Since the 1990s, there has been a sus­tained pre­oc­cu­pa­tion in con­tem­po­rary art with time, memory, and the writ­ing of his­tory. In this con­text, the archive has come into focus as a place that, through its mech­a­nisms of in­clu­sion and ex­clu­sion, sub­stan­tially reg­u­lates our access to the past. Artists have grap­pled with the au­thor­ity of the archive, point­ing out its biases and gaps, or build­ing idio­syn­cratic col­lec­tions them­selves. Their at­ten­tion to the archive is also a re­sponse to the fact that the archive has come under pres­sure: from civil so­ci­ety pro­tag­o­nists de­mand­ing a dif­fer­ent cul­ture of memory, but also from a tech­no­log­i­cal change that is al­ter­ing our un­der­stand­ing of the archive.

The dis­ser­ta­tion pro­ject sys­tem­at­i­cally fo­cuses on the con­tri­bu­tion of au­dio­vi­sual art in this field. I draw on a het­ero­ge­neous corpus of essay films, video in­stal­la­tions and ex­per­i­men­tal doc­u­men­taries, some of which move flu­idly be­tween the spaces of art, cinema and dig­i­tal plat­forms. By closely en­gag­ing with works by Filipa César, Harun Farocki & Andrei Ujică, Onyeka Igwe, Ag­nieszka Polska, Hito Stey­erl, Deb­o­rah Strat­man, Ana Vaz and others, this pro­ject ex­plores the an­ar­chival po­ten­tial of their prac­tices: Ac­ti­vat­ing that which works against the archive from within. The archive is con­ceived here as a figure of me­di­al­ity, which be­comes par­tic­u­larly vis­i­ble in its dis­rup­tion: Where the archive breaks down and is dis­persed, where its bor­ders become porous or its ef­fects of pres­ence are haunted by ab­sence. Con­se­quently, the pro­ject is con­cerned not with an au­dio­vi­sual prac­tice that reaf­firms the archive, but with the pos­si­bil­i­ties of de­con­struct­ing its op­er­a­tions.

Jo­hanna Laub is a PhD can­di­date and re­search fellow in the Graduiertenkol­leg “Con­fig­u­ra­tions of Film” at Goethe Uni­ver­sity Frank­furt. She com­pleted a Bach­e­lor’s and Master’s degree in art his­tory at Uni­ver­sity of Leipzig and Uni­ver­sité de Tours. Sub­se­quently, she worked as a cu­ra­to­r­ial as­sis­tant at Schirn Kun­sthalle Frank­furt on ex­hi­bi­tions such as “Basquiat: Boom for Real” (2018), “Hannah Ryggen: Woven Man­i­festos” (2019), and “Big Or­ches­tra” (2019), and co-cu­rated the screen­ing pro­gram “Double Fea­ture.” In her re­search, she is in­ter­ested in art as a site of knowl­edge pro­duc­tion, the­o­ries of archive and his­tory, and the in­ter­sec­tion of art and media phi­los­o­phy. From August to De­cem­ber 2022, she was a vis­it­ing scholar at the Mel Hop­pen­heim School of Cinema at Con­cor­dia Uni­ver­sity, Montréal.

laub[at]tfm.​uni-​frankfurt.​de