Birkbeck, University of London International Symposium « André Malraux: Art, Death, Metamorphosis » 19 June 2026, London, UK

GHWA will be presented to the public for the first time at Birkbeck’s international symposium marking the 50th anniversary of Malraux’s death. The paper, « Spectral Curation: Malraux’s Imaginary Museum and the Feminist Reconstitution of Archival Survival », reads the Musée Imaginaire as an involuntary archive and asks what a feminist methodology can recover from what it left out.

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Abstract: This paper examines André Malraux’s musée imaginaire as a theory of artistic survival, one in which works persist not through material permanence but through mediation, reproduction and reactivation. While acknowledging the philosophical force of this intuition, the paper argues that Malraux’s model presents its universalism as given rather than constructed, and therefore fails to account for the selective mechanisms that determine which artistic presences enter the archive at all. Drawing on the notion of structural non-transmission, the paper distinguishes between absence as historical contingency and absence as the product of epistemic exclusion, a distinction with significant methodological and ethical consequences. It then develops the concept of curation as posthumous agency, proposing that curatorial practice, at its most politically and epistemologically engaged, operates as an apparatus that distributes and reactivates presences rendered absent by the archive rather than by time. This framework is grounded in A Global History of Women in Art (GHWA), a transnational research project organised around three principles: archival death as a non-natural condition, reconstitution as distinct from recovery, and the imaginary museum as a permanently unfinished structure requiring continuous critical reopening. The paper concludes that a feminist curatorial ecology does not seek to complete or replace Malraux’s museum without walls, but to reopen it toward the absences, silences and spectral presences it has not yet learned to transmit.