CAA2024

Critical Race Art History and the Archive

Session Abstract

In Subject to Display (2009), Jennifer A. González asserts that “the collection and display of bodies, images, and artifacts in museums and elsewhere is a primary means by which a nation tells the story of its past and locates the cultures of its citizens in the present.“ In this session, contemporary archivists’ discuss their approaches to telling the narratives of racial identification and racialization—past and present. What has been collected and how has that material been interpreted? What questions do they bring to institutional systems of classification? How do they create space and cede power so that marginalized communities can access resources that support their created and managed archives? In what ways have the concerns of the humanities—analysis, interpretation, argumentation—been mainstreamed into digital humanities practice in the scope of critical race art history?

Presentations

The Importance of Sigh/te

Ingrid Pollard, Goldsmiths, University of London

Ingrid Pollard’s presents work that considers many distinct but closely linked ideas, including the social constructs of Englishness, race, the notion of home and belonging, or “being,” community, place, encounter, national identity or nationhood, colonial histories, what is unseen or hidden and “unhidden” and more, as realised through landscape. While Pollard’s multi-layered photographic works are best known to the public, hers is a wide-ranging practice that is neither easy to navigate nor easy to define. Pollard’s work is also about photography as a medium and about its history, methods, materiality, and archives.

Transmedia Performance Art/ifacts: Nao Bustamente’s Archival Activations

Lucian O’Connor, WU Pomona

Nao Bustamante’s performance-installations reactivate critical past events with imaginative archival presentations, the development of uncanny experiential environments, and affective modes of accountability to racialized bodies in pain. Brown Disco (2023) – a memorial to the victims of the 2022 Club Q massacre – stages a giant disco ball adorned by golden-brown light, confronting visitors with extraordinary scale, meditatively-slowed dance music, and choreographies of mourning and protection. BLOOM (2021-2024) interrogates gynecology’s historical experiments on women of color, as Bustamante channels their intense pain while performing on a suspended artifactual gynecology table, in proximity to displays of re-interpreted vaginal speculums and related transmedia interventions. My presentation analyzes how Bustamante grapples with difficult historical experiences and archives through performance, transmedia, and conceptualism, with an attention to racialization and the significance of flesh informed by theories of the brown commons (Moten, Muñoz, Chambers-Letson, etc).

The final discussion shares my experiences as a scholar and curator working closely with Bustamante’s archives, meeting with her regularly in 2023-2024. I share my intimate engagements with the archive of her entire oeuvre, approaching its materials as documents, performative fragments, traces, mnemonic aids, indexes, narrative pieces, reusable props, historical artifacts, relational materials, haunting devices, art objects, and more (Jones, González, etc). I relay notable details about my research and pragmatic support for our collaborations, as well as our collective plans with Hugo Cervantes for interpreting and mobilizing Bustamante’s archive of past performances in future curated productions.

Artist as Archivist: French Algerian Colonial History in Contemporary Art

Monique Kerman, Western Washington University

Generations after Algeria gained its independence in 1962, the truth of French colonial violence and oppression remains largely obscured in French academia, political discourse, and public monuments. Artists Zineb Sedira, Katia Kameli, and dalila mahdjoub mine various archives to uncover stories of domination, survival, and revolution. For the publication accompanying her exhibition Dreams Have No Titles at the 2022 Venice Biennale, Sedira chose a newsprint format that reproduces anti-colonial imagery and records discovered in the course of her research. In Kameli’s video series, le Romain algérien (the Algerian novel) (2016-19), a street vendor, an academic, and a photojournalist present their collected postcards and photographs of France in Algeria, explaining how the images are gathered and interpreted. In her research, mahdjoub has rescued records found degrading in former government bureaus. In her works, she employs reproductions of these documents as well as applications, permits, and letters from her family’s archive to explore untold French/Algerian history. In these artists’ works, the archivist is a careful guardian of the historical record, as equally empowered to lock information away into dusty vaults as to bring it out into the open. The stories culled from these archives, otherwise in danger of being literally thrown upon the garbage heap of history, are reassembled in their art to serve as counternarrative to French denial and suppression. In their capacity both to make visible and validate the generational trauma of colonialism’s legacy, the creative processes that produced such works can be understood as practices of (self-)care.

Un-Muting (Sonic Restitutions)

Satch Hoyt, Satch Hoyt Studio

What is Un-Muting? To Un-Mute is to reveal by giving voice and agency to that which has been silenced. To render audible, to unfurl, to unlock, to enable. To propose progressive possibilities for sonic liberation. To animate inanimate artifacts. And to question custodianship of them and to form new possibilities to display them. Un-Muting is inextricably linked to my Afro-Sonic Mapping theory insofar as it traces both early and current cartographic sonifications. Those sonic codes are pertinent to the forced migrations of Africans, who, as portals transported multiple, mnemonic networks of sound to the Caribbean basin and the Americas. Specifically, what I term the Afro-Sonic Signifier remainsin constant states of expansive flux. Music is permanently transforming our sense of society, personhood, and community. Un-Muting is, in fact, a deliberate emancipatory intervention, which offers various platforms of sonification and amplification. My primary focus is on the un-muting of African music instruments, specifically those abducted from the African continent and held in ethnographic museum collections across the world. Unlocking these archives, I offer a lens of sonic repair toward the understanding of Black history in our moment. The Un-Mutings are performed to unveil sonics which are created on instruments from the past, situated in the present tense, and focused on a vision of futurisms. I attempt to glimpse the future, which is unpredictable.