Exhibition, Symposium & Events
November 7, 2019–March 1, 2020
The Centre for Artists’ Publications was founded in the Weserburg Museum of Modern Art in November 1999, after the acquisition of the Archive for Small Press & Communication, built up by Guy Schraenen in Antwerp. Since then it has evolved into an internationally renowned institution. It is an archive, research institute and exhibition venue whose archive and collection holdings are unique in scope and variety.
In the same year, the Research Association Artists’ Publications was established, a collaboration between the University of Bremen, the University of the Arts Bremen, the Research Centre for Eastern European Studies and the Centre for Artists’ Publications in the Weserburg Museum of Modern Art. Since its foundation, researchers from all over the world have become members.
On the occasion of the 20th anniversary, the international symposium Archives in Motion on November 8 and 9 is held. The exhibition fictionfictionfiction by Heman Chong, and further events complete the programme.
fictionfictionfiction by Heman Chong
Heman Chong is an artist whose work is located at the intersection between image, performance, situations, and writing. His practice can be read as an imagining, interrogation and sometimes intervention into infrastructure as an everyday medium of politics. fictionfictionfiction encompasses two major work complexes. Foreign Affairs (2019) is a series of apparently banal photographs of embassy back doors. The systematic repetition of images simultaneously recalls a cinematic frame and the omnipresence of the surveillance camera that watches nothing and everything. The performance Words, They, Wrote, (2019) is embedded within the symposium Archives in Motion and the exhibition space. This allows a retrospective moment where the audience can listen in on what artists write about their lives and their work, and negotiate objects and situations out of texts.
Archives in Motion. Artists’ Publications between Circulation and Preservation in a Global Perspective
The symposium will examine the importance of an artistically comprehensive approach, ranging from art archives to artists’ archives, from performance archives and mail art archives to archives for artists’ publications as well as their diverse contexts in contemporary art. Art archives and archives for artists’ publications are extended archives. Today, archives no longer really serve as locations for the deposit of knowledge in terms of its collection and administration. With the replacement of the bureaucratic notion of an archive, the question is to what extent visualizations and enactments of archival material allow for spaces of human action to emerge. How can concepts of extended archives make their potential of knowledge and reception accessible through forms of agency, based on new approaches such as staging, curating or performing the archive? To what extent are the various art archives counter archives or identity archives that represent and establish the perspectives of particular groups? How to document contexts of networking and counter-publicity in which alternative, marginalized and emerging socio-political, sociocultural and/or artistic ideas are taken up, made public and disseminated? What is the significance of the use of archival material for artistic practice?
Contributions by Maike Aden (Paris), Heman Chong (Singapore), Cristina Freire (São Paulo), Ursula Frohne (Münster), David Paton (Johannesburg), Andrea Sick (Bremen), John Tain (Hong Kong), Anne Thurmann-Jajes (Bremen).
www.soundcollection.de: An Acoustic Presentation of the Sound Collection Guy Schraenen
More than 300 works of sound art provide a contextual and acoustic overview of the interweaving of visual and acoustic works in the visual arts. They are part of the Sound Collection Guy Schraenen—the most important and extensive international collection of sound art. It consists of more than 1,000 artists’ records, audio CDs and audio cassettes, graphics, drawings, scores, posters and objects as well as comprehensive documentation and library.
The Kulturstiftung der Länder and the Karin and Uwe Hollweg Foundation funded the purchase of the globally acclaimed Sound Collection in 2018, the digitization and online-presentation. Thus the artists’ sound works are processed in terms of content and made accessible to the public via a special Internet presentation.
