Paris, 2025

Back in 2013, when I first started my research on curatorial archives, I embarked on a long journey meant to understand a topic that is still evolving, in its many shapes and forms, throughout time and space, without allowing any definitive answer – although hopefully provoking renewed questions. 

The topic was, and still is, curatorial archives in relation to curatorial practices.

The questions were, and still are: how does a curator consider his or her archive; what does he or she uses it for; how do institutions archive; what do they use the archive for; how to blur the lines between personal and institutional curatorial archives; furthermore, how to use the intimate/ presumably subjective/ personal to tell public/ presumably objective/ collective stories; how to prove that archives cannot and should not be considered as objective repositories of truths; how to exhibit archives and their contradictions in their full autonomy; what do archives reveal of the socio-political context they exist in; and how do they contribute to exhibitions’ history. Many questions indeed, and many more voices in the choral, possible answers they suggest.

The following series of interviews follows the first volume of Curatorial Archives in Curatorial Practices, published in 2018 by Salt, Istanbul, that featured 19 interviews to international curators I had the chance to encounter during the years of my doctoral research on the same subject. It was an attempt to present curatorial archives as tools to manifest visions, in the case of personal curatorial archives; or as platforms where societal, political and cultural narratives are done and undone, in the case of institutional curatorial archives.

I am delighted to develop this research into a second set of interviews that considers a larger context, including contributions by curators (but also researchers and artists with a curatorial thinking of the archive) operating in Palestine, Mexico, Japan, Lebanon, China, Iran, UAE, India, Taiwan, Sudan, and Iraq. The interviews were realized between 2019 and 2021, a time of deep changes that we are still in the midst of understanding. Although many of the interviewees are not speaking from the same (institutional) role they were in when I met them, their contribution seems more actual and relevant than ever.

Expanding the notion of archives starts from expanding the geographical, cultural, and socio-political context from which we look at it – for, it goes without saying, one does not archive in the same way depending on the circumstances in which he/she does it. Archiving can be an intimate gesture, or a selfish act of self-conservation; in other, opposite cases, it serves a collective purpose, working as a kind of resistance but also operating an inherent violence. Oblivion, as well, does not mean the same in a society where we are under the illusion of remembering everything; and in one in which archives are destroyed daily, in order to cancel memory and prevent political agency.

As I did for the first volume, I started most of the interviews by asking the curators their own definition of archive, because having a multiplicity of (often contradicting) answers to this question could help make the supposedly universal notion of archive explode – at least, the immutable one, generally recognized in Western cultures, of a fact-provider and past files container. I hope that this work can contribute, once and for all, to demonstrate that going beyond what we are acquainted with and re-question what we believe to know about archives, can open up to different possibilities not only in the way we archive but also in the way we use archives and for what. 

The reader will encounter broad geographical areas, such as Southwest Asia and the Gulf region, Central and South East Asia, or South America; and notions of archive, such as “anarchive”, or “placeholder archives”. Although I would encourage to consider these correspondences or ricochets as symptomatic of thought-gathering approaches that go beyond physical or semiotic borders. The selection of curators, researchers and artists that I had the chance to speak with, reflects a kind of permeability: between a personal research and a collective mission, as in the case of Adila Laïdi-Hanieh, whose work on artist Farlhenissa Zeid’s personal archives informed her initiative, as former Director of the Palestinian Museum, to collect and use personal archives of Palestinian families in order to build other possible narratives against theft and destruction. Having migrated from being curator of MUAC’S artistic collection to curator of documental collections in the Centro de Documentación Arkheia (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, UNAM, Mexico City) in 2015, Sol Henaro talks of another permeability: between the artistic and the documental collection. Being part of the network “Red Conceptualismos del Sur” since 2010, Henaro thinks of memories and archives as a common whose “relevance is fundamental to shake inertia and destabilize stories”; while Yuko Hasegawa’s witnessing focuses on the use of her archive in pivotal art exhibitions that she has curated in Japan and internationally, and a day-to-day approach of memory’s organization. 

Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti insist on the importance of the social history of art, especially in Lebanon where “institutional archives are not easy to access, and the culture of archiving is a state culture. It is not a practice of civil society”. To that purpose, they recall the experience of curating Past Disquiet, a documentary and archival exhibition centered on research conducted on and around the story of the International Art Exhibition for Palestine, which opened in the spring of 1978 at the Beirut Arab University – an exhibition whose size and scope was “unprecedented for the region and yet seems to have eclipsed from art historical narratives and texts”. Christine Tomé also talks about this exhibition in her interview, as a positive example of curatorial interest towards archives; and about Lebanon, where “archival records—or rather, the lack thereof—have been central in debates pertaining to collective memory in the wake of the Lebanese civil wars (1975-1990)”, giving a wide panoramic of artistic use of archives in Lebanon: from critical art practices that emerged in the 90s and “closely examined the inextricable imbrication of the archive and the production of historical narratives”; to today, when “we’re witnessing a forensic, even archaeological, turn in contemporary art practices and with it, a politicized engagement on behalf of artists and filmmakers in Lebanon and the broader region to dig in to the forgotten annals of history that inform past grievances, present impasses, and future potentialities”. 

One of the contemporary artists that Tomé names and also a curator, Ala Younis, presents her archive as an attempt to deal with “seepages” that evaded her attention or ran parallel to it, a place to collect placeholders. A certain porosity is reflected in the “archive as an active space”, as proposed by Natasha Gingwala: curatorial archives as “active space that actually get incited within the exhibition (…) and exists outside of practices”. Raqs Media Collective’s notion of archive is “a dispersed seam of remembered or half-remembered events and biographies, faint trails and fallouts, not recalled from the perspective of states and statesmen, but of yet-to-form subjects, partial-subjects, quarter-citizens and those anytime to be declared aliens, as well as aliens”, what they like to call the anarchive. 

Former Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM)’s Director Ping Lin discusses the involvement of the institution in considering the archive “like a conceptual methodology to organize certain contents (…) – it can be a pack of documents, a series of information, or even more radically, it can be an incident”,  to contribute to the cultural and societal context it unfolds in. As a response to the lack of historical accounts on art and its production in the Arab world, along with an increased interest in the modern and contemporary arts that made the need for the field’s historiography vital, Nada Shabout introduces MAIA, Modern Art Iraq Archive: a long-term project, an open access, online system for gathering and sharing information about the works of art from the Iraqi Museum of Modern Art in Baghdad, many of them lost and damaged in the fires and looting during the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq. Suheyla Takesh, Director of Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah, recognizes the urgency in documenting Middle East and Gulf’s region’s history, “particularly its twentieth-century history—and its inclusion in the conversation on global modernity” for, due to the political and environmental instability in the wider region, “many archives—both personal and institutional—are being destroyed, looted, or misplaced”. So do Doha-based Sudanese curator Hadeel Eltayeb and the initiative Locale Sudan, that consider the archive as a reminder of “our role as creators to be inclusive of narratives that may have otherwise been neglected, forgotten or intentionally removed”. 

These words best describe the ultimate goal behind this research and collection of witnessings. While a trending interest for both archives and curatorial practices evolves persistently and gets stronger, I reckon that the main responsibility of researchers and curators interested in curatorial archives lies in hopefully bringing awareness to the multiple purposes that archives serve, or refuse to serve, all around the globe and in a number of disciplines, in order to not only bring to the surface the numerous approaches to the questions but also the stories and the possibilities they carry. Furthermore and above all, not to stop imagining new ones. This also includes acknowledging the role we have in shaping not only the understanding but the ethics, the perimeter of our behaviour towards the archive and its exploitation, hopefully not as consumers but as respectful visitors wishing to bring our knowledge back to its very foundation and ideally deconstruct it, or at least question it.

To the people who have accepted to contribute to this discussion, to those who will continue monitoring the many ways in which this discourse will unfold in the next future, goes my deepest gratitude.