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FOCUS: ART & ARCHIVES
Archival Art: Memory Practices, Interventions, and Productions
KATHY CARBONE
Abstract The widespread preoccupation with memory continues to endure in contemporary art,
academic discourses, and social practices such as commemorations, observances, and memorials across
the globe. Archives, as spaces of and catalysts for memory, play a central role in society’s modes of
remembering, and over the past several decades, artists’engagements with archives –whether as source,
concept, or subject –has turned a spotlight on the workings and transmissions of archival memory. This
essay examines some of the critical activators of contemporary art practice with archives to contemplate
the mnemonic possibilities of archives and artworks made with them.
INTRODUCTION
In 2004, art historian and critic Hal Foster
identified an ‘archival impulse’ at work interna-
tionally since the mid-1990s in the contempo-
rary visual art world (Foster, 2004). Likewise,
dance theorist Andre Lepecki in 2010 noted a
concerted interest in and drive to re-enact
dances sweeping the contemporary dance world
for two decades, which he called a “will to
archive” (Lepecki, 2010, 29). Additionally, in
2013, performance studies scholar Heike Roms
observed an ‘archive fever’ currently “gripping
performance scholarship, curatorship and prac-
tice” (Roms, 2013, 35). Indeed, over the past
several decades, many artists and art curators,
critics, and theorists have critically explored and
continue to reflect upon the forms and functions
of institutional, mass-culture, notional, or per-
sonal archives and the subjectivities and identi-
ties, positionalities and knowledge, agencies
and imaginaries they evoke and construct. In
the opposite direction, the archival world’s
interest in how artists approach, use, and trans-
form archives has led to a burgeoning
movement within archival practice and scholar-
ship over the past decade: the hosting of artist-
in-residence projects in archives and a growing
body of research about such residencies and the
archival turn in the arts.
1
What has provoked, and continues to pro-
voke, the nexus between contemporary art prac-
tice and the archive? The question of the archive
in contemporary art goes hand in hand with the
question of memory in the archive. How does
memory articulate (or not) in the archive? How
does archival memory (or lack thereof) influence
contemporary art-making? What kinds of
memory work do artists do with archives, and
what does this reveal about contemporary art
practice and the archive?
This article explores these questions by first
looking at two sociocultural trends foundational
to archival art-making: the archival turn across
the academy and the memory boom in both aca-
demia and the public sphere. Then, following a
brief review of the nature of memory from an
archival studies perspective, this essay considers
the critical art practices (creative processes,
artistic actions, and works of art) of several
Kathy Carbone (kcarbone@ucla.edu) is a Postdoctoral Scholar and Lecturer in the Department of Information
Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
©2020 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 257
Volume 63 Number 2April 2020
prime instigators and movers of the archival art
genre over the past twenty years.
2
Rather than
creating an encyclopedic account of these art
practices, I have chosen instead to develop my
arguments through a close analysis of practices
that I understand to be exemplary of conversa-
tions tied to memory within the archival field.
Finally, this essay argues that besides being
compelling mnemonic assemblages and tools
for engaging and reflecting on the past, archival
artworks can also push the boundaries of the
imagination to address present circumstances
and focus visions of the future.
THE ARCHIVAL TURN IN THE ARTS:
INFLUENCES
The Greater Archival Turn
Since the 1990s, the ‘archival turn’ in the
humanities and social sciences –a preoccupa-
tion with the archive as a symbol for expressions
of power, what is remembered or forgotten in
society, and what is knowable and who has the
power to make knowledge –has brought the
archive into wider views and discussions. There
are a variety of vantage points about what com-
prises or motivates this turn. For instance,
anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler writes that the
archival turn “registers a rethinking of the mate-
riality and imaginary of collections and of what
kind of truth claims lie in documentation” (Sto-
ler, 2002, 94). Feminist scholar Kate Eichhorn,
on the other hand, understands the turn as a
response to the political and economic impacts
of the turn to neoliberalism, arguing that:
a turn toward the archive is not a turn
toward the past but rather an essential way of
understanding and imagining other ways to live
in the present...an attempt to regain agency in
an era when the ability to collectively imagine
and enact other ways of being in the world has
become deeply eroded (Eichhorn, 2013, 9).
Stoler’s and Eichhorn’s ideas highlight
some of the shifts in thinking about the nat-
ure and role of the archive through the
archival turn. In their conceptualizations the
archive, although historically embedded, is
not about the past but about the future of
the past and is a vital source for inquiry as
well as a subject of inquiry that can inspire
new ways of envisioning and living in the
world.
