Event

Women, Photography, and Feminisms

Thu, Nov 18, 2021

10:00 AM–6:00 PM

This event will be virtual and in-person at Pérez Art Museum Miami, free and open to all, but please register to attend.

Join the world’s first-ever Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA) Congress for Women, Photography, and Feminisms, a two-day convening at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) and virtually online. Connect with worldwide organizations of women photographers, internationally recognized art historians, and preeminent artists to explore the dynamic history and contributions of women photographers from the 19th century to date.

The two-day, in-person and online convening will provide a space for dialogue, celebration, and critical debate about women’s contributions to modern and contemporary art, with the aim of rewriting the established artistic canon and provoking social change. This event presents seminal and emerging research and discourse in the field, considering both national and international discussions about women and feminisms in the history of photography. Click here for the full schedule for both days, to register, and for more information.

Watch the live-stream on YouTube here.

More than 25 internationally-recognized scholars and artists from around the world will participate in the two-day interactive congress, including Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Deborah Dorotinsky, Shoair Mavlian and Ángeles Donoso Macaya, Seminar Faculty Leader of the Archives in Common project, for a panel “This is Not an Archival Object” on Friday, November 19th at 11:25 AM (EST):

An heiress demands the restitution of the daguerreotype of her enslaved ancestor from the museum that preserves his captive image; a Tzotzil artist photographs objects, knowledges, and practices of her Indigenous community; a Greek-Armenian artist composes collages and film using found photographic and film materials produced by and for the United States and Western audiences. Resorting to the abolitionist imagination, decolonial approaches and methods, postcolonial theory, and feminisms, the presentations in this panel probe and interrogate the Archive as a space interconnected to racial capitalism, the establishment of settler-colonial states, and the sexual division of labor, from its very inception. If a practice is a provisional way of operating within dominant spaces, these archival, photographic, and artistic practices bring to the fore the notion that archival objects are not dead matter; on the contrary, they can—and should—be reactivated and potentialized inorder to dismantle the Archive in its imperial form. The panel will include in-person and virtual presentations. This panel will be live-streamed on YouTube here.

ABOUT PARTICIPANTS

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, PhD
Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature, Brown University, film essayist, and curator of archives and exhibitions, (Providence)