Chance Encounters: Archival Fabulations and Feminist Art History
Friday 10 October, 1.30–4.30pm
This hands-on session takes the archive as a starting point for how artists, curators and writers can learn from, and speculate beyond history. Drawing on examples from personal archives and intimate experiences that are hard to contain within art’s histories, as well as fabricated narratives within feminist and institutional collections, this workshop provides an opportunity to explore material from the Women’s Art Library alongside participants’ personal stories.
Participants will be encouraged to experiment with imagining feminist art histories that centre desire, gossip, speculation and an embodied relationship to the past. This work of archival fabulation will build on the installation Slightly Bitter, part of our exhibition Lubaina Himid with Magda Stawarska: Another Chance Encounter, which combines actual and fictional correspondence to imagine the relationship between the modernist artists Sophie Gaudier-Brzeska and Nina Hamnett beyond the historical record.
There will also be an opportunity to view the exhibition.
Please note: participants will need to bring a notepad and pen.
This event would be best suited to students, researchers, curators, artists, and archivists.
About the speakers
Catherine Grant is Reader in Modern and Contemporary Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. She is the author of A Time of One’s Own: histories of feminism in contemporary art (2022), and co-editor of Fandom as Methodology (2019), Creative Writing and Art History (2012), and the questionnaire on “Decolonizing Art History”, Art History, 2020. She is a co-lead of two research networks: Group Work: Feminism and Contemporary Art and Animating Archives.
Dr Althea Greenan works in Special Collections and Archives at Goldsmiths University of London curating the Women’s Art Library collection (WAL). Her work with WAL began in 1989 as a volunteer and she remained with the collection when it was gifted to Goldsmiths in 2004. She subsequently developed a programme of artistic research supporting artists, students and academics. She has written on/for women artists since the 1980s publishing reviews, interviews and creative pieces. Her doctoral research on the WAL slide collection features in articles for Of Other Spaces (edited by Sophia Yadong Hao, Sternberg Press 2019) and Women: a cultural review (edited by Dr Victoria Horne, Taylor and Francis 2019). Her writings about the WAL include a chapter in Feminism and Museums, volume 1 (edited by Dr Jenna C Ashton, MuseumsETC 2017) and “We’re in the Library!: welcoming creative practices, sharing responsibilities of access” (Art Libraries Journal July 2024). She co-curated the Animating Archives website and contributed as an advisor to Feminist Art Making Histories, (an oral history, digital humanities project, funded by the Irish Research Council and the AHRC) and Women in Revolt (Tate Britain 2023-24, Modern Two Edinburgh 2025, Whitworth 2025). She is currently Senior Fellow at the College for Social Sciences and Humanities of the University Alliance Ruhr.
Helena Reckitt has worked across the contemporary art field as a curator, editor, writer, and lecturer. She is Reader in Curating in the Art Department at Goldsmiths, University of London, and founder of the Feminist Duration Reading Group, a collectively-organised public events programme exploring under-represented feminisms, currently in residence at Goldsmiths CCA. For this workshop she will read from her essay ‘In and Out of Time: Returning to the Art and Life of Gretchen Hupfel,’ (forthcoming in Re-Evaluation in Feminism and Contemporary Art, ed. Katy Deepwell, Vernon Press, 2026) and share some images and objects from her personal archive.
About the exhibition
This new exhibition by one of the UK’s most renowned and celebrated contemporary artists will present new paintings, a special installation made in collaboration with Magda Stawarska and ‘interventions’ in the Kettle’s Yard house.
Initially trained in theatre design, Himid is best known for her innovative approaches to painting and social engagement, playing a pivotal role in the British Black Arts movement since the 1980s. Over the last decade, she has earned international recognition for her figurative canvases, which explore overlooked and invisible aspects of history and contemporary daily life.
At Kettle’s Yard, her new work will centre on what is missing from the telling of life stories, who is left out of narratives, what strategies are used to fill in the gaps and the objects we choose to leave behind as clues.
Access
- The galleries, where exhibitions are shown, and all areas of the Clore Learning Studio (level -1), the Research Space (level 1) and the Ede Room (level 2) are fully accessible.
- We have wheelchair accessible toilets on the lower ground (level -1), ground and first floor (level 1).
- There is a lift giving access to all floors located past the galleries, just beside the Clore Learning Studio on the ground floor.
- Kettle’s Yard welcomes assistance and service dogs in all areas.
- We have large-print versions of the wall text available.
- We can lend visitors small folding seats for taking around exhibitions or using at non-seated events. Please ask a Visitor Assistant for help finding a seat.
