Researching Exhibitions of South Asian Women Artists in Britain in the 1980s

Abstract

This paper narrates the author’s research methodologies and findings relating to her ongoing project, Articulating British Asian Art Histories. With a specific focus on four exhibitions of South Asian women artists during the 1980s and early 1990s, it provides an overview of her primary and secondary research, and presents archival material, which cumulatively gives a richer understanding of the aesthetic and political aims of exhibitors, and the contexts in which they were working. Exhibitions of exclusively women artists of South Asian heritage were rare during this period, but close visual analysis of individual exhibitions and artworks reveals an active engagement with the specificities of the female, British-Asian experience. This article is accompanied by two downloadable resources: a complete copy of the Numaish exhibition catalogue (Fig. 15) and a copy of the exhibition pamphlet for Jagrati (Fig. 22).