Since the 1990s, the archival turn in contemporary art has given rise to a sustained engagement with archives—not only as sources, but also as a conceptual figure. My dissertation, in close dialogue with Jacques Derrida’s concept of the archive, pursues deconstructive artistic practices in this field in order to elucidate their central operation: rendering the archive perceptible as a medial figure that structures our access to the past as well as to the future, and conditions its forms of mediation. This inquiry is pursued through selected works in contemporary audiovisual art, including those by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Filipa César, Harun Farocki & Andrei Ujică, Onyeka Igwe, Hito Steyerl, Deborah Stratman, and Ana Vaz, and structured around three main themes: the ruination of archives, archives as sites of haunting, and the real-time production of archives.

Anarchival practices, the dissertation argues, activate the aporias inherent to the archive: the precariousness of its material carriers, the absence of an origin in reconstruction, the spectrality of transmission, conflicting temporalities, and the latency and contextual dependency of meaning. By exposing and sustaining the tensions inscribed in archives, they bring forth a space of possibility from which knowledge and narratives are generated. Seen in this light, the past no longer appears as closed off, but set into the motion of meaning-making as an ongoing process. This movement is not merely one arising from the formal means of the moving image; it concerns the past in its ontological condition.

Johanna Laub is an art historian and curator with a focus on art’s engagement with epistemic politics, archives and history, as well as the intersection between art and media philosophy. She studied art history at the University of Leipzig and subsequently worked as a curatorial assistant at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt on exhibitions of modern and contemporary art. From 2020–2023, she was a PhD candidate and research fellow in the Graduiertenkolleg “Configurations of Film” at Goethe University Frankfurt, submitting her dissertation in 2025. In 2022, she was a visiting research fellow at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University, Montréal. She works as a program curator and coordinator at Hochschule für Bildende Künste–Städelschule in Frankfurt.

laub[at]tfm.uni-frankfurt.de