Online launch of the Enthusiasts Archive

Enthusiasts: archive, an artistic project by Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska is the result of extensive research amongst the remnants of amateur film clubs in Poland under socialism. It is a critical archive of films found, restored and made available online under Creative Commons licenses. Originally conceived as a series of exhibitions, the first iteration of Enthusiasts in 2004 at the Centre of Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw was curated by Łukasz Ronduda, followed by Enthusiasm in 2005 in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery, London; KW Institute, Berlin and Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona. In 2019, after fifteen years since its first public presentation, the Enthusiasts: archive has become part of the Museum of Modern Art Collection.

“Presented as a collaborative artwork, Enthusiasts: archive explores how the generosity of the enthusiast reveals a range of interests and experiences generally invisible amid the breathless flow of the state-sponsored or professionally mediated culture. Through our founding of Enthusiasts: archive as an artwork, we intend to challenge creative practices, to replace exchanges facilitated by frustration and restriction with those of collaboration and generosity. We want to reanimate the public function of archives, collections and exhibitions in an age characterized by relentless privatization, and to initiate new practices of exhibition, aiming to reconfigure them as conscious sites of exchange and negotiation over the ‘making’ and ‘re-making’ of the work of art. Our intention with Enthusiasts: archive is to stimulate interest in and discussion of the nature of creative exchange, access to public archives, and the future of the public domain.” NC&ML 

Further press information contact: prasa [​at​] artmuseum.pl / www.prasa.artmuseum.pl