1985: Affirmative Action for Women in the Visual Arts Committee of the Artworkers Union (NSW) insists that women be offered 50 percent of employment, exhibition and funding opportunities in the visual arts. Booklet design and cover by Ruth Waller.

The whole project of archiving,
of documenting that ‘we have a past’ is,
in actuality, a desire for a future

Future Feminist Archive

FFA is an ongoing archive, addressing strategies of recovering lost information, promoting the legacies of local feminist art activists and building a solid platform for the future.

Convened by Contemporary Art and Feminism Project Archive, Future Feminist Archive (FFA) posed a series of hypothetical questions. These range from the grand do we need a specialist feminist art archive and what forms could it take, to practical considerations of recovering lost archives, stock-taking existing records, and generating new ideas for curating and archiving.

To introduce these questions Future Feminist Archive (FFA) opened with a symposium at Art Gallery of NSW on 7 March 2015 and an accompanying set of exhibitions across Sydney and in Adelaide, Brisbane, Hobart and Melbourne.

Symposia in Wollongong, Dubbo, Bathurst, Lismore and in Sydney at AGNSW National Art Archive and Trades Hall, engaged with the art and design histories of regional New South Wales with in order to (re)value cultural work by women in the past, and to investigate their legacy for present and future feminist cultural politics.

With support from Arts NSW, nine female artists and collectives worked alongside with diverse arts entities and experts to create a variety of engagements with the archive. Their reports were presented at the exhibition Future Feminist Archive Report at The Cross Art Projects.