Making the Archive (2018–)

Making the archive started in 2018 with Varsha Nair, Nitaya Ueareeworakul and Jamilah Preenun Nana, opening up boxes of stored Womanifesto material—photographs, slides, albums, documents and so on—in Varsha’s studio in Bangkok. This was the starting point to organise the material with a focus on digitising it for Asia Art Archive’s Research Collection, and exhibiting the archive for the first time. 

About the Womanifesto Archive on Asia Art Archive

The history of exhibitions, art-making, residencies and events that have been part of Womanifesto since the mid-1990s have been archived and digitised by the Asia Art Archive (AAA). The AAA was co-founded in 2000 by Claire Hsu and Johnson Chang. Its goal is to collate and preserve material on the recent history of art from Asia and make these available via the onsite library and the online website.

Digitised archival materials for the Womanifesto Way anthology project have been made available in partnership with Asia Art Archive.

From Asia Art Archive website:

"The Womanifesto Archive traces the multifarious activities of a biennial event, organised by women artists, that began in Bangkok in the mid-nineties.

The hundreds of records comprising the collection consist of correspondences and texts, photographs, audiovisual materials, artwork, and documents. The bulk of the material range from 1997, when Nitaya Ueareeworakul and Varsha Nair organised the first exhibition, through 2008, the date of the residency programme. In particular, the thousands of photographs trace the participation of an international roster of artists, including Arahmaiani, Amanda Heng, Tari Ito, Sanja Iveković, Mella Jaarsma, Sriwan Janehuttakarnkit, Pinaree Sanpitak, Tejal Shah, Phaptawan Suwannakudt, wen yau, Shimada Yoshiko, and Yin Xiuzhen. These are complemented by a selection of press clippings mostly from around 1997 to 2001, video documentation, and artwork and objects relating to Womanifesto. In addition, there are some administrative papers and a cache of materials relating to a retrospective exhibition from 2019.

The archive was assembled over the years by Nitaya Ueareeworkaul and Varsha Nair, supplemented by an additional large cache of photographs and other documents supplied by Phaptawan Suwannakudt in 2020. " Read more...

Further Reading

Womanifesto Archive, Asia Art Archive, https://aaa.org.hk/en/collections/search/archive/womanifesto-archive