“The Flow of History. Southeast Asian Women Artists” is a research program led by AWARE in collaboration with Asia Art Archive, a Hong Kong-based organization that builds tools and communities to collectively expand knowledge about recent art in Asia through research, residency, and educational programs.

The research program aims to highlight the work of women artists from Southeast Asia with diverse practices and locations, from the 18th century to today. The aim is to cross gender issues with transversal historical questions, and to consider the place of the practices and reflections of women artists in Southeast Asia born between 1700 and 1973, embracing the diversity of the area and its particular national and social dynamics at pivotal moments such as decolonization. A research committee of experts representing the cultural diversity of the region has been created to advise AWARE and Asia Art Archive, in order to publish online biographies and research articles about women artists, to identify archives of these artists, and to organize events that highlight this research.

The title of the project makes reference to Indonesian poet Toeti Heraty’s (1933-2021) 1989 poem, The Portrait of a Woman 1938. Proposing a reading of the flows of history against the grain, to echo and deepen the artistic initiatives led by women in the geographical area, makes it possible to affirm the relevance of gender issues in the artistic history of the region, in order to “recover or reclaim lost narratives, and bring new opportunities for dialogue into the present”, as stated by the artists’ group WOMANIFESTO, which has been organizing artistic actions since the mid-1990s, particularly in Thailand.