Nina Höchtl and Julia Wieger discuss researching the Austrian Association of Women Artists and their efforts to disrupt unreliable histories
An understanding of history as unreliable – a subjective, edited text, fallible to human error or deliberate bias – has been much explored in recent politics and art practice. The archive has become both a physical and rhetorical space in which to challenge omissions, gaps and absences and ask questions about hierarchies of power. Who, and how, do we remember, and why? The intricate relationship between feminism and the archive – the notion of activating and preserving marginalized history as a form of collective resistance – has been addressed by academics such as Kate Eichhorn, a lecturer in writing and cultural theory at The New School in New York, who perceive an engagement with the past as a means to stage radical, progressive interventions in the present. Akin to other energized forms of political intervention, the archive is there to be reclaimed.
For more, see https://frieze.com/article/hauntings-archive