The Memory Explosion
The archival impulse in the arts also
aligns with the thriving interdisciplinary and
international preoccupation with memory
since the 1990s. Memory is a significant con-
cept of discourse across academic fields,
including history, archival and recordkeeping
studies, media studies, religious studies, soci-
ology, psychology, and literary studies. Mem-
ory also plays a vital role in social practices,
such as commemorations and observances
(anniversaries, centennials, memorials) across
the globe. According to memory scholar
Astrid Erll, the global fascination with mem-
ory and flourishing of memory practices can
be mainly attributable to three things (Erll,
2011). First are the numerous historical
transformations, including the loss of the
generation that had first-hand experience of
the Holocaust and World War II, the disso-
lution of the Soviet Union which engendered
a plethora of ethnic and national memories,
and truth and reconciliation processes (in
South Africa, for example), to name a just a
few. Secondly, Erll argues that changes in
media technology such as the increase in pos-
sibilities for data (memory) storage and
258 Focus: Art & Archives: Archival Art: Memory Practices, Interventions, and Productions
CURATOR: THE MUSEUM JOURNAL
sharing and the role of popular media,
including the proliferation of period pictures
and documentaries, are fueling interests in
and practices of memory. Lastly, Erll con-
tends that developments within academia,
particularly post-structuralism and postmod-
ernism –the end of grand narratives and the
embrace of the idea of the constructed nature
of the past –have influenced memory dis-
courses.
Memory in the Archive
Archives have long been associated with
memory. Within the archival field, there are
diverse conceptualizations about the working
and nature of memory in the archive –ideas that
deny the pastness and center the dynamism of
both memory and the archive. Laura Millar, for
instance, imagines archives as “triggers, as
touchstones” that rouse memory (Millar, 2006,
125), whereas Terry Cook considers archives to
be “constructed memories about the past, about
history, heritage, and culture, about personal
roots and familial connections, and about who
we are as human beings” (Cook, 2013, 101).
Brien Brothman, on the other hand, under-
stands archives to have a social memory function,
whose role is not so much “to construct the
remoteness and preserve the difference of the
past” but instead to “articulate cycles of continu-
ity, recurrence, and repetition” (Brothman,
2001, 65). Furthermore, he continues, “the
record content of memory forms part of a corpo-
rate continuum...it forms part of the system in
place, the ‘living, momentary setting’”. Lastly,
Terry Cook and Joan M. Schwartz write that
archives:
are not passive storehouses of old stuff, but
active sites where social power is negotiated,
contested, confirmed. By extension, memory is
not something found or collected in archives,
but something that is made, and continually re-
made (Cook & Schwartz, 2002, 172).
ARCHIVAL ART-MAKING
Prime Movers
One of the first art exhibitions (and its
eponymous catalog) focused on archives was
Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing, and Archiving
in Art (1997). Curator Ingrid Schaffner initi-
ated, curated, and co-produced Deep Storage at
the Haus der Kunst in Munich, which featured
over 100 works including paintings, ready-
mades, books, and photographs by more than
40 European and American artists who engaged
archiving and storage as symbol, imagery, or
practice (Schaffner, 1998, 10). The exhibition
traveled to venues in Berlin (1997), Dusseldorf
(1998), New York City (1998), and Seattle
(1998–1999). There was also the Interarchive
project and exhibition at the University of
Luneberg (1997–1999), led by Dusseldorf artist
Hans Peter Feldmann and curator Hans Ulrich
Obrist. Interarchive centered on an archive of
over 1,000 boxes of material –books, catalogues,
invitation cards, correspondence –Obrist
amassed in the course of his work as a curator in
the 1990s. The book, Interarchive: Archival
Practices and Sites in the Contemporary Art Field,
documents the exhibition and some of the
inventive procedures the curators employed
with the objects, such as ordering objects by
their material aspects such as smell, weight,
physical state, and surface properties instead of
by provenance, subject, or year (von Bismarck,
Feldmann, Ulrich, Stoller, & Wuggenig, 2002).
The book also presents over 60 different views
of archiving practice and the potentials of mem-
ory in contemporary art.
