Sezin Romi evaluates the role of archives in art historiographies, ways of disrupting established narratives, and the significance of user engagement in expanding knowledge.

How is art history made? Traditionally, artists make the work and art historians, curators, and critics inscribe it into the canon—first through reviews in newspapers and art magazines, then in catalogues and books. Who decides what gets included in the accounts of each decade or movement as time passes?¹ Are the resources in circulation, the exhibitions and events, and the activities of the institutions sufficient for the formation of an art history? What are the ways to introduce neglected themes and figures into art history and abandon the idea of a canon?

In his book Stories of Art, James Elkins criticises the narrative of an art history that focuses on limited geographical regions and literature:

When art historians debate the survey course, the arguments usually turn on the major textbooks by Gombrich, Gardner, Stokstad, Honour and Fleming, and Janson. The situation is a little incestuous because those books are all in the same family: they were all written in the twentieth century in Western Europe or America. It has appeared in different times and places.²

Elkins emphasises that art history can never be limited to common subjects in Western geographies. In the publication, he discusses ways of “being fair to all cultures while also telling a story of art that is our story, fitted to our culture and our needs.”³

Archives and their accessibility play a critical role in historiography. “The archive is a source of historiography, a mirror held up to the collective memory of a given country and the living memory of its past.”⁴ Elkin proposes to form an art history beyond Western-oriented narratives. This could be achieved if all cultures create and preserve their own memory. This situation also requires revealing local stories that have been isolated for various reasons and making resources accessible to the public. Today, archival initiatives concentrate on the histories of historical artistic practices that a variety of factors, including wars, dictatorships, institutional neglect, and a hungry art market, have ignored, buried, or hijacked.⁵ They discuss ways of creating an alternative source of information when the archives are not publicly accessible for similar reasons.

^{Image: From Salt’s mapping project on Turkey's participation in international biennials. Courtesy of Sezin Romi.}

From the 1960s to the Present

The interest in archives in the field of visual arts is nothing new. Since the 1960s, artists in Europe and the US have used the archive as a tool to critique the transparency of art institutions. “More recently and in more diverse geographies, artworks appropriating practices of the documentary and the archival to question memory, the formation of subjectivities, identities, and the accountability of history have proliferated significantly in exhibitions and discourse.”⁶ In the post-1989 period, efforts to compile information and documents in the field of culture and art from former Soviet countries, isolated by the repression of the communist regime, became visible. In this period, artist initiatives such as SubREAL (Romania), < rotor > (Austria), Contemporary Art Archive and Centre for Art Analysis (Romania), Soros Center for Contemporary Arts (Hungary), as well as the attempts of institutions to document and research art in Central and Eastern Europe came to the fore.

From the 2000s onwards, discussions on archives became more visible. The constitution of archives, their preservation in the geographies they belong to and accessibility began to be discussed more widely. In 2002, the publication Interarchive⁷ was released. Documenting the legendary exhibition curated by Hans-Peter Feldmann and Hans Ulrich-Obrist at the Kunstraum der Universitaet Luneburg (Germany) between 1997 and 2002, the publication presented interviews, case studies, and research projects on contemporary art archives. In 2008, Okwui Enwezor curated the exhibition Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art at the International Center of Photography in New York. Taking its name from Jacques Derrida’s book, the exhibition dealt with memory, time, history, and identity, focusing on the notion of an archive.⁸

In 2007, a group of researchers, curators, and artists came together to form the Red Conceptualismos del Sur (RedCSur) network. Archives of art and political practices from the 1960s to the present day have been one of the main focuses of the network.⁹ Since 2009, Museo Reina Sofía in and Red Conceptualismos del Sur have collaborated in various projects such as research, publications, digitisation, and consolidation of archives, exhibitions, screening programmes, and seminars. They aimed to confront the dominant circuits of cultural production, from the South to the North, and replace them with horizontal itineraries that include South-South trajectories between archives, museums, researchers, artists, and institutions.¹⁰

Pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive) was launched in 2008. The archive consisted of videos documenting the changing social, political, economic, and cultural landscape of the cities in India, mostly from Mumbai and Bangalore. They were made publicly accessible for non-commercial use. In 2010, Pad.ma published their manifesto 10 Thesis on The Archive¹¹ in Beirut and aimed to draw attention to the preservation of the archives. Speak, Memory symposium was organised in Cairo by the Townhouse Gallery in the same year. It sought to discuss ways of recovering a vanishing history of the Middle East’s neglected cultural and artistic movements. The event brought together artists, curators, historians, writers, archivists, collectors, and museum professionals to engage in a critical discussion on archival initiatives from other regions that have traditionally been underrepresented in art historical narratives, including Latin America, Africa, and Asia.¹² Copyright, restoration, and preservation of archives at risk, archival technologies, research methods, and ways to promote access to national archives were discussed during the three-day conference.¹³

