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.

For several decades now, audio-visual artworks have routinely been described as “research” or “research based”. However, the relationship between image, research and theory is often unclear, particularly when the artwork in question is produced outside formal academic frameworks like practice-based PhD or MFA programs. This essay asks how we can understand and interpret artworks that use materials and methods that approximate those used by academic researchers but do so through audio-visual means. Four artworks are discussed: Kajsa Dahlberg’s Reach, Grasp, Move, Position, Apply Force (2015); Kalle Brolin’s I am Scania (2016) and I am the Sun (2018); and Hanni Kamaly’s HeadHandEye (2017/2018). All four highlight how image practices establish, reinforce, and subvert specific attitudes, ideas, and practices relating to work or the human body. The author’s key argument is that the selected artworks can be understood as examples of the media-theoretical method of analysis known as cultural techniques. Cultural techniques have been defined within media theory as the chains of operations that link humans, things, and media. The scholar who uses this perspective searches for the rules, procedures, and documented practices that preceded and directed the development and formats of specific media technologies. This essay proposes that the four selected artworks show how fragmentation operates as cultural technique in different contexts. Fragmentation is shown to be at work beneath efficiency studies of industrial workers in the early twentieth century and the early twenty-first (Dahlberg); in the relationship between the sugar industry and coal mines in the south of Sweden in the early twentieth century (Brolin); and in the de-subjectification practices among colonial rulers in the nineteenth century (Kamaly).

The archive has been one of the most persistent buzz-words in the international artworld since the turn of the twenty-first century. While some claim that it has been used with such abandon that its usefulness is questionable at best, others view it as indicative of an important theoretical framework, necessary to make sense of some of the most important contemporary artworks and artistic practices. Several decades after the proposed “turn” to the archive, it is now possible to examine the phenomenon with the benefit of some historical distance, and ask: what was the archival turn, and is it still turning? The first part of this essay argues that an important explanation for the ubiquity of references to archives in the artworld was that elements of the notion theorized by philosophers, historians, and others lined up with a number of issues already of interest to artists and art writers. Two such intersecting interests are considered: first, the focus on institutional structures and a break with traditional forms of history, and second, a concern with critical research practices. In the essay’s second part, the author takes stock of how the archive has been rearticulated in artistic practices that deal with some of the most pressing concerns of the present moment such as the socio-political climate of post-truth; engagement with microhistories and local knowledges; looming environmental catastrophe; and current conditions of AI assisted online surveillance.

Art + Archive provides an in-depth analysis of the connection between art and the archive at the turn of the twenty-first century. The book examines how the archive emerged in art writing in the mid-1990s and how its subsequent ubiquity can be understood in light of wider social, technological, philosophical and art-historical conditions and concerns. Deftly combining writing on archives from different disciplines with artistic practices, the book clarifies the function and meaning of one of the most persistent artworld buzzwords of recent years, shedding light on the conceptual and historical implications of the so-called archival turn in contemporary art.

This essay examines three instances where Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies have been referenced and reused in present-day visual culture—a scientific experiment that encoded a GIF of a galloping horse into bacterial DNA (2017); a project where multiple frames from the horse-in-motion series were tattooed onto eleven different people (2014); and an activist video that used images of animals from the series to argue for the urgency of species extinction and environmental catastrophe (2019). The author’s central argument is that, in addition to the more or less clearly stated intentions of this image-use, these transmediations of Muybridge’s historical photographic images also activate and extend questions and concerns from recent media theory: contributing to notions such as image ecology and image liveness, and proposing challenges to established distinctions between new/old media, still/moving images, and material/immaterial media qualities. A further suggestion is that their ability to carry out complex theoretical work relating to present-day media practices can help explain why these images have come to have such staying power in visual culture a century and a half after they were first made.

This essay offers a broad look at the way critique as amode,method, and attitude in postwarart history research and teaching intersects with occurrences of critique in humanitiesscholarship and teaching generally, but also how distorted forms of critique occur incontexts outside the academic field. The essay outlines concerns raised by humanitiesscholars with what they consider to be an over-reliance on critique as a negative skill,resulting in scholarship that tears down without building up, and self-satisfied debunkingof anything that does not stand up to the current era’s identity politics. The essay arguesthat the question of critique is of particular urgency to the field of contemporary art.Here critique is embedded in the material studied—artworks, artistic practices, anddiscourses—and therefore in dire need of being understood, challenged, and decenteredas a method.

Kulturen formas av vår relation till naturens rytm och uppmärksamheten på det långsamma. Men naturen är också filtrerad genom kulturen. En ny utställning och SVT:s succé med älg-tv ställer frågor om vad som förtjänar vår uppmärksamhet – och vad som förtjänar vår distraktion.

