Vanessa Gravenor

The artistic employment of archives has reached a nexus in the last decade with the explosion of digital technologies, citizen journalism, and the utilization of the “internet of things.” These tools have given rise to unofficial and decentralized archiving practices, reframing archives as metadata, indexes, taxonomies, and digitized matter. Yet amongst the ubiquity of images and information, the gaps, silences, and crises within the archive itself remain. How, then, do artists and theoreticians read the archive critically and account for its new character?
This seminar will track the shifting nature of the archive. We will consider its future orientation to storage, to image, to data, and knowledge. The seminar’s focus is on recent artistic research with a focus on media art and film coming out of this field including the formation of counter-archives. Central to our discussion will be questions surrounding imaging violence, (counter)forensis, image capturing techniques, and a discussion of archives in relation to state silence and repression. As such, we will examine various ways to work with this archival matter through materials that incorporate found footage and images, while problematizing these technologies of control and the harmful gazes embedded within their visual regimes. We will open up questions on how to foster care when working with the archive through specific case studies such as pad.ma, the Afghan Film archive in Mariam Ghani’s What We Left Unfinished, Karol Radziszweski’s queer archives institute and film Kisieland, forensic architecture’s counter archive/counter forensis. We will also discuss Susan Schuppli’s notion of the “material witness” and matter as witness, and how this emerges from the use of the archive and forms of analogue image capture used in human rights tribunals. The aim of this seminar is to form a broad overview of working with the archive and discuss how active, critical practices of artistic research emerge.
Students are encouraged to present their own issues with archival work, and we will discuss them in a round table discussion/crit/conversation. Credit is based on attendance, participation in discussions, and a group presentation which can be creative or academic.

With Achille Mbembe, Okwui Enwezor, Anri Sala, Svetlana Boym, Susan Schuppli, Forensic Architecture, Harun Farocki, Trevor Peglan, Hito Steyerl, Mariam Ghani, Karol Radziszweski, and more