Conference: February 20–21, 2020
The international conference celebrates the 40th anniversary of the foundation of Artpool and its concurrent relocation to KEMKI, the Central European Research Institute of Art History of the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. It aims to map the cultural-political-historical contexts of Artpool’s activity by bringing together scholars and practitioners interested in transnational research on artist archives, progressive curatorial and museological practices, and the historiography of Cold War art scenes and networks.
The conference takes Artpool’s 1979 concept of an “Active Archive“ as a starting point to explore its contemporary interpretations and applications, its similarities with and differences from other artist archives. As Artpool’s founder György Galántai puts it, an active archive “generates the very material to be archived” through calls for participation, co-operation, exchange, and building of non-hierarchical networks, as well as through combining art historical and artistic methodologies of research. An active archive is future-oriented and employs a dynamic approach to history “as an open artwork and as an activist artistic practice.” The main activity of Artpool to this day is to conduct non-medium specific research into the role of art in ever-changing social and political contexts.
In this spirit, we invited scholars and practitioners to propose new museological, curatorial, academic, or artistic perspectives and methodologies that allow the consideration of archival practice as a creative and active form of researching art and artistic visions of the future.
Registration
If you would like to attend the conference, please send an email to artpool40.conference [at] gmail.com before February 17.
Thursday, February 20
Archive as Institution—Questions of Methodology and Institutionalization
–Emese Kürti: Artpool in Motion: The Archive’s Path from the Underground to the Museum
–Zdenka Badovinac: Self-Historicization Artists’ Archives in Eastern Europe
–Jasna Jakšić—Tihana Puc: Artists’ Networks in the Context of Institutional and Personal Archives—Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb
–Sarah Haylett: Beyond an Archival Impulse: Re-Examining the Artist Archive at Tate
–Lina Džuverović: Historicizing and Archiving Collectivity: Collaborative Actions, Continued Omissions—a Feminist Revisiting of Yugoslav Collectives in the 1970s
–Lívia Páldi: Active Archive—Slow Institution (2017–2020)
Artistic Strategies of (Self-)Documentation and Archiving
–Sven Spieker: Self-Documentation as Artistic Practice in Eastern Europe
–Tomasz Załuski: The Alternative Official? KwieKulik’s Studio of Activities, Documentation and Propagation as a State Financed Performative Archive under Real Socialism
–Kaja Kraner: Anti-Archive and Memory Politics in the Work of Walid Raad
–Daniel Grúň: Discrepancy between History and Self-Historicization: Stano Filko in the 1970s
–Katalin Cseh-Varga: The Art of (Self-)Reflection: An Intellectual Journey across György Galántai’s Mind
–Karolina Majewska-Güde: Life and After-Life of the Archives: Ewa Partum’s and Valie Exports’s Archives
Friday, February 21
“Collecting the Future”—Strategies of Self-Historicization
–Kristine Stiles: Collecting the Future: Methods, Theories, Self-and-Other Historicization, and a Special Focus on East-European Artists
–Péter György: Pre-Avant-Garde: In the Shadow of Time
–Henar Rivière: Fluxus and the Archive as Agent Provocateur
–David Crowley: Archiving the Infra-Ordinary in Late Socialism
Archive as an Artistic Medium / Media of Archiving
–Meghan Forbes: The Art Magazine as Archive: Underground Print Culture in 1980s East Germany
–Elisabeth Zimmermann: Ö1 Kunstradio and Its Never Finished Online Archive
–Roddy Hunter—Judit Bodor: artpool.hu: a user’s guide
–Agustina Andreoletti: Shadow Libraries: Distributed Models for the Creation and Circulation of Digital Archives
Network Theories
–John Held: Harboring Hidden Histories: Mail Art’s Reception in United States Institutional Archives
–Katalin Timár: Theorizing Mail Art: Frameworks and Approaches
–Mela Dávila-Freire: “Constructive Contact between Us”: Other Books and So by Ulises Carrión
–Klara Kemp-Welch: Networking the Bloc: Critical Reflections on Art Historical Method
The conference is organized by Júlia Klaniczay, Dr. Emese Kürti, and Zsuzsa László from Artpool Art Research Center—Museum of Fine Arts in collaboration with Dr. Judit Bodor (Glasgow School of Art) and Dr. Beáta Hock (Universität Leipzig), and is realized in the framework of the COST Action New Exploratory Phase in Research on East European Cultures of Dissent (NEP4DISSENT) generously supported by the Horizon 2020 Framework Program of the European Union.
*Image above: One of the first Artpool cards. Design: György Galántai, 1979. On the back: “ARTPOOL is the newest archive / ARTPOOL collects: documentations, photos, prints, slides, texts, magazines, books, catalogs, postcards, stamps, T-shirts, ideas, projects, utopias, tapes, and diverse new media / ARTPOOL is an information base / Document your activity in ARTPOOL.”
