No Instructions for Assembly: Case Studies in Radical Archiving
Duration: 01:23:02; Aspect Ratio: 1.778:1; Hue: 81.742; Saturation: 0.057; Lightness: 0.374; Volume: 0.195; Cuts per Minute: 0.060; Words per Minute: 5.708
Summary: Memory Loss: Excavating the Abushady Family Archive
Joy Garnett
This paper explores the relationship between the material archive and
memory. I will examine the connections between the desire to preserve a
legacy, the suppression of memory, the revision of history, and the
contradictory and complimentary aspects of these tendencies, which issue
from the same need to control the historical narrative. My point of
departure for this study is my late Egyptian grandfather and his three
children, and the latter generation’s capacity to revise their memories
and suppress their connection to the larger historical-political
landscape. I will demonstrate how, in the same breath, my grandfather
and his children painstakingly and successfully preserved materials and
minutiae that tell historically significant and culturally rooted
stories. My grandfather was Dr. Ahmed Zaky Abushady (1892-1955), an
influential Egyptian Romantic poet, scientist, and physician, as well as
a builder of institutions and libraries. The materials he
self-consciously preserved reflect a culturally expansive moment in
Egypt's modern history, the period between the Egyptian revolutions of
1919 and 1952, and the World Wars. Abushady’s strategy for ensuring his
place in the narrative of Egyptian Modernism included gifting books he
authored to the world's major libraries. In his bid to control his
position in this narrative, he made carbon copies of every letter he
wrote, collating them with the letters he received in reply, and binding
them in chronologically organized tomes. The desire to preserve this
legacy was handed down from generation to generation directly from the
man himself. Abushady’s children saved these and other materials, such
as countless albums of photographs and ephemera, after his death. I, in
turn, have begun to gather these materials to organize them as an
archive that extends beyond the story of one family. In doing so, I have
come to realize that the stories told by my relatives exist separately
from the archive they so painstakingly preserved. Official family
history pushes out actual memories, while conveniently ignoring the
physical reminders that serve as markers for those memories. Confronted
with this contradiction–preserving objects only to hide them–I seek to
establish connections between the determined compiling and preservation
of tangible archives, the recounting of official family histories, and
the willful curtailing of memory and generating of family secrets.
Thankfully, the content of the archive tells its own story.
No Instructions for Assembly - Archiving From the Margins with Fragments
Kameelah Janan Rasheed
A discussion of my archival installation 'No Instructions for Assembly'
focusing on ideas such as spatial trauma/homelessness and archiving as a
form of artistic reparations; intervening/interfering with the
machinery of the official archive; reimagining personal histories using
found and original fragments of photographs, texts, and objects; the
footnotes and marginalized histories as an active site of
conjuring/reactivating narratives; radical archiving as a project in
radical cartography; and boundless considerations of who counts as an
archivist and what is archival.
The Innocent City: A Modest Archive of Everday Istanbul
Ian Alden Russell
Situated in Cihangir, the Museum of Innocence archives and presents the
everyday life of the city of Istanbul in the 1970s through the intimate
moments of two people. The collection represents an intimate archive
assembled by the character Kemal in honor of his love Füsun in Orhan
Pamuk’s novel The Museum of Innocence. Pamuk’s book and museum together
present a manifesto for modest museums that archive and present the
everyday lives of people often overlooked by national and state cultural
institutions. The Innocent City will open at Koç University’s Research
Center for Anatolian Civilizations in summer 2014. The project responds
to Pamuk’s manifesto by moving from the intimate archive of the museum
back into the public. Objects are selected from the Museum of Innocence
and working with students, artists and local communities, Ian Alden
Russell will depart from the Museum of Innocence to seek out the lives
of these objects in the city of Istanbul today. Each selected object
will present unique paths through the city and encounters (i.e. a tea
cup might lead to a cold morning Bosporus crossing on a ferry or to a
back alley tea garden and a intimate personal conversation). The lives
of these objects are documented through photography, oral history,
cartography, video and narrative writing – becoming an archive of
stories of the city of Istanbul as it is today, as seen through intimate
encounters with everyday objects from the Museum of Innocence’s
collection.
Navigating and Research: Art History in Hong Kong
Michelle Wong
Hong Kong has often been described as a city that easily forgets. Sites
in this affluent city are regularly, literally erased by urban
(re)developments. With the passage of time, memories of demolished sites
fade and disappear, and heritage remains largely an intangible notion.
In the absence of museum and university archives pertaining to visual
culture, art historical documents are often gathered and held by
individuals privately. Institutional acts of collecting such materials,
while reflecting and responding to their own agendas, create important
resources that may not be easily accessed afterwards. Short-term
research projects conducted by the academia also becomes a vehicle for
collecting materials that primarily serve the purposes of writing and
constructing art historical narratives. Only a small fraction of what
has been collected is being published and circulated.
How does one make sense of such an array of archival holdings, which
presents themselves not only with different levels of accessibility,
circulation and visibility, but also a myriad of contextual information
and archival impulses? How might one’s approach change if we see the
holdings as not only containers of historical information, but also
instantiations of their times? This paper offers a case study of an Asia
Art Archive project, which is working towards building a network of
archives in Hong Kong. It also shares an AAA researcher’s perspective on
how a constellation of research methodologies are applied to activate
and navigate the archives, and how some of those lead to more archive
building in the process. This paper examines the navigation, usage, and
building of archives as a collaborative and rhizomic process that not
only produces knowledge, but also accumulates materials.
