AMA Artists & Archives

All five projects of Artist Meets Archive #2 will ask questions about displaying or NOT displaying images.

The artists' questions relate both to the totality of the image material stored in the archives and to the motifs depicted in each case. These investigations take place within an ethnological, entrepreneurial, but also an entirely poetic background: What remains of a photographically documented dance performance without the body of the dancer in the picture? What longings do images of the planet Mars create in us?

What is the archive made of, what is its outer shell? How do we preserve image information over a period of hundreds of years and what responsibility goes with its preservation? What do the blanks of conventional historiography tell us and what alternative strands have not (yet) been told? What is deliberately shown / deliberately omitted?

The finite nature of storage media, including analogue carriers or digital data formats and programs, lead to a constant migration process of data. In this process, we usually see the archive only as a hermetically sealed corpus, without access to the image material that is hidden inside and preserved there. In the exhibitions, institutional decisions and conservation processes will be examined as much as the archive material and the individual artefacts. Often, the archive itself will become the object of artistic reflection.

A special responsibility comes with images that were taken under unequal power relations without the consent of the persons recorded. This brings up the question how and whether these images should be shown at all.

That is why a lot of artists decide against showing that kind of images in favour of investigating the processes and institutions that preserve them. The projects of second issue of Artist Meets Archive can therefore be seen as an important contribution to the current discourse on dealing with photographic archives.

The "Artist Meets Archive" program will be accompanied by a symposium planned as a hybrid event for 21 and 22 May in cooperation with the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie (DGPh) and the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum. More information will follow soon!

German Dance Archive

Anna Orlowska

German Aerospace Center

Joan Fontcuberta

Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum

Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh

Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln

Philipp Goldbach

Rheinisch-Westf. Wirtschaftsarchiv

Rosângela Rennó