"MOBILIZING MEMORY: WOMEN WITNESSING" EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
“Collaborative Archives: Connective Histories” builds on a multi-year collaboration of Women Mobilizing Memory, a transnational group of artists, scholars and activists from the United States, Chile, Argentina, and Turkey who study the politics of memory from the unique perspective of gender and social difference. It asks what strategies of memorialization and re-imagining are most effective in calling attention to past and present wrongs and in creating possibilities of redress. It reveals unexpected connections and resonances between divergent histories. Using gender as an analytic lens, Women Mobilizing Memory explicitly considers the gendered forms and the gendered consequences of political repression and persecution.
Confronting legacies of political violence in their own communities and in the lives of others, the artists in this exhibition bear witness to the power of art to combat injustice and forgetting. They mobilize intimate and collective archives to reveal individual and communal acts of resistance and survival and thus their work enables us to imagine more open and progressive futures.
The exhibition forms an integral part of the working group’s effort to bring discussions initiated in Santiago, Chile and Istanbul, Turkey to New York. A public day of workshops and roundtables on September 10, “Women Mobilizing Memory: Collaboration and Co- Resistance” will feature panels on “Performances of Protest,” “Mobilizing Memory Sites: Istanbul, Santiago, New York,” and “Intimate Archives/ Political Violence.”