moma _ archives on display_ activating the past, challenging the present
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11/2/2016 MoMA | Archives on Display: Activating the Past, Challenging the Present
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APRIL 28, 2015 | INTERN CHRONICLES
Archives on Display: Activating the Past, Challenging thePresentPosted by Christina Eliopoulos, 2014–16 Dedalus Fellow, Museum Archives
Hrair Sarkissian. istory. 2011. Archival inkjet print, 150 x 190 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Kalfayan Galleries, Athens – Thessaloniki
As an intern in the MoMA Archives, my favorite part of the day is paging through the material that ourresearchers have requested. Though pulling document files doesn’t seem like the most exciting task in theworld, it is for me, because it’s the exact moment when archives come alive. Sitting in the stacks in hundredsof archival boxes, these documents are inactive forces of potential energy waiting to be picked up. And when Ipull out unique items like original letters written by Alfred Barr and notebooks by Vito Acconci, I feel as thoughI am giving these priceless documents a chance to live. For a single moment—and a single researcher—theseitems escape their boxes to be seen, studied, appreciated, and revered. But at the end of the day, they mustgo back to their boxes, concealed from the world, waiting to be seen at the request of yet another researcher.
Archives tend to live on the periphery in the art world. Placed within a museum’s most dark and isolated areas,their hidden physical life matches the way they are used and presented within exhibitions. Though crucial to acurator’s scholarship and (re)interpretation of an artwork, they are rarely exhibited and exist only as a footnotein the back of a catalogue, tucked away from the eyes of many.
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11/2/2016 MoMA | Archives on Display: Activating the Past, Challenging the Present
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Installation view of Dorothy Annan and Trevor Tennant, Henry Moore Institute UpperSculpture Study Gallery, November 11, 2014–March 1, 2015. Courtesy of the Estateof Dorothy Annan and Trevor Tennant/Leeds Museums & Galleries (Henry MooreInstitute Archive). Photographer: Jerry HardmanJones
London, England. Photo: Christina Eliopoulos
But in Europe curators are shifting archives from the margins of the texts that they write to the very subjects ofthe shows they create. You can imagine my excitement when I discovered that these materials escaped theirtypical fate to instead be placed in a display case for millions to see, for days on end. MoMA’s 12MonthInternship Program enabled me to investigate this phenomenon in England, a place where archives are notonly exhibited, but art museums and institutions have created permanent gallery spaces devoted solely to theirdisplay.
One such place is the Henry MooreInstitute‘s Upper Sculpture StudyGallery. Frequently featuring materialfrom its Research Library and Archive,the gallery materializes the institute’sdedication as a center for the study ofsculpture and places archives at theforefront of this dialogue. As theHenry Moore Institute curator PavelPyś claims, “Our Archives andResearch Library are the heart of theInstitute, where new thought and newresearch stems from.”
Meeting with Pyś, curator of theinstitute’s previous archive showDorothy Annan and Trevor Tennant, Iwas really intrigued by a “nonarchivist’s” perspective about thetrend in exhibiting archive material.Pyś believes that this popularitystems from a shift in art historicalscholarship. He claims that, “In the
20th century, a big of way of focusing on art was to think about individual artworks and to write narrativesabout those works and fitting them into a certain chronology with other works. But I think what’s happening nowis more the history of art being written through its context and exhibitions…. That shift to context is key onfocusing on archival material.”
The Whitechapel Gallery is another institute that recognizes the importance of archives within the dialogue ofart history. Presented in the Archive Gallery, the exhibition Sculptors’ Papers from the Henry Moore Institute
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11/2/2016 MoMA | Archives on Display: Activating the Past, Challenging the Present
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Archive was part of Whitechapel’s ongoing program of archive exhibitions in which they display guest archivesand items from the gallery’s own history. Meeting with the curator of the Archive Gallery, Nayia Yiakoumaki, Ilearned that one of the biggest luxuries archives have to offer is their ability to allow us to move through time.
Installation view of the Sculptors Papers from the Henry Moore Institute Archive exhibition, Pat Matthews Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery,September 23, 2014–April 12, 2015. Courtesy Whitechapel Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery Archive
Symbolic of this unique capability is a work by photographer Hrair Sarkissian, in Tate Modern’s exhibitionConflict, Time, Photography, where I discovered that the use of archives is popular not only among curators,but among artists. In his work istory, Hrair presents images taken from historical archives in Turkey relating tothe history of his ancestors and the 1915 Armenian genocide. With the specific contents of the archives hiddenfrom the viewer, these photos show rows of information that appear caught in time yet represent the verydocuments that either confirm or deny the history of his people, questioning his own existence in the present.
A successful archive exhibition doesn’t simply retell a static, linear history. Like Hrair’s work, its importancelies in uncovering multiple perspectives that challenge our current notions, telling a diverse, everchangingstory of the past within our present.
Tags: Museum Archives, MoMA Library and Archives, Hrair Sarkissian MORE
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MAY 8, 2015, 3:40 P.M.
Thank you Christina for your work. I am glad to know that the files I have access to through the Film StudyCenter are in the capable and loving hands of people like you. Wish you the best in your time ahead at MoMAand onward. Walt Wilder
Posted by Walt Wilder
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11/2/2016 MoMA | Archives on Display: Activating the Past, Challenging the Present
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