about circulation, the idea of copyleft, the idea of artists not creating something tangible, a unique piece, but something that should be circulated and kept being redistributed over time.

 

This is a joke, if I have time for a joke? This is how I would like to conclude. Of course, we also brought a lot of publications. And one of them was this incredible publication made by Bindia Thapar and Kamla Bhasin, the late poet, who wanted to illustrate these cartoons. So with the joke, I will just read it out loud. Question, how many feminists do you need to change an electric bulb? Answer, five. One, to change the bulb, to write about the process, and another two, to make a video. 

 

Which encapsulates our entire exhibition and also how these two artists have been working with. But this is a type of joke that we want to reclaim. And thinking about the importance of documenting  our own practices, when maybe institutional histories might not be immediately interesting. So the role of the artist, thinking about as documenters, as archivists of their own history. So this is maybe where I would like to end my presentation. 

 

Thank you so much for listening.

(Applause)