Lent 2024
Book display and read-ins
Disentangling the Document is a book display that invites members of our department and the community in Cambridge, to engage with diverse trajectories in arts and culture, and the multiple perspectives that exist within them. The value of documentary mediums in art has been linked to their veracity and perceived objectivity. While the emergence of media forms such as photography and video have revitalized ideas of indexicality and fostered growing apperception of images, the status of documents emergent from such technologies remain bound by logics of modernity, race, class and empire. Debates in history have questioned the form and facticity of documents, and the archival turn in art has been accompanied by questions of legitimacy, power and perspective.
When we engage with archives, we often become trespassers of history, and invite ourselves to extract information as it presents itself at its face value. But for scholars working at the limits of or dwelling in the gaps within archives, engaging with intimate and often violent histories also becomes an act of witness-bearing. We wish to examine the ethics of recognition and methodologies that these encounters prompt.
Through a selection of critical texts, we would like to present the archive as a space for reimagining and restoration, as a space to consider what exists beyond the givenness of records and the asymmetric power dynamics that have enabled certain accounts of history to become so pronounced in the mainstream. In thinking-with other readers, we are keen to develop diverse perspectives on documents, from tangible records to fragments and fictions.
The questions we ask aim to destabilise prevalent ideas of the ‘document’ by inviting methodological reflections on: What is a legible/legitimate document?; Who produces documents — whose voice, which perspective is inscribed and remembered?; What are the locations, networks and afterlives of documents?; What is the immaterial archive?; In the concerted erasure or absence of records, how does critical fabulation and worldbuilding assist in doing history? What is the role of documents in visualizing resistance and dissent?; Do documents have a right to opacity?
Curated by: Oluwakemi Akinrele (Undergraduate, History of Art), Arushi Vats (PhD, History of Art)
Texts on display:
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. New York City: Verso, 2019.
Kareem Estefan, Carin Kuoni, Laura Raicovich eds., Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production. New York City: OR Books, 2017.
Saidiya V. Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe 26, Vol. 12, no. 2 (June 2008), pp. 1-14.
Irit Katz, Common Camp: Architecture of Power and Resistance in Israel-Palestine. London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022.
NourbeSe Philip, Zong! Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2008.
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
Aruna D’Souza, Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts. New York City: Badlands Limited, 2018.
Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture : Violence at the Threshold of Detectability. New York City: Zone Books, 2017.
