Notes on Archives 5
Unnamed Series features a succession of artworks provoked by photographs that art historian Aby Warburg had taken as part of his travels to the Hopi Indians in 1898. Warburg noted that the images should never be published, but in the 1990s, the Warburg Institute in London made the images available as part of a glossy hardcover book. The book circulates around a series of aspects that this famous encounter evokes.
Notes on Archives 1–5
Notes on Archives is a series of publications by artist Ines Schaber about archives and the practices we conduct in relation to them. Produced over the course of more than ten years, the publications feature a series of case studies, research, concrete projects, and reflections on the questions and problems that image archives pose today. The aim of the work is not to find or create another institutional archive per se, but to develop a practice in which the set of problems that archives produce is in fact part of the process one engages in.
The artist understands the archive as a place of negotiation and writing. “There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation,” writes Jacques Derrida.