Steffani Jemison Introduces No Instructions for Assembly: Case Studies in Radical Archiving.
Ian Alden Russell, The Innocent City: A Modest Archive of Everday Istanbul
Situated in Cihangir, the Museum of Innocence archives and presents the everyday life of the city of Istanbul in the 1970s through the intimate moments of two people. The collection represents an intimate archive assembled by the character Kemal in honor of his love Füsun in Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Museum of Innocence. Pamuk’s book and museum together present a manifesto for modest museums that archive and present the everyday lives of people often overlooked by national and state cultural institutions. The Innocent City will open at Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations in summer 2014. The project responds to Pamuk’s manifesto by moving from the intimate archive of the museum back into the public. Objects are selected from the Museum of Innocence and working with students, artists and local communities, Ian Alden Russell will depart from the Museum of Innocence to seek out the lives of these objects in the city of Istanbul today. Each selected object will present unique paths through the city and encounters (i.e. a tea cup might lead to a cold morning Bosporus crossing on a ferry or to a back alley tea garden and a intimate personal conversation). The lives of these objects are documented through photography, oral history, cartography, video and narrative writing – becoming an archive of stories of the city of Istanbul as it is today, as seen through intimate encounters with everyday objects from the Museum of Innocence’s collection.
Michelle Wong, Navigating and Research: Art History in Hong Kong
Hong Kong has often been described as a city that easily forgets. Sites in this affluent city are regularly, literally erased by urban (re)developments. With the passage of time, memories of demolished sites fade and disappear, and heritage remains largely an intangible notion. In the absence of museum and university archives pertaining to visual culture, art historical documents are often gathered and held by individuals privately. Institutional acts of collecting such materials, while reflecting and responding to their own agendas, create important resources that may not be easily accessed afterwards. Short-term research projects conducted by the academia also becomes a vehicle for collecting materials that primarily serve the purposes of writing and constructing art historical narratives. Only a small fraction of what has been collected is being published and circulated.
How does one make sense of such an array of archival holdings, which presents themselves not only with different levels of accessibility, circulation and visibility, but also a myriad of contextual information and archival impulses? How might one’s approach change if we see the holdings as not only containers of historical information, but also instantiations of their times? This paper offers a case study of an Asia Art Archive project, which is working towards building a network of archives in Hong Kong. It also shares an AAA researcher’s perspective on how a constellation of research methodologies are applied to activate and navigate the archives, and how some of those lead to more archive building in the process. This paper examines the navigation, usage, and building of archives as a collaborative and rhizomic process that not only produces knowledge, but also accumulates materials.
Joy Garnett, Memory Loss: Excavating the Abushady Family Archive
This paper explores the relationship between the material archive and memory. I will examine the connections between the desire to preserve a legacy, the suppression of memory, the revision of history, and the contradictory and complimentary aspects of these tendencies, which issue from the same need to control the historical narrative. My point of departure for this study is my late Egyptian grandfather and his three children, and the latter generation’s capacity to revise their memories and suppress their connection to the larger historical-political landscape. I will demonstrate how, in the same breath, my grandfather and his children painstakingly and successfully preserved materials and minutiae that tell historically significant and culturally rooted stories. My grandfather was Dr. Ahmed Zaky Abushady (1892-1955), an influential Egyptian Romantic poet, scientist, and physician, as well as a builder of institutions and libraries. The materials he self-consciously preserved reflect a culturally expansive moment in Egypt's modern history, the period between the Egyptian revolutions of 1919 and 1952, and the World Wars. Abushady’s strategy for ensuring his place in the narrative of Egyptian Modernism included gifting books he authored to the world's major libraries. In his bid to control his position in this narrative, he made carbon copies of every letter he wrote, collating them with the letters he received in reply, and binding them in chronologically organized tomes. The desire to preserve this legacy was handed down from generation to generation directly from the man himself. Abushady’s children saved these and other materials, such as countless albums of photographs and ephemera, after his death. I, in turn, have begun to gather these materials to organize them as an archive that extends beyond the story of one family. In doing so, I have come to realize that the stories told by my relatives exist separately from the archive they so painstakingly preserved. Official family history pushes out actual memories, while conveniently ignoring the physical reminders that serve as markers for those memories. Confronted with this contradiction–preserving objects only to hide them–I seek to establish connections between the determined compiling and preservation of tangible archives, the recounting of official family histories, and the willful curtailing of memory and generating of family secrets. Thankfully, the content of the archive tells its own story.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed, No Instructions for Assembly - Archiving From the Margins with Fragments
A discussion of my archival installation 'No Instructions for Assembly' focusing on ideas such as spatial trauma/homelessness and archiving as a form of artistic reparations; intervening/interfering with the machinery of the official archive; reimagining personal histories using found and original fragments of photographs, texts, and objects; the footnotes and marginalized histories as an active site of conjuring/reactivating narratives; radical archiving as a project in radical cartography; and boundless considerations of who counts as an archivist and what is archival.
Q&A
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