14 Phaptawan Suwannakudt’s Akojorn (1995) Connecting Women Yvonne Low TAKING its cue from Cornelia Butler’s ground-breaking exhibition Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007), this essay is a conscious attempt to invoke feminism’s “legacy of inclusivity” to consider other narratives of feminisms beyond the received canon of feminist art (Butler 2007, 15). While an exhibition such as Wack! might seem like a timely self-refexive exercise to rethink feminism’s impact in the visual arts and art historical discourses of Europe and America, “feminist art” as a category of visual practice is still treated with much ambivalence in Southeast Asia and has yet to garner the same degree of theorisation and recognition. Postcolonial studies have criticised the term “feminism” for speaking from the perspective of a middle-class, educated, white woman. Despite later assertions of alternative viewpoints that more accurately express a collective notion of solidarity with one’s culture and race as well as one’s gender within the discourse of Western feminism, non-Western women have continued to re-assert their positions which they felt were marginalised by Western feminism. Within Asia, the recent increase in women artist collectives as designated con- temporary art spaces exclusive to women which had grown in tandem with women associations that were not necessarily related to art, revealed signifcant changes in the social positions of women from urban spaces (Low 2015a, 4–6). In Bangkok, Thailand, the exhibition Tradisexion that took place in 1995 marked the frst event in which women artists worked together on women’s issues, sparking the development of a transnational women’s artistic network, Womanifesto. Such collectives which may be inspired by feminist thinking were established not to promote feminist art per se but to provide women artists, whose participation in academies and artists’ societies appeared limited, with support and encouragement. These sex-segregated collectives grew out from a fundamental desire to address issues of inequality. In 2007, the same year that Butler sought to revise canonical narratives of femi- nist art, Indonesia saw the staging of another ground-breaking exhibition entitled Intimate distance: Exploring traces of feminism in Indonesian Contemporary Art. This was ground-breaking for a much different reason. Held at the National Gallery of Jakarta, the exhibition examined traces of feminism in women’s art, marking what might well be the frst attempt to discuss feminist strategies in Indonesian art. The three curators further used the occasion to launch their jointly authored book, Indonesian Women Artists: The Curtains Open, which was very much in line with other established “recovery” efforts (Bianpoen et al. 2007). 1 As the frst major sur- vey on the lives and works of purportedly Indonesia’s “most prominent women art- ists from the early twentieth century to the present”, Indonesian Women Artists was an unapologetic celebration of women’s art (Goeltom 2007, 6). It marked the BK-TandF-SCHMAHMANN_9780367707446-210131-Chp14.indd 223 15/04/21 10:24 AM