Kathy Carbone 259
Volume 63 Number 2April 2020
Perhaps the most influential and well-
known instigator of the archival turn in the arts
is art critic and curator Okwui Enwezor’s 2008
exhibition at the International Center of Pho-
tography in New York City entitled, Archive
Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art.
Enwezor also authored a book with the same
title, with both the exhibition and the book tak-
ing their inspiration from Jacques Derrida’s
Archive Fever (Derrida & Prenowitz, 1996).
According to Enwezor, the exhibition aimed to
highlight how “archival documents, informa-
tion gathering, data-driven visual analysis, the
contradictions of master narratives, the inven-
tion of counter-narratives...the projection of
the social imagination into sites of testimony
and witnessing” inspire and animate contempo-
rary artistic practices (Enwezor, 2008, 22). The
exhibition featured video and photographic
works of over 20 visual artists who contemplated
memory, time, history, and identity through
investigations of the structural and functional
foundations of the archive and the appropria-
tion of archival materials. Finally, in 2013, the
New Museum in New York City held Perfor-
mance Archiving Performance, a series of perfor-
mance art and dance projects that engaged the
archive as medium and body as archive.
Tactics and Works
Artists apply a variety of critical and aes-
thetic approaches to the archive, and their archi-
val interventions are often concerned with
constructions of meaning, challenging or pro-
voking change in a situation or condition, open-
ing out possibilities for new meaning-making
processes, and providing alternative and more
socially situated meanings that diverge from an
‘official’ interpretation. Archival artworks fore-
ground several phenomena: the multiple ways
in which the archive is always subject to
negotiation and interpretation; the material,
relational, affective, and performative aspects of
the archive; and the many ways in which the
archive is built on return, repetition, recogni-
tion, and association.
One popular tactic that artists employ with
archives is to invent or fabricate archival materi-
als or an archive itself to question absences,
expose missing or silenced voices, or address
gaps in institutional archives and collective his-
tory –bringing attention to the fragmentary and
incomplete nature of archives. One well-known
work that tackles a missing history from the
archives is a collaboration between filmmaker
and photographer Cheryl Dunye and photogra-
pher, installation artist, and filmmaker Zoe
Leonard entitled, The Fae Richards Photo
Archive (1996). This fabricated and imaginary
photographic archive depicts the life of Fae
Richards, an African-American lesbian actress
and blues singer who is a fictional character in
Dunye’s film, The Watermelon Woman (1996).
Dunye, unsuccessful in finding archival records
about African American lesbians in Hollywood,
created with Leonard the imaginary archive for
the film, which comprises seventy-eight gelatin
silver prints, four chromogenic prints, and a
notebook of typed text (Bryan-Wilson &
Dunye, 2013). Dunye and Leonard staged and
designed each candid shot, still picture, family
photograph, and publicity photograph with
period-specific make-up, clothing, and accou-
trement. Although Dunye and Leonard created
a story and an archive that are fictional, they
both none-the-less ring true (and could easily
have been actual) because the real-life women
and their stories that indeed existed went
undocumented. Dunye and Leonard’s work
calls to mind the power of what archival scholars
Anne Gilliland and Michelle Caswell term
“imagined-but-unavailable records”, which can
serve as “fertile sources of personal and public
260 Focus: Art & Archives: Archival Art: Memory Practices, Interventions, and Productions
CURATOR: THE MUSEUM JOURNAL
affect that is not only a significant human and
ethical consideration in itself but also can be
activated and manipulated for a variety of politi-
cal and social ends” (Gilliland & Caswell, 2015,
55). The Fae Richards Photo Archive was on exhi-
bition at the Whitney Museum of American
Art in New York City in its 1997 Biennial, and
the Whitney subsequently acquired the work.
Artists also model artworks on archival
practices such as collecting, arrangement,
description, classification, and preservation or
adopt archival forms such as inventories, boxes,
storage systems, or labels in their work. Addi-
tionally, artists often foreground or interrogate
a particular aspect of the archive –such as how
knowledge is organized or the archive’s claim to
authenticity or authority. Contemporary media
artist Walid Raad mobilized almost all of the
above methods in his Atlas Group Archive
(1989–2004), and similar to Dunye and Leo-
nard, fabricated an archive (including fictitious
archival creators and donors) that considers
relations between memory, history, fact, and fic-
tion –evoking Jacques Ranciere’s notion that
the “real must be fictionalized in order to be
thought” (Ranciere, 2004, 38). From 1989
through 2004, Raad and his fictional group of
collaborators, “The Atlas Group,” donated
items to and produced the Atlas Group Archive, a
virtual archive authored by imaginary individu-
als or organizations and comprising manipu-
lated films, photographs, lectures, notebooks,
and essays about real events in contemporary
Lebanese history, with a particular focus on the
Lebanese wars (1975–1991).
