Week 4 | Workshop with Dr James Bell – Shuwen Chen / Curating (2021-2022)[SEM2]

8 February 2022

Working in Archives

The title of this workshop is Working in Archives and Professor Bell uses his research on ‘Queering archives’ as an example to demonstrate the Archival turn in contemporary art.

When I think of Archive, I imagine a library or a museum with thick paper materials, then video materials, pictures, or documentaries, which in any case have a serious and official presence. But in the workshop, I watched the film P. Staff’s The Foundation (2015), which shows the house in America, the collection and footage of its inhabitants, these “unofficial” records opened up a wonderful space for me, this house, this community, which was both a living space (for birthday parties) and an archive (for the collection of documents). The film also uses the characters to allow the viewer to explore how the collection was formed and how the community relates to Queer culture.

Through the film I realised that a house can also be called an archive (archives are made up of entities, but not only) and that archives can also be made up of feelings and relationships, which was an interesting discovery.

Last term I had already read Rogoff’s essay ‘Turning’. ‘Turn as a movement’ , Archive turn as part of the transformation of contemporary art, both in terms of the specific materials and the researcher’s thinking, which seems to represent a change in society.

Professor Bell refers to the project he is interested in (the advertising board pictured below) as having a real-life presence (displayed in the public domain) rather than retrospective nostalgia for the LGBT past. Here, the archive is not just a record of past existence, it develops new responsibilities – becoming a place to negotiate issues.

……

In fact, my understanding of archives started to have a distortion from this lesson. What exactly is the archival turn in contemporary art？？？ I didn’t get, so I was late to finish the workshop’s portfolio.

I leave it to my future self to figure it out, hopefully through reading the essay or through discussion with others she can understand. I am tired of this moment.