Archival Sites of Speculation

Screening program

The film program Archival Sites of Speculation brings together artists, who draw on the archive as an object of artistic inquiry rather than merely a site of research and negotiate the constitutive limits of the archive. They developed methodologies of proximity and engagement with archives in order to reflect on colonial continuities.
The films make visible what is absent from documentation and refer to the gaps in the transmission of memory, testimony or kept historical material. The artists apply a specific embodied practice as a way of closing the distance between one’s own body to the body of the archive through dance, touch, text, juxtaposition, cuts, collage or reading. With these methods, historical and archival research is combined with a “critical fabulation” to make productive sense of gaps and silences within an archive.

Films by Alessandra Ferrini, Onyeka Igwe, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, and Maryam Tafakory.
Overall duration: ca. 120 min., OV (partially with w engl. Subs)

Detailed Program:
Onyeka Igwe, Her Name in My Mouth, 2017, 06:02 min.
Maryam Tafakory, Irani Bag, 2021, 8 min.
Alessandra Ferrini, Sight Unseen, HD video, 2019, 18:47 min.
Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, Unearthing. In Conversation, 2017, 13 min.
Onyeka Igwe, a so-called archive, 2020, 19:34 min.

Event in English. With an introduction by the curators and a conversation with Onyeka Igwe.

Curated by Mai Ling, Georgia Holz, and Stephanie Misa within the context of the INTRA project „Anonymity and Absence – Archival Sites of Speculation“ at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
Design of the film program Archival Sites
                                          of Speculation.
Onyeka Igwe, a so-called archive, 2020, courtesy of the artist
Event