3
For example, Dr.
Fadl Fakhouri, a ‘well-known’ but fictional
Lebanese historian, deposited a notebook in the
archive containing images of cars of the same
make, model, and color as those used in car
bomb attacks during the Lebanese wars. Here,
the documentary information is factual, but
notes and annotations made by Fakhouri
attached to the images are fictional. Further,
Raad mimicked the organizational logic of
archives by arranging his archive’s materials into
three fonds or groups, each with accompanying
text establishing their provenance. Raad dis-
seminated the archive online, in a series of pub-
lications, and through lecture-performances in
museums such as the 2002 Whitney Biennial.
Artists also juxtapose or blend the ‘unofficial’
with the ‘official’ by incorporating collected objects
or personal items into archives. Installation artists
Susan Hiller and Sophie Calle both used this
approach in two separate art installations at the
Freud Museum in London (Sigmund Freud’s last
home that contains his library and art collection,
artifacts, souvenirs, andfamilyfurniture).For
example, in From the Freud Museum (1994), Hiller
put materials from Freud’s collections together
with items she had collected, “rubbish, discards,
fragments, trivia and reproductions –which
seemed to carry an aura of memory” (Hiller,
2000, Afterward). One such piece from this
installation is Journey, which contains a photocopy
of an image from Freud’s art collection in combi-
nation with fossils Hiller found in the desert near
Mt. Sinai. Calle, on the other hand, in her instal-
lation entitled, Appointment With Sigmund Freud
(1998), placed among Freud’s artifacts a wig, let-
ters from a lover, and a wedding photograph, and
laid her wedding dress across Freud’s couch. By
bringing their own stories into Freud’s archives
and placing different memory regimes together,
both Hiller’s and Calle’s installations disrupt the
ordering and authenticity of the archive, articulate
relations between official and personal memory,
and make new linkages between people, events,
temporalities, and objects.
Finally, artists often transform records from
institutional archives into performances that
interrogate dominant power structures, chal-
lenge or reframe history, or bear witness to those
silenced, oppressed, or marginalized. An
Kathy Carbone 261
Volume 63 Number 2April 2020
example of this archival performance method is
theater group Rimini Protokoll’s ambulatory
audio-installation entitled, 50 Kilometres of Files
(2011). For this piece, participants were
equipped with headphones, a smartphone, and
a map, and while walking the streets of Berlin,
heard in specific locations narrations from the
Stasi files –recordings of telephone conversa-
tions of and interviews with Stasi victims –
transporting participants back to the atmo-
sphere of the Cold War and the political and
military tensions between the Western and the
Eastern bloc after World War II. 50 Kilometres
of Files’ activation and reanimation of Cold War
records not only blurs relations and creates a
dialogue between past and present but demon-
strates how archival artworks can (re)present
and transmit past human experience and socio-
political worlds.
CONCLUSION
Artistic practices are “‘ways of doing and
making’ that intervene in the general distribu-
tion of ways of doing and making as well as the
relationships they maintain to modes of being
and forms of visibility” (Ranciere, 2004, 13).
Archival art-making intervenes in and grows
the ways that we do, make, and experience
memory –as well as counter-memory –and
makes visible the different ways in which mem-
ory is both mediated and constructed and medi-
ates and constructs the past, the present, and
future action. Archival art-making extracts
latent, un-actualized energies from the archive,
creating forms of expression and sensation that
reveal the archive’s endless compositional and
re-creational drive and significant aesthetic,
relational, social, and political potencies. Lastly,
archival art not only shows how archives and
artworks are both social and cultural practices
and forms of memory that shape identities and
our understandings of the past and present, but
are also ever-evolving commentaries and living
debates, systems of possibilities, and processes
of connectivity given for future encounter and
meaning-making to come. END
NOTES
1. See Bibliography for recommended further read-
ings.
2. As the international archival art genre is broad
(and this essay short), my choices and discussions
of who and what are the prime movers of this art
form are by necessity selective and non-exhaustive
and focus on archival art practice in the US, UK,
and Europe.
3. See: http://www.theatlasgroup.org/
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