F.3.1 Killjoy Art History

• Banafsheh Mohammadi, University of Alberta

In this presentation, I think through the role of petroleum-based philanthropy in the formation of North American museums to make a case for the suitability and necessity of leveraging a feminist killjoy methodology in historical studies of museums. Borrowing the term from feminist theorist Sara Ahmed, I define killjoy art history as an act of self-reflection in which art history investigates its problematic moments without any intention of righting them or proposing a progression toward a “better” outcome. Killjoy art history as complaint allows us to stay with the problematic moments of coloniality and racism that have engendered human and environmental violence and loss.

keywords: petroleum-based philanthropy, killjoy, feminism

F.3.2 Potential Archives, Art Histories, and Institutions: Feminist, Digital Strategies and Relationality in the Documentation, Organization, and Study of Art

• Julia Polyck-O’Neill, York University

Can a feminist materialist reimagining of digital technology in institutional contexts provide an innovative theoretical and practical framework for transforming interdisciplinary artist archives? Moreover, can such a reimagining dismantle and replace the traditional imperialist systems that structure current knowledge regimes in museums and art history more broadly? My project demonstrates how artists’ archives benefit from non-traditional archival methods that combine emerging digital archival strategies that accommodate and represent community networks and collaborations with the intervention of the artists themselves in the co-creation of accessible multimedia archives.

Archival scholars have identified two interrelated contentions underlying current approaches to artists’ archives within the present academic and archival milieu: systemic issues fundamental to archival conventions and practices, and shortcomings of formal organizational strategies within such practices. Feminist archival studies scholars Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor argue that traditional archival practice is often rooted in colonial and patriarchal cultural and structural conditions. Deena Engel and Glen Wharton of the Artist Archive Initiative have addressed how the limitations of conventional archival systems often fail to accommodate the kinds of information, accuracy, and logistical affordances scholars and art professionals require for their research. Specialists in feminist archival studies respond to such organizational shortcomings, observing how the practice of the co-creation of archives with the artist(s) represented within the collections can contribute meaningfully to the value of the collection for scholars and communities. Caswell and Cifor’s proposal for a “feminist ethical framework” for archival studies situates the archive socially and culturally, with consideration of relational and affective contexts.¹

This paper explores two main, preliminary ideas: why a transformation of the organization of artist archives is timely and important; and how more equitable and nuanced digital methods and platforms have the potential to benefit artists, scholars of art history, arts archivists, museum educators and curators, and broader publics.

¹ Caswell, Michelle and Marika Cifor. “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives.” Archivaria no. 81, Spring 2016, pp. 23-43. p.24.

keywords: critical feminist practice, feminist digital methods, feminist materialisms, art histories, artist archives

F.3.3 The Museum that could have been: Potentializing National Museum of Karachi, Pakistan

• Varda Nisar, Concordia University

The National Museum of Pakistan appeared almost overnight after Pakistan gained its independence from their colonizers in 1947, completely missing the point of this moment of decolonization.

In the year 1958, an opportunity would rise again when under the rule of the first military dictator, General Ayub Khan, plans for a new “ultra—modern” building for the National Museum would be announced. Finally opened in 1970, the museum once again missed the mark. How is it that a new nation and its new museum followed the same colonial logic of defining the native, and fell victim to the colonial stereotypes about their own citizens?

For the purposes of this paper, I will be exploring the potential history of the museum by visiting writings by those communities who continue to fall victim to coloniality’s gaze. Through those writings I want to foreground how these communities imagined themselves in this new nation, and how and why these visions were set aside. Using Nicholas Mirzoeff’s framework of countervisuality, I want to establish that resistance and self-imaginings existed alongside these colonial imaginings, even if they haven’t been allowed space in the official narratives the state has written about itself.

keywords: countervisuality, National Museum of Pakistan, potential history, community self-imaginings

F.3.4 What if museum history was a history of contestation?

• Pansee Abou ElAtta, Carleton University

Critical approaches to museum theory in the past fifty years (i.e. Stocking 1985, Vergo 1989, Bunch 1992, Boyd 1999) frequently characterize protests against the museum’s coloniality as a recent phenomenon, one that only began to affect normative museum practice from the 1970s onwards. This characterization works alongside the New Museology’s self-described disciplinary intervention, that of permitting, for the first time, subaltern voices to influence cultural institutions with the aid of museum professionals.

Yet by reading against the archival grain, new potential museum historiographies might emerge. The role of Egyptian resistance against the Napoleonic expedition, for example, looms large in the construction of the Louvre’s self-image, lending value to hard-won objects. Accordingly, the most highly-prized trophies from Ancient Egypt and beyond come to be valued through the difficulty of their acquisition, the adversity through which they are won.

This presentation re-reads late 18^th and early 19^th century French texts (i.e. Denon 1802, de Quincy 1815) to highlight the role of anti-colonial resistance and contestation in shaping the value structures through which the modern museum has come to be understood. In doing so, a counter-institutional museum historiography is drawn, one with perhaps a greater potential to lay bare the networks of labour and affect that have undergirded it from its very foundation.

keywords: contestation, museum historiographies, Egyptian anti-colonial resistance