An Unhomely Feeling

Abstract

The idea, or timing, for this issue had something to do with the National Gallery of Australia’s (NGA) Know My Name initiative (KMN). For the uninitiated, KMN seeks to redress the NGA’s decades long gender inequity across the museum’s operations and structures, including staffing, exhibitions and collecting practices and policies. As part of KMN, the NGA organised a conference towards the end of 2020 which some of the contributors and editors of this issue — Diana Baker Smith, Paola Balla, Janine Burke, Alex Martinis Roe, Vikki McInnes, Bhenji Ra, and I participated. Following the conference, McInnes, Baker Smith and I, alongside Fiona Foley and Ngarino Ellis, began conversations around continuing the work of critiquing the gendered discrimination at the centre of art institutions in Australia and New Zealand/Aotearoa. Beyond those aforementioned, we invited Helen Hughes, Soo-Min Shim, June Miskell and Cameron Hurst to contribute to this issue. Since so many of us are based in universities, and we all contribute to the writing of art history in one way or another, we wanted to analyse and dismantle at least some of the biases, vocabularies and structures that perpetuate gender inequity in the discipline that underpins this journal. Whatever the limits of KMN may be (in part registered in Soo-Min Shim’s extended review of KMN in this issue) the NGA’s project has been a catalysed for discussions on ways in which Australian art institutions require a profound restructure to undo who feels at home in such spaces. In a way, the idea for this issue is simple: it adopts methods of institutional critique to unsettle the discipline of art history—that is, to not “make a home” therein given the relation between this act and dispossession—but rather to expose how and why many of us find ourselves on the margins of art history. The issue adopts methods of institutional critique to assess the limits and possibilities of the