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Archive-Fever-Enwezor-Okwui-9783865216229Archive Fever
Christian Boltanski
Tacita Dean
Stan Douglas
Harun Farocki
Hans-Peter Felmann
Jef Geys
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Craigie Horsfield
Lamia Joreige
Zoe Leonard
Sherrie Levine
Ilan Lieberman
Glenn Ligon
Robert Morris
Walid Raad
Thomas Ruff
Anri Sala
Fazal Sheikh
Lorna Simpson
Eyal Sivan
Vivan Sundaram
Andrei Ujica
Gediminas and Nomeda Urbonas
Andy Warhol
International Center of Photography

 

Hardcover
264 pages
203×244 mm
2008
ISBN: 978-3-86521-622-9

Was it Joseph Cornell’s dossiers on ballerinas and artists that first proposed the model of the archive as a creative storehouse, a vehicle for the ordering of chaotic fragments? Over the past 30 years, successive generations have taken wide-ranging approaches to archives, most of them (like Cornell) concentrating on photographic and filmic collections. Organized and written by renowned scholar and ICP Adjunct Curator Okwui Enwezor, and taking its title from Jacques Derrida’s book of the same name, “Archive Fever” gathers leading contemporary artists who use archival materials in the fabrication of their work. As Derrida notes, the Greek etymology of “archive” connotes both “commencement” and “commandment,” implying that authority is as much at stake as authenticity. For artists, of course, these imperatives provoke all kinds of exciting opportunities for eccentricity and falsification, and the works included herein take many forms, including physical archives arranged by bizarre cataloguing methods, imagined biographies of fictitious persons, collections of found and anonymous photographs, film versions of photographic albums, and photomontages composed from historical photographs. These images offer a wide-ranging subject matter but are linked by the artists’ shared meditation on photography and film as the quintessential media of the archive.

The International Center of Photography (ICP) is the world’s leading institution dedicated to the practice and understanding of photography and the reproduced image in all its forms.