CMRK is a network of four independent institutions in Graz whose common interest lies in the conveyance of contemporary art within an international context.

Facebook

CMRK archive:
Spring 2017
Summer 2017
Autumn 2017
Un-Curating the Archive
Based on a Reference Collection by Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch (Part II: 1990 – 2002)

Opening: 7. 12. 2017, 8 pm
Duration: 8. 12. 2017 – 18. 2. 2018

Although archives safeguard and preserve documents, they are not always accessible to the public, or else access to these documents is considerably restricted. So archives regulate the relationship between the visible, the accessible, and the concealed. For this reason, it is often exceedingly difficult to reconstruct the histories/stories of institutions. Since the year 2017, Camera Austria has been exploring its own archive in a different way: all archival material is being presented in two exhibitions. The Vienna-based artists Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch have developed a publication concept for this archive, so that it will remain available as reference collection in Camera Austria’s library after the exhibitions are over. In December, the second part of “Un-Curating the Archive” will be opening, featuring material from the years 1990 to 2002, the period during which Camera Austria moved into the Eisernes Haus.

Boris Groys writes that an archive is suspended as soon as it becomes the subject of an exhibition. Yet instead of transforming the archive into an exhibition, Six & Petritsch turn the exhibition space itself into a site for viewing and probing the archive. With its structure and appearance remaining intact to the greatest possible extent, the project aims—with this gesture of public disclosure—to give something back to the public, to restitute the archive in a certain sense, to transform it into a common space, without holding anything back and thus freeing it up for new interpretations. Through this gesture, the work that formed this archive ultimately has its own say.





Library Camera Austria,
Furniture: Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch.
Photo: Markus Krottendorfer.