Performing the Relational Archive

This article addresses the recent changes in archival practices and discourse, and their implications for documentary photography and photographic theory. Exploring the work of artists such as Renée Green and Gitte Villesen, as well as the writings of Margaret Iversen, Jan Verwoert, and others, the first section of the article examines the severing of the links between photographic images and the events they document in the photographic theory of the late 1970s and 1980s, and the rethinking of these links today through the concepts of performativity and relationality. The second half of the article examines more closely the discourse of the archive in the last decade, focusing on the work of Benjamin Buchloh and Hal Foster. The article highlights the shifts in recent archival practices, from an excavation of past events and their traumatic implications, to viewing of the archive as a potential site for (re)constructing utopian visions

Art · Art history · Performativity · Photography · Section (typography · Sociology · Vision · Visual arts · Anthropology · Cinema and Media Studies · Computer Science · Gender Studies · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Photography and Visual Culture

• Spectral Evidence

  Ulrich Baer•Spectral Evidence•2002

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• Unmarked

  Peggy Phelan•Unmarked•2003

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• What is a photograph

  Open Access•Margaret Iversen•Art History•1994

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• An Archival Impulse

  Hal Foster•October•2004

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• The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism

  Douglas Crimp•October•1980

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