I ”Referenshantering: Lager, ekon och reflektioner i Lina Selanders Model of Continuation” diskuterar Sara Callahan ett samtida konstverk utifrån tre olika kontext- och referenslager. Som titeln antyder ligger fokus på Lina Selanders videoverk Model of Continuation (2013) som i texten fungerar som ett typexempel på en samtida konstpraktik som bearbetar och re-kontextualiserar existerande bilder och filmfragment, i det här fallet varvat med konstnärens nyfilmade material. Denna praktik kan sägas bygga vidare på 1970- och 80-talets approprieringspraktiker, men med en tydligare fokus på bilders funktion i historieskrivning och en komplex själv-reflexivitet där bilden blir synlig som just konstruerad bild, alltid filtrerad genom visuella teknologier. Här innefattar och innefattas varje bild av olika ramar, temporaliteter och referenser, vilket innebär en rad specifika utmaningar för den konstvetenskapliga tolkaren. Kapitlet diskuterar hur ett verk blir betydelsebärande genom att kontextualiseras utifrån tre olika infallsvinklar. Den första delen diskuterar kontextualisering i relationen mellan text och bild i verket. Den andra delen använder begreppet montage för att dels diskutera sammansättningen av olika bilder och filmfragment, dels för att analysera det specifika verket i relation till konstnärens hela oeuvre. Kapitlets tredje del analyserar verket i relation till vidare konst- film- och fototeoretiska diskussioner. 

This essay considers how a number of artworks mobilize what is tentatively termed “the analogue.” “The analogue” highlights artistic practices that implicitly or explicitly evoke themes and concepts associated with analogue photography. The essay argues that the so-called digital turn opens the possibility of tapping into analogue photography as a conceptual and cultural sensitivity distinguishable from the technique. It is the discourse of analogue photography that is key, not the technological process itself—therefore “the analogue” can be evoked also in works that are produced digitally. The essay explores how “the analogue” can be a productive way of analyzing specific artworks by artists such as Lotta Antonsson, Brian Ganter, Joachim Koester, Zoe Leonard, Vera Lutter, Joel Sternfeld, and Akram Zaatari. Contemporary artworks located within a postconceptual tradition can be said to have a built-in self-reflexive relationship to medium whereby the method and technique of production are always intimately intertwined with the artwork’s content and meaning. With that in mind, this paper shows how the selected artworks can be analyzed precisely in terms of this interplay between medium as technique and medium as concept and content. The essay adapts and modifies the analytical tools of intermediality to fit the specific conditions of contemporary photographic practices among artists, and shows that the artists considered in the text evoke both the documentary, evidentiary connotations 

This dissertation investigates the relationship between art and archive at the turn of the twenty-first century. The object of study is the phenomenon of archive art, understood as a combination of theories of the archive, artworks, and different kinds of texts (catalogues, scholarly articles, critical essays, etc.) delineating the art here called archive art. The study has been conducted by cross-reading the different elements that make up the phenomenon of archive art with various discourses and developments both within and outside the artworld. It investigates how the archive became a ubiquitous reference in art discourse and the functions and implications the notion has within an art context.

Each of the dissertation’s six chapters adds to and builds on the previous, thereby examining an increasingly thickening web of conceptual relations. Chapter I examines five texts about archive art written between 1995 and 2008. Chapter II outlines writings about archives from other disciplines frequently referenced in art discourse, and shows how this “archive theory” (including works by Foucault, Derrida and others) overlaps in many ways with the Institutional Theory of Art. Chapter III analyses the archive art phenomenon by juxtaposing three different aspects of the tension between materiality and immateriality: the artwork as object or idea; connotations of analogue and digital technology; and different notions of traditional and poststructural forms of history writing. Chapter IV is concerned with the role of the artist as historian, archivist and researcher, and examines how the discourse around studio-based research overlaps with the different modes of historical truth-claims outlined in the previous chapter. This chapter also analyses references to research as process and form in archive art discourse. Chapter V examines different kinds of critique of institutions and shows how the archive art phenomenon intersects with a critical paradigm in the academy and beyond. Chapter VI ties together many results of the previous discussions by analysing the archive art phenomenon within a broader historical context. The chapter shows that history, the presumed subject of much archive art, can also be considered indicative of a shift away from a grounding of the art object within a teleological art history, toward an institutionally defined concept of art as an archival structure. In that sense the archive art phenomenon is analysed both as a resistance to, and a symptom of, what some have called the presentism of the current era.  

The archive is an example of what Mieke Bal terms a “travelling concept”, as it moves between and within disciplines and contexts. The ubiquity of the concept in art discourse is part of a broader “turn” to the archive, however, this study shows that the archive takes on meaning specific to the contemporary artworld. The notion of the archive here functions as a short-cut for theorizing artists’ interest in the material traces of the past (the concrete, “dusty” archive) as well as their critical investigation of the post-1960s artworld (the archive as metaphor and structure). What may seem like a mere trend within contemporary art discourse, is thus shown to have functions and implications that interlock with the conceptual grounding of contemporary art.