The Archive to Come: Short Time-Based Works by more than 50 International Artists
Curated by Carla Gannis & Clark Buckner
The Archive to Come is a collection of short time-based works by more than fifty international artists, curated by new media artist Carla Gannis and gallerist Clark Buckner in the winter of 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the persistent systemic racism brought to light by Black Lives Matter protests. What did we value and want to preserve as we worked to recover from these crises? How would we memorialize those whose lives had been lost? What could do justice to the fact that so many had died needlessly, or worse, as victims of racist violence? What histories demanded to be foregrounded and what legacies needed to be left behind? What were the sources of precariousness and resilience in our personal and collective constitutions? What did we hope for the future? Oriented by the concerns in Carla’s wwwunderkammer project, these questions were taken up as questions of the archive, which both founds and sustains the authority of discourses, institutions, and practices in the modern world, questions concerning the construction of memory, knowledge, power, and authority, which presented themselves amidst these crises, as both problems and possibilities: revelations of the previously unconscious contradictions in our way of doing things, as well as opportunities to re-orient our attunement to the world. Artists were invited to construct and share archives of their own, to reflect upon historical trauma and displacement, and to consider how the digitalization of memory has changed the experience of what we remember – indeed, memory and experience themselves. The result, documented in this book, is a collection of works addressing loss, memorialization, crisis, and re-invention, at a singular moment in history, through the lens of contemporary networked culture and digital media.
