Report on the 2025 Womanifesto Workshop

Katrina Grant, Lachlan Thompson and Marni Williams from the Power Institute, and Yvonne Low from Art History recently joined members of the Womanifesto artists collective in Bangkok for a week-long workshop to finalise the digital publication 'Womanifesto Way'. This digital edition will present an Anthology of newly commissioned texts, conversations and creative responses from artists and researchers, alongside a newly developed interface for exploring the archives and histories of Womanifesto. This project was supported by the multi-year program at Power, the Visual Understanding Initiative. As part of this program, we are investigating new ways of publishing art histories, including innovative digital editions.

The workshop participants were hosted by the three leads of the collective Varsha Nair, Nitaya Ueareeworakul and Jamilah Preenun Nana in Bangkok. A permanent home for the Womanifesto archive is being created in Bangkok and this workshop gave the team an opportunity to view the original materials and work collaboratively on adding these to the final digital edition. Once complete the network graph interface page will allow readers to see the connections between people, projects and texts. Over the last three decades Womanifesto has brought together dozens of artists and collaborators to work on a range of workshops, art projects, exhibitions and more.

The workshop was a lively and busy five days where we all wrote new content, checked and corrected entries, uploaded new content and tested the functionality and usability of the website. On the final day we held a soft launch of the project and invited people who have been part of the Womanifesto projects over the years, and many who are contributing new work to the Anthology, to view the site, offer feedback and celebrate this milestone.

We were fortunate to be in Bangkok at the same time as an event held by AWARE Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions and delegates from this event attended our launch and offered valuable feedback. The Asia Art ARchive (AAA) has supported this project offering access to the digitised Womanifesto archive, so it was great to include current Executive Director Özge Ersoy and show her the way the AAA materials are now art of the digital edition and Anthology.  Following the launch Power Publishing lead Marni Williams and Varsha Nair from Womanifesto were both invited to speak about the project at the AWARE symposium 'The Flow Of History: Southeast Asian Women Artists' on Sunday 23rd November held at the Jim Thompson House in Bangkok.

The final digital edition will be launched early next year, so look out for a public event to join us to celebrate the conclusion of this significant project.

--Katrina Grant, Power Institute Research Fellow