Strategies of critique in contemporary artistic archival practice

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12543957

Keywords:

Archive art, Katarina Pirak Sikku, Kader Attia, Michael Rakowitz, Kajsa Dahlberg

Abstract

This essay proposes that selected artworks by Katarina Pirak Sikku, Kader Attia, Michael Rakowitz, and Kajsa Dahlberg exemplify a set of approaches within contemporary artistic practices that operate in ways that simultaneously align with and deviate from the main tenets of the “archival turn” in contemporary art. The author suggests that these artworks involve indirect reconsideration of what critical archival practice can involve. All four artists deal with specific instances of conflict, marginalization, and forms of oppression by actively reframing the confrontational, suspicious and undermining strategies that has characterized some archival discourse. The essay shows how these artistic practices stress notions of care, repair, empathy and permeability in ways that have specific methodological and conceptual consequences. By doing so they invite a rethinking of critical archive theory in the face of specific question and concerns of the current moment such as how to handle remnants of racist histories in present-day archives; the need for recycling and repair in the face of the environmental effects of rampant consumption; how to address those who hold diametrically opposed political position from oneself; and how to take serious people whose bodies operate in ways that tend to marginalize them as non-productive  in the face of neo-liberal values like professional success and self-sufficiency.  

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Sara Callahan, Malmö University, Sweden

Sara Callahan is an art historian specializing in modern and Contemporary art and visual culture. Her book Art + Archive: Understanding the Archival Turn in Contemporary Art was published in January 2022 by Manchester University Press. She is currently working on a project, financed by the Swedish Research Council, that investigates how photographic motion studies from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century have been used in different contexts over time, and to what effect.

References

AHMED, Sara. “Happy Objects.” In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 29–51. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.

ATTIA, Kader. “Kader Attia Talks about ‘Repair. In Five Acts.’” Artforum, August 23, 2013. https://www.artforum.com/interviews/kader-attia-talks-about-repair-in-five-acts-42670.

———. “Open Your Eyes: ‘La Péparation’ in Africa and in the Occident.” Third Text 31, no. 1 (2018): 16–31.

AZOULAY, Ariella. The Civil Contract of Photography. 1st pbk. ed. New York : Cambridge, Mass: Zone Books ; Distributed by The MIT Press, 2008.

Barbara Wien Gallery. “Press Release Michael Rakowitz. I’m Good at Love, I’m Good at Hate, It’s in between I Freeze,” 2023. https://www.barbarawien.de/dl/mr_pressrelease_eng.pdf.

BENNETT, Tony, and Patrick Joyce, eds. Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn. Culture, Economy and the Social. London: Routledge, 2010.

Blumenstein, Ellen. “Randonnée: Objects and Quasi-Objects.” In Kader Attia: Transformations, by Kader Attia, 27–35. edited by Ellen Blumenstein. Leipzig: Spector Books, 2014.

CALLAHAN, Sara. Art + Archive: Understanding the Archival Turn in Contemporary Art. Rethinking Art’s Histories. Manchester (UK): Manchester University Press, 2022.

———. “Critique and Post-Critique in Contemporary Art History: Excessive Attachment to Suspicion in Academia and Beyond.” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 20, no. 1 (2019 2021): 42–65.

CLOUGH, Patricia T. “The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia, and Bodies.” In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 206–25. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.

CONNOLLY, William E. “The ‘New Materialism’ and the Fragility of Things.” Millennium - Journal of International Studies 41, no. 3 (2013): 399–412.

COOLE, Diana, and Samantha Frost, eds. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

DERRIDA, Jacques. “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.” Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Diacritics 25, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 9–63.

FELSKI, Rita. Hooked: Art and Attachment. Chicago ; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2020.

———. The Limits of Critique. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015.

FOUCAULT, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge: And the Discourse on Language. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books, 2010.

GAMBLE, Christopher N., Joshua S. Hanan, and Thomas Nail. “What Is New Materialism?” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 24, no. 6 (2019): 111–34.

GRIFFIN, Gabriele, and Katarina Pirak Sikku. “My Body, My Self: Indigeneity, Bioprecarity and the Construction of the Embodied Self - an Artist’s View.” In Bodily Interventions and Intimate Labour: Understanding Bioprecarity, edited by Gabriele Griffin and Doris Leibetseder, 209–31. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020.

HAMILTON, Carolyn, ed. “Archive Fever (A Seminar by Jacques Derrida, University of the Witwatersrand, August 1998, Transcribed by Verne Harris).” In Refiguring the Archive, 38–80. Dordrecht ; Boston: Kluwer Academic, 2002.

HARAWAY, Donna. “Gene: Maps and Portraits of Life Itself.” In Modest_Witness@Second Millennium. FemaleMan®_Meets_OncoMouseTM. Feminism and Technoscience, Second edition., 131–72. New York London: Routledge, 2018.

———. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Priviledge of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (Autumn 1988): 575–99.

———. When Species Meet. Posthumanities 3. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

JONSSON, Stefan. “Where Humanism Finds Its Ends: Lessons from Pia Arke and Katarina Pirak Sikku on the Difficulty of Narrating the Arctic.” Studies in Travel Writing 20, no. 3 (2016): 1–11.

JOYCE, Patrick, and Tony Bennett. “Material Powers: Introduction.” In Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn, edited by Tony Bennett and Patrick Joyce, 1–21. Culture, Economy and the Social. London: Routledge, 2010.

“Kader Attia - ICI Berlin.” Accessed September 14, 2023. https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/kader-attia/.

LARSSON, Erika. “Feeling the Past: An Emotional Reflection on an Archive.” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 12, no. 1 (2020): 1–10.

LATOUR, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Critique.” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 225–48.

LEVI, Bryant R. The Democracy of Objects. First edition. New Metaphysics. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2011.

“New Materialism.” Accessed September 5, 2023. https://newmaterialism.eu/.

PIRAK SIKKU, Katarina. “Katarina Pirak Sikku.” Accessed August 14, 2023. https://www.katarinapiraksikku.com.

PUIG DE LA BELLACASA, María. “‘Nothing Comes Without Its World’: Thinking with Care.” The Sociological Review 60 (May 2012): 197–216.

RAKOWITZ, Michael. “Letter to Leonard Cohen.” Accessed October 17, 2023. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5379b2d2e4b04b1ccbd96e13/t/5f383fd7dc500a47eb0d7933/1597521879850/Letter_to_LC%281%29.pdf.

REINHARDT, Thomas. “The Cannibalization of the Other: Mirror, Art, and Postcolonialism in Kader Attia’s Repair. 5 Acts.” In Kader Attia: Transformations, by Kader Attia, 55–62. edited by Ellen Blumenstein. Leipzig: Spector Books, 2014.

RONY, Fatimah Tobing. The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.

SCOTT-BAUMANN, Alison. “Chapter 4: On the Use and Abuse of the Term ‘Hermenutics of Suspicion.’” In Ricœur and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion, 59–77. London ; New York: Continuum, 2009.

SEDGWICK, Eve Kosofsky. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading or, You’re so Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You.” In Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, 123–51, 2003.

SEKULA, Allan. “The Body and the Archive.” October 39 (Winter 1986): 3–64.

Smith, Shawn Michelle. Photography on the Color Line: W.E.B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2004.

SPIVAK, Gayatri Chakravorty. “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives.” History and Theory 24, no. 3 (1985): 247–72.

Additional Files

Published

27.06.2024

How to Cite

Callahan, S. . (2024). Strategies of critique in contemporary artistic archival practice. Archivo Papers, 4, 29–50. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12543957