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Today, after Post-Communism has ended in chaos and confusion, we are entitled to ask: was it a condition, or a transition; a rise or a decline; progression, regression or simply a time-lag? Has it ever shaped its own form of social being, a unique mode of economic production, a politics of its own, a culture? Or was it just another interregnum of history, full of morbid symptoms we cannot get rid of?
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Eine Ansammlung von Echos, Erinnerungen und Erkenntnissen aus drei Jahren Forschung, Performances, Ausstellungen und Gespräch im Rahmen von That, Around Which The Universe Revolves. On Rhythmanalysis of Memory, Times, Bodies in Space. Henri Lefebvres Konzept der Ryhthmusanalyse durch- und weiterdenkend, bringt diese Publikation Künstler*innen, Stadtplaner*innen, Schriftsteller*innen, Photograph*innen, Performer*innen, Dichter*innen und Theoretiker*innen zusammen, um die Beziehungen zwischen Raum und Zeit, Erinnerung, Architektur und Städteplanung zu untersuchen.
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Community of Parting is an extension and continuation of Jane Jin Kaisen’s artistic practice. Kaisen brings past and present, the eternal and the temporal into play through layered, performative and multi-voiced, feminist works that explore topics such as memory, war, migration, and borders in a field where individual experiences and collective stories intersect. Her works negotiate and mediate the means of representation, resistance and reconciliation, thus forming alternative genealogies and sites of collective emergence.
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Intermedia and Expanded Cinema, both as critical approach and artistic practice, left an indelible mark in a period of Japanese art history that is broadly considered to be one of its most dynamic moments in the wake of its postwar reemergence. Rather than assuming the interpretations of the terms were the same as their counterparts abroad, we decided to commission translations of a selection of key texts that we felt were instrumental in shaping the specific discourse around these terms.
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Filmmaterial 7 / In Zusammenarbeit mit Till Gathmann. Mit den Filmen Transformation Scenario, 70.001 und Faux Terrain sowie einem Bildessay, Glossar und Textbeiträgen von Heike Geißler, Fanni Fetzer und Franciska Zólyom.
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《普遍与特殊：何为亚洲性？》这本小书的出版并非一桩小事。一方面，这本出版物包含了酒井直树教授与孙歌教授近期思想实践的一个小切片。他们共同阐述了亚洲的概念在研究我们的区域历史时可以提供的先验性视角，以及重新审视被广泛接受的普遍性与特殊性的关系中遗漏的一些问题。
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Notes on Archives is a series of publications by artist Ines Schaber about archives and the practices we conduct in relation to them. Produced over the course of more than ten years, the publications feature a series of case studies, research, concrete projects, and reflections on the questions and problems that image archives pose today. The aim of the work is not to find or create another institutional archive per se, but to develop a practice in which the set of problems that archives produce is in fact part of the process one engages in.
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In 2008, an exhibition opened at the Umm el-Fahem Art Gallery, Israel, that focused on the launching of a new on photographic archive: “Memories of a Place: The Photo-Archives graphic History of Wadi ‘Ara, 1903–2008.” Notably, the archive used a series of historical images from existing archives, often giving them different captions that retrieve lost histories in the area. This archive exemplifies the possibilities that can result from the critique of institutional image archives: that rethinking archival arrangements can bring to light legible traces of suppressed histories.
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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. Among them were the commercial stock-image agency Corbis, founded by Bill Gates, and the Agentur für Bilder zur Zeitgeschichte (Agency for images on contemporary history), an independent organization established by photo historian Diethart Kerbs.
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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 digital data banks, images travel more frequently from one archive to another than they did in analog archives. Sometimes images that are in the public domain are taken by commercial stock-image agencies and offered for sale. This is the case for a series of images of breaker boys in Pennsylvania that Lewis Hine made in the 1910s as part of his series on child labor. The images are both digitally available for free from the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and for a fee from Corbis, Bill Gates’s stock-image company, which offered them for sale until it ceased operations in 2016.
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The anthology Politics of Memory aims to investigate the document as such, as an objective trace left by events, as material proof or the creation of reality – the strategies with which they transform a state of memory into State memory, those by means of which a historical removal is enacted, those, ultimately, in which there is an attempt to challenge permanent or temporary amnesia, opening up to the future. The artists and filmmakers contributing to this publication represent the most advanced area on an international scale of a research that inaugurates a new relationship between artistic practices and the documentary.