Seminarium HERSTORIE LAT 80.

Seminar: Herstories of the 1980s

Organizers:
Arton Foundation
Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw
Faculty of Artistic Research and Curatorial Studies

Date: October 28, 2026, 10:00 AM–4:00 PM
Venue: Auditorium, Academy of Fine Arts building
Wybrzeże Kościuszkowskie 37/39, 00-379 Warsaw

You're welcome to submit an abstract (up to 1,500 characters including spaces) and a short biography (up to 1,000 characters including spaces) to: arton@fundacjaarton.pl.

Submission deadline: September 15, 2026, 11:59 PM
Announcement of results: September 20, 2026

We provide seminar participants with an honorarium and full or partial reimbursement of travel costs.

The event will be held in Polish and will be accessible to the public.

Subsidized by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage from the Culture Promotion Fund.

Given the intensive and multi-threaded discussion on the role of women in shaping the Polish image of art, which has been developing for some time, the need to initiate and intensify research on the art of women who debuted at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, or in the early 1980s, is becoming increasingly apparent.

This is the goal of the exhibition and research program Herstories of the 1980s, carried out by the Arton Foundation in 2026, within which we are cataloguing and presenting selected archival collections of women artists active after 1980.

The seminar, which we invite you to participate in, aims to introduce selected creative biographies, attempt to analyze phenomena in the field of art that occurred with the active participation of women artists, and revise the image of 1980s art that has been shaped and consolidated in the existing literature on the subject. We want to draw attention to activities that have so far been marginalized, or whose currently known image requires further completion.

We wish to draw attention to the fact that valuable archives of women artists, which began to form during that period, exist in private studios and homes — yet only a few selected examples have been made available to the public.

We invite people interested in this period of Polish art and conducting research on the work of women active in the 1980s to take part, particularly those who have conducted or are currently conducting research on selected archival collections.

During the meeting, we plan to address topics such as:
– Invisible archive – the status, protection, and emancipation of private collections of women artists
– Strategies of survival – how women artists operated outside the official institutional circuit in the 1980s
– Revising the canon – deconstructing existing literature and myths about 1980s art
– Marginalia and experiments – artistic phenomena omitted from existing narratives
– Debut in the shadow of crisis – the specifics of the socio-political realities at the turn of the decades from the perspective of women artists.