Artist Meets Archive #2 was characterized by a common question. All five projects posed questions about the showing or non-showing of images.
The artists' questions related both to the entirety of the image material stored in the archives and to the motifs depicted in each case. These investigations took place against an ethnological, entrepreneurial, but also poetic background: What remained of a photographically documented dance performance without the dancer's body in the picture? What longings did images of Mars awaken in us?
What was the archive made of, what was its outer shell? How did we preserve pictorial information over a period of hundreds of years, and what responsibility went hand in hand with its preservation? What did the gaps in conventional historiography tell us, and what alternative strands were not (yet) told? What was deliberately shown or deliberately omitted?
The finite nature of storage media, be it analog carriers or digital data formats and program versions, led to a constant migration process of data. We usually saw 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 were examined just as much as the archive material and the individual artifacts. The archive itself often became the subject of artistic reflection. A particular responsibility emanated from the images that were taken under unequal power relations without the consent of the people photographed. How and whether were these images allowed to be shown at all? It was not uncommon for artists to decide against showing them and in favor of examining the processes and institutions that preserved this visual material. The contributions to the second edition of Artist Meets Archive can therefore be seen as an important contribution to the discourse on dealing with photographic archives at the time.
The participating artists were:
Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh // Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum
Joan Fontcuberta // Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt
Philipp Goldbach // Rheinisches Bildarchiv
Anna Orłowska // Deutsches Tanzarchiv
Rosângela Rennó // Rheinisch-Westfälisches-Wirtschaftsarchiv
Exhibitions
21st – 30th May 2021
Joan Fontcuberta / The German Aerospace Center
Gossan: Mars Mission
25hours Hotel
and from the 3th of May till the end of summer in public space
21st May – 04th June 2021
Philipp Goldbach / Rheinisches Bildarchiv
Image Cycle
Kapelle am Gereonskloster
21st May – 4th July 2021
Rosângela Rennó / Rheinisch-Westfälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv
Eaux des Colonies
Museum für Angewandt Kunst Köln (MAKK)
21st May – 07th November 2021
Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh / Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum
Rautenstrauch-Joest’s Cat, scratching on the Black Box of Colonial Photographs
Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum
21st May 2021 – 20th February 2022*
Anna Orłowska / Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln
Ein Teil des Teils
(Part of the part)
German Dance Archive
*within the exhibition „INSZENIERUNG | INSPIRATION. Tanz und Fotografie“
(Staging | Inspiration. Dance and Photography)
