Locating Subjectivities and Finding Intimacies in Archive Sources

Abstract

Artists Michelle Williams Gamaker and Nina Mangalanayagam discuss their archival source material and research methods in relation to their artistic projects, Strange Evidence at Matt’s Gallery, London (2025), and Blank Pages at Bildmuseet, Umeå (2026), respectively. Both artists engage rigorously with scholarly archival research as the bedrock of their creative practice, seeking to unearth the multiple lines of narrative possibility that archives elicit, and to expose how subjectivities are embedded within the structures of power that produce them.  In distinct ways, each artist draws connections between the political and their personal lineages, addressing how history shapes subjectivity and how that subjectivity is perpetually renegotiated—not only in its original historical moment but in every subsequent re-reading and re-positioning of the source material. This conversation, facilitated by Jyoti Mistry, foregrounds the artists’ research processes within the archive, and considers how their encounters with its contents and materialities shape their creative decisions.