SECONDARY ARCHIVE – the newest history of art written by women.

The Secondary Archive: secondaryarchive.org is an on-line research and database platform that presents the history of non-Western, European art from a female perspective. The archive, an international project focusing on Central and Eastern Europe, is realised by the Katarzyna Kozyra Foundation, together with its partners Easttopics (Hungary) Björnsonova (Slovakia) and MeetFactory (Czech Republic). The project is co-financed through Visegrad Grants from International Visegrad Fund

The platform secondaryarchive.org will give free access to more than 250 female artists’ profiles, containing newly published artist and curatorial texts developed especially for the purpose of the archive. Representing three generations of artists from Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, the platform aims to help promote, discover, and rediscover women artists and the most valuable phenomena of contemporary art of our region from the female perspective. The project which has been in preparation since early 2020, will launch this spring.

The website and the database – unique on a European scale will serve to disseminate the common heritage in the field of contemporary art created by women artists in Visegrad countries, after the year 1989. The project aims to address the problem of a “white spot” and invisibility of women artists from the region of Central and Eastern Europe in the global art world in terms of the presence and the institutional representation of women artists from V4. To eliminate this geographical exclusion we need cooperate between V4 to organize more significant art presentations for the international audience and art professionals and build reliable resources of information and its distribution. Multilevel cooperation between V4 art institutions will enable us not only to preserve our women artists heritage, but also to promote it, both within V4 and on the global scale, and set new horizons for emerging artists and a better start for their careers.

In its first stage, the Secondary Archive will be composed of more than 600 pages of bespoke artists’ statements of female artists, with original pages from their biographies and descriptions of their artistic practices. Developed thanks to the efforts of a curatorial team of 30 curators form all countries, the archive gathers the names of the key female figures of Central and Eastern European art, as well as those who have been wrongfully marginalized, forgotten, or remain little known to the general public. The name Secondary Archive, being a slight provocation and play on words refers to the fact that these countries have  historically been considered “secondary” in relation to the First World , as well as that that women have always been the “second sex” to justify men’s dominance. At the same time secondaryarchive.org is a platform that aims to challenge the given qualities of an archive and is conceived as a subversive space for discussion, where artists themselves are invited to reflect on their own practices. Created in close cooperation with the featured artists and local art professionals from their respective countries – curators, theorists and writers – it will remain an open form, assuming the possibility of expanding it with new entries of artists, but also polemics, articles, analytical essays and other texts written in the context of non-Western, European female art and feminism.

The period covered by the archive embraces the artistic endeavors of three generations of women artists spanning from the 1960s onwards: from the first so-called neo-avant-garde generation that operated within the toughest period of communistic regimes, with a mediatic  turn through a conceptual approach; to the second generation, which emerged in the eighties and nineties, having witnessed the opening effects of the Fall of Soviet Union in their early careers; and the third generation which, having come of age at the time of political changes that have reshaped the face of present-day Europe. In the future, we plan to expand the scope of the archive by extending it to include artists from Eastern Europe and the Balkans

Follow hashtag #SecondaryArchive for upcoming news!

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Secondary Archive
• Project initiator: Katarzyna Kozyra Foundation
• Partners: Björnsonova, Easttopics, MeetFactory
• Project curator: Agata Cieślak
• Project coordinator: Magdalena Majewska
• Project design and identification: Marcel Kaczmarek
• Website developers: Aleksandra Gajda, Franciszek Dąbrowski
• Website edition: Zosiia Floeth, Iwona Łabuz, Justyna Michalska
• Media strategy: Business and Culture

Czech Republic

• Partner: MeetFactory
• Project coordinator: Piotr Sikora
• Support: Zuzana Belasová, Daniela Šiandorová
• Curatorial Team: Katarína Klusová, Jolanta Nowaczyk,
Kristýna Péčová, Marianna Placáková, Eva Skopalová
• Translation: Stan Barański, Lamija Čehajić, Alena Kottová, Glynis Hull-Rochelle
• Proofreading (Czech): Zuzana Kolouchová
• Special thanks: Flash Art Czech & Slovak Edition

Poland
• Partner: Katarzyna Kozyra Foundation
• Cooperation: Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw
• Project coordinator: Agata Cieślak
• Support: Paulina Bijoch, Magdalena Majewska, Gabriela Porada, Asia Tsisar,
Justyna Załęska
• Curatorial team: Magdalena Adameczek, Anna Ciabach,
Maja Demska, Anna Kowalska, Ewa Mielczarek, Karolina Rojek, Joanna Ruszczyk,
Agnieszka Sosnowska, Bogna Stefańska
• Translation: Ewa Kanigowska-Gedroyc (English), Iwona Łabuz (Polish)
• Proofreading (Polish): Agata Cieślak, Iwona Łabuz

Hungary

• Partner: Easttopics
• Project coordinator: Róna Kopeczky
• Support: Fruzsina Kigyós, Alexandra Nagy
• Curatorial team: Kata Balázs, Fruzsina Kigyós, Róna Kopeczky, Fanni Magyar,
Viktória Popovics, Andrea Soós, Mónika Zsikla
• Translation: Róna Kopeczky, Andrea Soós, Alexandra Nagy,
Gerda Szabó
• Proofreading (Hungarian): Andrea Soós, Fanni Magyar, Kata Balázs

Slovakia

• Partner: Björnsonova
• Project coordinator: Lucia Kvočáková
• Curatorial team: Viktória Beličáková, Zuzana Kotíková, Lujza Kotočová, Michaela
Kučová, Miroslava Urbanová, Denisa Tomková
• Translation: Lucie Kolouchová
• Proofreading (Slovakian): Lucia Kvočáková
• Special thanks: Flash Art Czech & Slovak Edition, Kapitál, Gallery of Nitra,
Slovak National Gallery, SODA Gallery, tranzit.sk

The project is co-financed by the Governments of Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia through Visegrad Grants from International Visegrad Fund: