The writing of histories is about storytelling, which is by its very nature subjective, yet histories are usually taught and presented as inviolable truths. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak writes, “History is, after all, a storying. The French language has it very conveniently in the word histoire which means both history and story.”

In this Feb 28 presentation (via Zoom), Alpesh Kantilal Patel and Yasmeen Siddiqui reflected on the question: What might it mean to shift the discourse around art history to one of storytellers?

A follow-up storytelling workshop organized by Patel and Siddiqui took place in person at Asia Art Archive in America on March 18.

Alpesh Kantilal Patel is associate professor of contemporary art and visual culture at Temple University and curator-at-large at UrbanGlass. He is the author of Productive failure: Writing Queer Transnational South Asian Art Histories (Manchester University Press, 2017).

Yasmeen Siddiqui is the founding director of Minerva Projects, an independent art press. Her work has been published in catalogues, as well as in ART PAPERS, the Cairo Times, Medina Magazine, Flash Art, Modern Painters, and NKA. She is a visiting assistant professor at Pratt Institute.

Alpesh Kantilal Patel and Yasmeen Siddiqui are co-editors of the anthology Storytellers of Art Histories (2022).