Archive Books

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This book brings together contributions from participants and guests of Film in the Present Tense – International Symposium on Current Developments in Analog Film Culture, held in Berlin. It reflects a contemporary discussion around the use, value and purpose of analogue film from a multiplicity of perspectives: artists, filmmakers, scholars, archivists, curators, technicians and manufacturers. Film in the Present Tense intends to provide a documentation of the collective momentum that characterized the symposium and it responds to the persistent desire to keep talking about analogue film.

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What is lost and what is found in the process of returning home? homecomings revisits, through varying means of translation, spatial and conceptual loci of homecoming within artistic practice. This publication draws its principle inspiration from the architectural and linguistic returns and repetitions punctuating artist Hreinn Friðfinnsson’s House Project and author Georges Perec’s Espèces d’espaces. Testing the concept of “homecomings” against a number of artistic practices, this volume grows out of an imperative to act according to the referentiality hallmarked in the conceptually rigorous works of Friðfinnsson and Perec. The collected contributions oscillate between self-referential modes—creating full-circle loops within singular practices—and far-reaching trajectories, gaining momentum and associations upon every rereading. Like Perec, many works call for an attuned presence, and in so doing, proffer a homecoming at the very site of reading.

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This is not an artist’s book about borders. Rather, it is an artist’s book about overcoming the influence of politics on the land within the borders of unrecognized or semi-recognized states. It is a document of the fragmented symptoms of the “Bosnian pot” character of governance, in which all components simultaneously complement and eliminate each other. This unsettling principle of governance, in which elements unable to withstand the pressure collapse, while those that are more powerful survive (and are subsequently absorbed within the system), has been known for many centuries. By not taking sides, what this book highlights, from a bird’s-eye view, are the contrasts and conflicts provoked by contemporary attempts at preserving a semblance of safety within those borders. Unfortunately, many of these attempts did, and continue to, constitute crimes.

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In recent decades, artists, photographers, curators, and critics have caught archive fever. Archives and their processes have dominated the discussions in and around photography, with particular consequences for documentary and artistic practices.
Following these debates, Notes on Archives 1: Obtuse, flitting by, and in spite of all—image archives in practice starts with the assumption that an archive today is not only a place of storage but also a place of production, where our relation to the past is materialized and where our present writes itself into the future.
This book explores the difficulties for documentary and artistic practice in and with the archive, and revolves around four key questions: What is the relation between an image and language? What is an author or an owner of an image? What is missing in the archive? And what is an active archive?

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In the process of transferring analog material to digital data banks, small independent archives are often not able to keep up with bigger, economically driven archives, such as stock-image companies.
Notes on Archives 2: Culture Is Our Business considers the case of Willy Römer, who in 1919 took a photograph of the street battles in the media district of Berlin during the German Revolution. Circulating widely throughout the twentieth century, Römer’s photograph in 2004 came to be owned simultaneously by a number of archives.

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The concept of the archive of the Umm el-Fahem Art Gallery concentrates on the notion of place rather than on the identity of a photographer or a person being shown. This became the point of departure for the artwork Dear Jadwa, by Ines Schaber. How could one write a history of a place through images? How could one deal with what might be excluded by it? What would happen if there was a need for images that would not fit into the concept of the newly established archive? 
The latter was the case with two photographs of the Arab Ladies’ Union meeting in Jerusalem in 1944, images found originally in the Matson Collection. In Dear Jadwa, both images are shown along with a letter addressed to a woman who is pictured in both. The photographs are accompanied by an interview with Dr. Mustafa Kabha, cocurator of the exhibition and archive “Memories of a Place,” and a text by Schaber reflecting on the making of the archive. 

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The institution of the ethnological museum or world museum seems to be in the midst of a serious crisis of choking. The delicacies that most of these museums have acquired, which is to say co-opted, which is to say ingested, seem to have collectively missed the track to the oesophagus and got stuck in the respiratory tract. They have been stuck there for as long as the history of mass collections, acquisitions and looting, for as long as the ruthless and ongoing extraction of cultural property has occurred in the former colonies outside of Europe. A twelve-act essay on the maintenance of supremacy, the ethnological Museum and the intricacies of the Humboldt Forum. 
First published in the tenth issue of South as a State of Mind.

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L’institution du musée ethnologique/musée du monde semble traverser une véritable crise d’étouffement. Les mets délicats acquis, ou plutôt cooptées, pour ainsi dire ingérées par la majorité de ces musées, semblent avoir été dépistés de la route vers l’œsophage et s’être coincés dans les voies respiratoires. Toutes ces choses y sont coincées depuis l’acquisition – le pillage – de ces objets. En somme, depuis l’impitoyable déracinement des biens culturels qui perdure jusqu’à nos jours dans les anciennes colonies hors d’Europe. Un essai en 12 actes sur sur la préservation de la suprématie, le Musée Ethnologiques et les complexités du Forum Humboldt. Publié pour la première fois en Anglais dans le dixième numéro de South as a State of Mind.

