ONLINE COURSE

THE ARCHIVE IS DEAD!

LONG LIVE THE ARCHIVE!

Archival Theory and Practice in the Artworld since 1990s

DR SARA CALLAHAN

Although it is difficult to assign a precise starting date to the so‑called archival turn, it has now been underway for several decades—remarkably long for the notoriously fickle art world. What were its historical and theoretical foundations? What distinguishes the archival turn within an art context from parallel developments in neighbouring disciplines such as literature, history, and cultural studies?

This course is largely based on my 2022 book Art + Archive: Understanding the Archival Turn in Contemporary Art, while also taking into account shifts in artistic practice and theory that have occurred since its publication. It provides participants with a foundation in the historical trajectories and theoretical frameworks underpinning the sustained interest in archives among artists, writers, critics, and curators and situates the emergence of the archive within social, technological, philosophical, and art-historical contexts.

Through close readings of key texts in archival theory, the course examines how these ideas entered the art world in the mid‑1990s and how they were transformed in the process. Drawing on a wide range of artworks, and broad phenomena in the artworld, it aims to deepen participants’ understanding of what is often left unformulated in writing about archives, thus developing analytical tools for examining important nuances and distinctions among different formats, stages, terminologies, and references within the so‑called archival turn.

COURSE STRUCTURE

The course takes place over one month and includes four in-depth sessions of three hours each, held weekly.

As part of the programme, participants will enjoy complimentary access to ARCHIVO’s public events throughout the course duration, including the Webinar Series and the Open Sessions, offering further opportunities for discussion, and exchange.

Sara Callahan is an art historian whose resarch focuses on art and visual culture from the twentieth and twenty-first century. Her various research projects converge around the question of how artistic and other visual practices relate to theories, attitudes, and phenomena from non-art contexts, and how the present interacts and interferes with history in different ways. Callahan is interested in the way artworks identify and process the most pressing issues of the day in ways that engage knowledge and ideas from scientific, philosophical and political contexts, and she believes that by studying and understanding phenomena in the artworld, we can better understand the multifaceted aspects of the world around us. Callahan’s book Art + Archive: Understanding the Archival Turn in Contemporary Art was published by Manchester University Press in their series Rethinking Art’s Histories in 2022. She is currently finishing a monographic study that investigates how photographic motion studies have been activated in different discourses and visual culture since the late-nineteenth century. In addition, she is currently developing a project about clouds as a visual and conceptual motif in contemporary art; a study that ties nineteenth century studies of clouds to present-day artworks that engage with the cloud as technological and environmental concern.

COVER PHOTO

Danh Võ, I M U U R 2, 2013, Installation consisting of objects from the Martin Wong Collection, dimensions variable.

Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. T.B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2014.