“Living in the earth-deposits of our history”: archival fabulations and feminist art history

This chapter proposes that to write feminist art histories requires paying attention to disrupted temporalities, speculation and desire. This is even more pressing when writing about recent art, which has complicated and foregrounded the idea of what ‘the contemporary’ might be, with feminist and queer artists often playing with archival material, both real and imagined, to engage with histories that speak to our present. A poem by Adrienne Rich provides an entry-point into the ways in which the past is accessed through texts, objects and bodily sensation. This is explored alongside British artists and writers who have taken the archive as a starting point for investigations into what can be done, learnt, and imagined from history: including Holly Pester’s “archive fan fiction”, the Black transfeminist “transfixions” in Shola von Reinhold’s 2020 novel Lote and Maud Sulter’s multi-layered artwork Hysteria, 1991. Through these examples, the ways in which experiments in art writing and art practice can reshape our understanding of (art) history is considered. Rather than keeping strictly with the historical work of recovery that is still so important to feminism, the artists and writers in this chapter move into the space of fabulation, staging the scene of their embodied connections with previous moments in time, including those they have had to invent.