Innovative Forms of Archives, Part One: Exhibitions, Events, Books, Museums, and Lia Perjovschi’s Contemporary Art Archive

Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 63.

Sue Breakell, “Perspectives: Negotiating the Archive,” Tate Papers 9 (Spring 2008), →.

The many archival approaches coming from South America will be the object of future research but cannot be specifically discussed here. For more about archive as form in contemporary art, see Okwui Enwezor, “Archive Fever: Photography Between History and Monument,” in Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, ed. Okwui Enwezor (New York: International Center of Photography; Göttingen: Steidl, 2008), 14–18.

The term “authorless projects” for this very specific assembly of projects and exhibitions is used by Inke Arns, who curated the exhibition “What is Modern Art? (A Group Show)” at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in 2006 and edited together with Walter Benjamin the catalogue What is Modern Art? Introductory Series to the Modern Art 2, (Frankfurt am Main: Revolver, 2006).

Another important example, which is however omitted from this essay, is Polish conceptual artist Zofia Kulik, who has in several recent projects been arranging and exhibiting the archive of the Laboratory of Action, Documentation, and Promotion—PDDiU. This was an archive managed by the artistic tandem KwieKulik (Zofia Kulik and her then partner in life and art, Przemysław Kwiek) and maintained in their houses. For more on archiving strategies in Zofia Kulik’s body of work, see Luiza Nader, “What Do Archives Forget? Memory and Histories, ‘From the Archive of Kwiekulik,’” in Opowiedziane inaczej. A story Differently Told: Tomasz Cieciersk / Jarosaw Kozłowski / Zofia Kulik / Zbigniew Libera i Darek Foks / Aleksandra Polisewicz (Gdańsk: Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej Łaźnia, 2008), 84–122, available at →.

See Dieter Roelstraete, “The Way of the Shovel: On the Archeological Imaginary in Art,” e-flux journal, no. 4 (March 2009), →.

Hal Foster: “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (Fall 2004), p.4.

Ibid, 5.

See for example Boris Groys, Logik der Sammlung. Das Ende des musealen Zeitalters (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1997).

Zdenka Badovinac, “Interrupted Histories,” in Prekinjene zgodovine / Interrupted Histories, ed. Zdenka Badovinac et al. (Ljubljana: Museum of Modern Art, 2006), unpaginated.

Private interview with Miran Mohar, 2006.

See Nataša Petrešin, “Self-historicisation and self-institutionalisation as strategies of the institutional critique in the Eastern Europe,” in Conceptual Artists and the Power of their Art Works for the Present, ed. Marina Gržinić and Alenka Domjan (Celje: Center for Contemporary Arts, 2007).

Ilya Kabakov, “Foreword,” in Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s, ed. Laura J. Hoptman and Tomáš Pospiszyl (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 7–8.

Victor Tupitsyn, The Museological Unconscious: Communal (Post)Modernism in Russia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 230.

Ibid, 230.

In an e-mail conversation, Sven Spieker, author of an influential book examining the archive as a crucible of twentieth-century art—The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008)—suggested an umbrella-term, “self-archive,” for the cases discussed in this very article.

Claudia Fontes, “London Calling,” in Again for Tomorrow (London: Royal College of Art, 2006), 129.