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Die Institution des Ethnologischen Museums scheint sich in einer ernsten Krise des Erstickens zu befinden. Die Delikatessen, welche die meisten solcher Museen meist unter zweifelhaften Bedingungen erwarben, mit anderen Worten genossen und verschluckt haben, scheinen kollektiv den Weg in den Oseophagus verpasst zu haben und blieben stattdessen im Atmungsapparat stecken. Sie hängen dort schon so lange fest, wie die Geschichte von Massensammlungen, Erwerbungen, Plünderungen; so lange wie der rücksichtslose und fortwährende Abbau von Kulturgut in den ehemaligen Kolonien außerhalb Europas bereits andauert. Ein zwölfaktiges Essay über die Aufrechterhaltung der Vormachtstellung, das Ethnologische Museum und die Verwicklungen des Humboldt Forums. 
Erstveröffentlichung in Englisch in South as a State of Mind, zehnte Ausgabe.

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Coming from dance, music, film, performance, visual art, and critical theory, nine artists from the UdK Graduate School in Berlin get together to talk concepts and share work. They respond to the sense of despair spreading in times of political backlash: What if it won’t stop here?

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Gentrification is not a law of nature, it is a war against the poor. It is a carefully planned development in cities, where it is welcomed and supported by political actors who prefer wealthy citizens. From 2008 until 2018, Berlin artist Ina Wudtke’s works focused on the displacement of low income tenants from their apartments in the city center, through massive rent hikes and with the help of judicial instruments like the so-called “Modernisierungsklage”, a tool used by landlords to revamp apartments for future high income tenants, or the so-called “Eigenbedarfsklage”, whereby the new owners of former public housing claim occupancy against longterm tenants.

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Labor migration is worldwide creating new models of the transnational family, which despite geographical distances strives to maintain contact between the separated family members. But, how is the relationship between parents and children to be redefined whenever gifts and material support take the place of shared experience? When physical closeness has to take second place to communication programs like Skype and WhatsApp? How does this changing family landscape impact children and their parents? Bitter Things retraces positions on this topic from the 1960s right up to present day perspectives.

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Forty-eight entries are organized alphabetically as a lexicon, each written by various members of the aneducation team and documenta 14 Chorus, as well as curators, artists, and educators who contributed to the program. The publication’s many points of departure present just as many desires for other sites of learning. Cross references among the entries show the deep relationships that existed—and continue to deepen—between the methods, programs, and locations of aneducation.

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When Attitudes Become the Norm is a collection of essays and interviews by art historian and theorist Beti Žerovc on the topic of curatorship in contemporary art. Žerovc examines curatorship in its broader social, political and economic contexts, as well as in relation to the profound changes that have taken place in the art field over the last century. She analyses the curator as a figure who appears, evolves, and participates in the institutionalisation of contemporary art and argues that with the curator institutional art – art designed to fit the art institution’s space and needs – achieves its fullest expression.

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Towards (Im)Measurability of Art and Life gathers together various stories, practices, and essays about measurement that embrace paradox, contradiction, and humour. The book creates and introduces incidents of ideas, conceptual methods, acts, and processes of measurement that dwell in a conceptual transition between science (technology) and everyday life. When measurement is viewed as a practice, it is important to recall that data processing, especially visualisation, actually necessitates many aesthetic decisions.

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To Become Two: Propositions for Feminist Collective Practice offers a narrative of artist Alex Martinis Roe’s research into a genealogy of feminist political practices in Europe and Australia from the seventies until today. These practices include those of the Milan Women’s Bookstore co-operative; Psychanalyse et Politique, Paris; Gender Studies (formerly Women’s Studies) at Utrecht University; a network in Sydney including people involved in the Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative, Feminist Film Workers, Working Papers Collective, and the Department of General Philosophy at Sydney University; and Duoda – Women’s Research Centre and Ca la Dona, a women’s documentation centre and encounter space in Barcelona.

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Overlapping every day observations with archival material, confronting, jumping. Figures that intervene – interruptions into the reproduction and maintenance of colonial poison cabinets and patriarchal canons. Histories of involvement. The folding of histories. Entangling feminist fictions. Taking care of. Trouble, always trouble.

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A conference, hosted by the International Center for the Arts José de Guimarães, borrowed its title from an unfinished film stored in an archive in Bissau. ‘Luta ca caba inda’ (The struggle is not over yet) was conceived as a documentary film on post-independence Guinea-Bissau, but was abandoned in the editing process in 1980. The archive testifies to a decade of collective and internationally connected cinema praxis in the country, as part of the people’s struggle for independence from Portuguese colonialism.