Women artists have always been creating. Recognition of women’s place in the history of art

Saturday, 22 November 2025, 11 am
The event will last around 75 min. It will be held in French.

A discussion with Sarah Burkhalter, Head of the “Antenne romande” of the Swiss Institute of Art Research (SIK-ISEA), and Camille Morineau, Executive Director of AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, moderated by Florence Grivel, art historian and journalist

In partnership with the Festival

In the 1970s critical thinking began to grapple with the realization that women artists were underrepresented in the history of art. Over the past fifteen years, echoing those earlier critiques and queries, initiatives working to win women artists greater recognition have increased and grown more intense. Symposiums, exhibitions, publications, and research projects have been examining the role women have played in artmaking, rehabilitating those who were well known in their day but are now absent from the history of art being transmitted to new generations, and bringing to light those who are marginalized and cut off from financial and support networks. These initiatives are also ways of thinking about how art history gets written and by whom, reflecting too on the mechanisms that render women artists invisible. They also help to draw media attention to the names of these artists and their works. To become aware that women artists have always been making art must lead to rewriting whole chapters of art history and taking a fresh look at aesthetic canons in order to offer new narratives and support creative women in the development of their work and its diffusion. The same errors should not be committed once again by dismissing them and overlooking their work. These perspectives, which include all minority artists, too, fuse redress, commitment, and the joy of (re)discovery. The discussion will go over these different questions while laying out the forms they take today.

Sarah Burkhalter

Sarah Burkhalter directs the “Antenne romande” of the Swiss Institute of Art Research (SIK-ISEA: www.sik-isea.ch). She holds a PhD in art history and codirected with Katia Poletti the catalogue raisonné of Félix Vallotton’s work in illustration, a research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Félix Vallotton illustrateur. Catalogue raisonné, 2025). Since 2023 she has also co-edited with Julie Enckell and Federica Martini an interview collection called “On Words.” Along with her work at SIK-ISEA, she has co-published with Laurence Schmidlin two books, Spacescapes. Dance and drawing since 1962 (2017) and The Postcard Dialogues. Mélanges à Dario Gamboni (2020).

Camille Morineau

A heritage curator and art specialist who has focused on women artists, Camille Morineau is a cofounder of AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions (awarewomenartists.com), where she has served as the Executive Director since 2014. A graduate of the École normale supérieure and the French National Institute of Cultural Heritage, she has worked for twenty years in public cultural institutions in France, including ten years as a curator of the contemporary collection at the Musée national d’art moderne – Centre Georges-Pompidou. She has curated numerous exhibitions, including the show elles@centrepompidou (2009-2011), which featured works by women artists that are part of the MNAM collection. From 2016 to 2019, she was the director of exhibitions and collections of the Monnaie de Paris.
Florence Grivel

An art historian by training, Florence Grivel has been a contributor since 2001 to various cultural programs at Switzerland’s national radio and television service, RTS, and has coproduced the broadcast “La vie à peu près” for RTS Espace 2. She is also a published author of both fiction and autobiographical texts (BSN Press and art&fiction), and a painter, who has brought out two collections of watercolors in dialogue with poems by Julien Burri (BSN Press and art&fiction). She has written on and edited interviews with artists and designed exhibitions and augmented touring lectures, podcasts and audio guides for a number of cultural institutions.

Back to news