ONLINE WORKSHOP

FROM SUBJECTIVE TO SPECULATIVE ARCHIVES

STRATEGIES FOR ARTISTIC RESEARCH

AIKATERINI GEGISIAN

VISUAL ARTIST / RESEARCHER

Photography has long been described as an archival medium, precisely because it is understood as a mnemonic device, determined by the operation of the shutter, which controlled by a patriarchal singular gaze captures a "decisive moment" in time. Through this archival logic, photography has been implicated in the structuring of time and systems of classification, shaping ways of organising knowledge as well as how archives are legitimised. Yet archives are never neutral: they are shaped through systems of power that determine what is remembered, what is excluded, and whose histories become visible. 

In response, artists have been challenging the authority and logic of the archive through critical, experimental, and speculative practices. Thinkers such as Okwui Enwezor, Hal Foster, Allan Sekula, Benjamin Buchloh and Ariella Azoulay describe artistic archival practices that disrupt classification through fragmentation, montage, subjective interpretation, and unexpected connections or by ‘unlearning’ the imperial knowledge structures altogether. These approaches resist the authority of institutional archives and open space for alternative narratives and suppressed histories.

Rather than focusing only on specific strategies for disrupting the archive or producing alternative archival structures, this workshop focuses on how archives can become terrains for subjective and speculative readings. While acknowledging the legacy of artistic practices that question the archive’s form, structure, and systems of classification, it is particularly interested in how artists re-read and enter existing (or newly formed) collections of images. The workshop approaches the archive not as a stable territory of organised knowledge, but as a fragmented and unstable space shaped by gaps, erasures, and multitudes. Through subjective readings, participants will explore how photographic archives can open toward new speculative imaginaries and alternative relations to memory. 

COURSE SCHEDULE  (UK timezone)

Fri, 9 Oct 2026 — 5-8 pm

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 — 10 am - 1 pm & 3 pm - 6 pm

Born in Thessaloniki, Greece, and of Armenian descent, Aikaterini Gegisian is a visual artist, filmmaker, educator, and researcher whose practice is rooted in image-making. Working across collage, film, photography, installation, and textile design, her work engages a feminist re-reading of optic technologies. She has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Venice Biennale (Golden Lion-winning Armenian Pavilion, 2015), Mathaf (Doha), ICP (New York), the National Arts Museum of China (Beijing), MOMus (Thessaloniki), BALTIC (Newcastle), Spike Island (Bristol), IVAM (Valencia) and Kunsthalle Osnabrück. Her films have screened at festivals such as Oberhausen and Videoformes, and her work is held in collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum and Frac des Pays de la Loire. She works extensively with the photobook as an expanded cinematic and photographic form. She has published A Small Guide to the Invisible Seas (Venice Biennale, 2015), Handbook of the Spontaneous Other (MACK, 2020), and most recently Third Person Plural (BÜCHS’N’BOOKS, 2025), which draws on postwar U.S. archival film material to examine the formation of gendered political imaginaries. She regularly leads workshops and lectures internationally, while currently teaching at London Metropolitan University and Arts University Bournemouth (online).