Archive Stories
A conversation with scholars Yvonne Low and Mary Roberts, and artist Simryn Gill, about the poetics and ethics of research.
Artists and art historians both trade in stories, facts and ideas. Underpinning the seeming solidity of these forms, however, is the slippery practice of research - the work of reading and looking, of collecting and organising, of listening and taking notes. In contrast to the standardised formats that characterise art and art history's public appearances (books, articles, artworks), research work is often deeply personal, beset by contingencies and ungovernable forces. Individual research practices - although not often seen or discussed out loud - have their own poetics and ethics.
In this event, artist Simryn Gill will join art historians Mary Roberts and Yvonne Low in conversation about the research practices that underpin their work, reflecting on the poetics and ethics that shape them, and the forms of knowledge that they expose and conceal.
This event is linked to Simryn Gill's 2024 Schaeffer Library Artist Residency. The Residency is made possible by a generous individual gift to the Power Institute.
More about the Schaeffer Library Art Program
More about Artist in Residence, Simryn Gill
People
Simryn Gill
Simryn Gill is an artist whose work spans photography, drawing, printing, object making and writing. Gill articulates the poetics of history, power and identity that striate the places and environments between which she lives and moves. With Tom Melick she runs Stolon Press, a small publisher of books and pamphlets in Sydney. In 2023 Gill's work was shown at MCA, Sydney; Barbican, London; Singapore Art Museum; Linnaen Society, London. Gill has participated in numerous international exhibitions, including the Singapore Biennale (2006), documenta (2007, 2012), Istanbul Biennial (2011, 2022), Venice Biennale (2013) and Dhaka Art Summit (2018), Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale (2024).
Yvonne Low
Yvonne Low is a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney. She specializes in Asian modernities, gender and sexuality in Asian art, and curatorial practice, teaching across undergraduate and postgraduate programs. Her research recovers marginalized histories in Southeast Asian art and Chinese diaspora cultures, with particular focus on women's practices and artist’s networks. She employs decolonial, feminist, and digital methodologies to challenge canonical art histories and develop new frameworks for studying artists excluded from dominant modernist narratives – including watercolourists, left-aligned practitioners, and those working across amateur-professional boundaries from the colonial period to the present. Since co-convening the inaugural 2017 international symposium on Gender in Southeast Asian Art Histories, she has actively built this interdisciplinary field through multiple channels. She has co-organised three exhibitions on women's art and archives, and serve on the editorial committee of Southeast of Now Journal and advisory boards for major regional initiatives including “The Flow of History: Southeast Asian Women Artists” (AWARE/AAA) and “The Womanifesto Way” (Power Institute, DFAT). Current collaborative projects include a special issue on Feminist Writings in Southeast Asian Art and the Artists Trajectories Map (ArTM), a digital tool advancing comparative research methodologies.
Mary Roberts
Mary Roberts is Professor of Art History and Nineteenth-Century Studies at the University of Sydney. Working at the intersection of modernism and orientalism, she traces the global networks that inform European and Islamic art. Her next book, Four Thresholds: Modernity, Islamic Art, and the Orientalist Interior, is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press in April 2027.
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