Archives on Show brings the potential of reformulating the social and political relevance of archives by curatorial means into focus. Based on the specific properties, faculties and methods of curation, the volume highlights those techniques and strategies that deal with archives not only to make their genesis and history apparent but also to open them up for the future. The 22 different ways of dealing with archives testify to the curatorial participation in (re)shaping the archival logic, structures and conditions. As process-oriented, collective and relational modes of producing meaning, these curatorial practices allow for the alteration, reconfiguration and mobilization of the laws, norms and narratives that the archive preserves as preconditions of its power.
The contributions to this volume by artists, curators and theorists demonstrate approaches that curatorially insist on building other relations between human and non-human archival participants. Each is using the book to create a curatorial constellation that generates and forms new connections between different times and spaces, narratives, disciplines and discourses. Configured as a glossary, the positions assembled in this volume exemplify curatorial methods with which to treat the archive as site and tool of collective, ongoing negotiations over its potential societal role and function.
Archives on Show
Revoicing, Shapeshifting, Displacing – A Curatorial Glossary
Copy-Editors
Corinne Butta, Aby Gaye, Mia Jaccarini
Design
Sophie Keij for Atelier Brenda
Design Assistance
Lore Janssens & Astrid Etienne
The Nomadic Curriculum — A Manual Series
The Nomadic Curriculum — A Manual Series are publications by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW). The series is part of The Whole Life. An Archive Project, a collaboration between Arsenal — Institute for Film and Video Art / Archive außer sich, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Pina Bausch Foundation, and Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD). It is part of HKW’s project The New Alphabet, supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media due to a ruling of the German Bundestag.