In-Conversation | Catherine De Zegher & Griselda Pollock

Key Takeaways

• The history of art has systematically excluded women artists, not through simple forgetting, but due to a lack of appropriate language and discourse to understand their contributions.
• The term 'rediscovered artist' implies a reason for being forgotten, highlighting the need to understand the historical circumstances of their erasure rather than just their re-emergence.
• Feminist curation and scholarship aim to uncover the 'hitherto invisible' by interpreting fragmented evidence and traces, challenging the notion of art history as neatly packaged narratives.
• The exclusion of artists based on identity (e.g., Black, queer, women) prevents the world from benefiting from their unique perspectives and contributions to art.
• The project of recognizing women's artistic contributions is ongoing, as evidenced by the continued commercialization of previously overlooked female artists.
• The act of curating and writing from a feminist perspective involves developing new ways of thinking that actively counter dominant patriarchal and Eurocentric structures of meaning.
• The exhibition 'Women's Work Has Never Done' signifies an unfinished project, emphasizing the continuous effort required to bring marginalized artists into visibility and critical discourse.