Institutions such as Asia Art Archive (Hong Kong), Salt (Turkey), and Indonesian Visual Art Archive (Indonesia) aimed to document the art history of their regions and share their studies with a wider audience of users and researchers. They have contributed to the circulation of the archive through their research projects and discussed the critical importance of the accessibility of the sources. More recently, new projects and initiatives aiming to constitute archives on the artistic environment of the Eastern Mediterranean countries have been initiated. Modern Art Iraq Archive (MAIA), the Atassi Foundation’s Modern Art of Syria Archive (MASA) project, and LAWHA, hosted by the Orient-Institut Beirut (OIB), focusing on art in Lebanon from 1943 to the present are among these attempts. These developments have been instrumental in transforming archives from being depositories of legal titles to places where historians hope to find the sediments of time itself.¹⁴ They aimed to unveil a narrative transcending the established histories conveyed through specific institutional and individual standpoints.

History Between the Archive and Past

Boris Groys states that history occurs in a space between the archive and life, between the past that is being collected and the reality where it is realised that not everything is collected:

Yet this zone where history occurs does not simply disintegrate, it does not become fictionalized. On the contrary, it becomes more and more homogeneous because the archives—partly through the electronic media—gradually merge to form one large world archive, a formalized universal memory. What we call history is the question after everything that is in the world but has not yet been incorporated into this universal memory. The dynamic process of history is the search for what is new—“new” not in the sense of a narrative but in the sense that it has not yet been included in the archive. The inclusion into the archive immediately redraws the boundary between the archive and its exterior and demands the archivization of what remains outside of its limits. The past is not “memory” but the archive itself, something that is factually present in reality. The future, on the other hand, is the task to expand the archive. Finally, the present is that of which one knows that it has not yet been included in the archival collection.¹⁵

Groys’s “task to expand the archive” raises questions about the role of institutions in generating knowledge. Research institutions are intermediaries in the dissemination of archives and thus of knowledge to the public. However, processing these archives and making them accessible requires an almost archaeological effort. To create a consistent narrative, it is necessary to trace the trajectory of the period’s artistic environment. This could be possible through comprehensive research in collaboration with the witnesses of the period and by bringing together information and documents from various sources. In this point, cataloguing is, in a sense, the identification of archival materials by the archivist, that is, the entry of all elements that provide information about the content and their presentation to the user. Cataloguing is also a “coincidence”: At times, relatively unknown exhibitions, spaces, or institutions are discovered during this process.¹⁶ Archive promises potential subtopics waiting to be explored and these topics pave the way for widening the scope of research. This situation also reflects the changing position of an archivist. Instead of merely overseeing archives waiting to be saved and revived by users, the archivist becomes a “researcher” and “content creator” specialised in different fields. As a researcher, historian, or editor, the archivist takes an active role in reflecting the multi-layered nature of the content, initiating new research projects, and compiling new sources.

^{Image: Artist İsmail Saray’s archive before the cataloguing and digitisation processes at Salt Research, Salt Beyoğlu, 2013. Photo: Duygu Demir.}

What If There Is No Archive?
While “contingencies” pave the way for new inquiries, they also reveal the absence and incompleteness of archives. What should be done when archives are not compiled and accessible? What could be alternative research methods and ways of access to information? What should be the roles of research institutions under these circumstances?

Curator, writer, and educator Amin Alsaden explains this situation through his own research experience on the history of modern art and architecture in Iraq.¹⁷ The inadequacy of the archives led the researcher to seek alternative sources for his research. He conducted interviews with surviving witnesses of the period residing in different parts of the world and accessed their archives. Simultaneously, he compiled resources from various public libraries and archives worldwide. In this way, he brought together extensive resources that he could access:

This was the most viable methodology I could devise: to build an alternative evidentiary body, the provenance of which I was confident. My archives encompass photographs, drawings, maps, handwritten documents (such as memoirs, notes, and letters), publications, postcards, and artworks, among other materials.¹⁸

During his long-term research, Alsaden formed one of the most comprehensive archives on the art history of Iraq. The researcher adopts the notion of the “counter-archive” rather than focusing on the absence of archives or their unsuitable preservation conditions. He demonstrates how alternative sources such as oral accounts, fieldwork, press coverage, memoirs, and private collections can shift the course of research and yield equally valuable alternative histories. Rather than being held to the idea of a traditional archive, Alsaden emphasises how transdisciplinary, layered, and unexpected narratives can be created beyond conventional history. Then, he comes up with an alternative approach that involves following everything and everyone that can shed light on the subject.¹⁹ This attempt by the researcher is also in line with the efforts of research institutions to document the history of their region and contribute to the production of knowledge. Vasıf Kortun, the founding director of Salt, explains this situation through the institution’s research-centric mission:

Focusing upon research and treating what we work with as potentially discursive objects, Salt becomes more involved in the actualisation of said objects’ capacity. As such, the question is not about custodianship but shaping novel narratives and telling multiple histories of art. There is never one story. History is not fixed, and any attempt to invent a canon is delusional or authoritarian or both delusional and authoritarian.²⁰

Research institutions serve as a point of reference when state archives are not accessible due to political circumstances, war, natural disasters, or various forms of neglect. They benefit from the memories and archives of the surviving witnesses of the period, and secondary sources such as publications, periodicals, or ephemera—similar to Alsaden’s efforts. By bringing them together, institutions aim to create a collective archive open to the public. They propose alternative ways such as mapping to retrieve knowledge when the archives are not compiled or accessible. They pursue research with outputs such as publications, visualisation projects, and public programmes, and aim to encourage their users to think beyond conventional boundaries. Whatever the format, the common objective is “putting into play different possibilities for history, for the archive, and for the transmission of knowledge.”²¹

Making resources accessible through an online catalogue or various platforms by the institutions is not the last word in the research. On the contrary, it is the beginning of the “task to expand the archive.” Archives are of value when they are layered with new outputs from different perspectives. Making archives available through distributed networks provides a digital platform for users to contribute, allowing wide digital access to any user without geographical barriers and enabling new links among each item in the archive. Then, the layering of the archive is encouraged. “Contingencies” spark new topics to be addressed and discussed for future research. In the long term, they enable the expansion of existing literature with new sources of reference. All of these factors contribute to the formation of an art history narrative from a broader perspective.

Sezin Romi is the Senior Librarian and Archivist at Salt (Istanbul, Turkey). Romi’s research area spans the development of book collections, research, and archive projects on the history of art in Turkey after the 1950s. She was involved in the research and visualisation of Salt’s projects It was a time of conversation (2012–13), From England with Love, İsmail Saray (2014–15), Idealist School, Productive Studio (2018), and History of the Painting and Sculpture Museums Association (2022). Having collaborated in the research processes of Salt’s various e-publications, Romi is the co-editor of İsmail Saray (2018), Sentez ve Montaj: Özer Kabaş Yazıları [Montage or Synthesis: Texts of Özer Kabaş] (2022), Serseri Mayın: Gürel Yontan [Loose Cannon: Gürel Yontan] (2023), and Venedik Bienali'nde Türkiye: 1895-2022 [Türkiye’s Participation in the Venice Biennial: 1895-2022] (2024). Her academic articles “Time of transformation: Research, resources, and access at SALT” (2022) and “Archiving as knowledge production: Research practices at Salt” (2024-25) were published by the Art Libraries Journal.

This essay takes its title from the architect Sam Stephenson's quote about the archive, which paved the way for his twenty-year research on the photojournalist W. Eugene Smith.

Previous versions of this essay were published in Turkish in Sanat Dünyamız, no. 202 (September/October 2024): 12-18; and in Argonotlar (December 19, 2024).

Notes

^{1. Maureen Connor, “(Con)Testing resources” in Making Art History: A changing discipline and its institutions, ed. Elizabeth C. Mansfield (New York, London: Routledge, 2007), 245.}

^{2. James Elkins, Stories of Art (New York: Routledge, 2002), 89.}

^{3. Ibid., 117.}

^{4. Nour Asalia, “The Archive in Art Art in the Archive”, translation: Robin Moger, Atassi Foundation, accessed: August 16, 2024, https://www.atassifoundation.com/features/the-archive-in-art-art-in-the-archive.}

^{5. Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, "Lost and found: On artists, artworks and archives," in Speak, Memory: on archives and other strategies of (re)activation of cultural memory, ed. Laura Carderera (Cairo, 2010), 13.}

^{6. “The Archive As Method”, LIKE A FEVER, ed. Chantal Wong, Chan Chingyan Janet, December 1, 2012, accessed: August 16, 2024, https://aaa.org.hk/en/like-a-fever/like-a-fever/archive-as-method.}

^{7. Interarchive: Archival Practices and Sites in the Contemporary Art Field, ed. Hans-Peter Feldmann, Hans Ulricht-Obrist, Diethelm Stoller and Ulf Wuggenig, Beatrice von Bismarck (Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2002).}

^{8. Kathy Carbone, “Archival Art: Memory Practices, Interventions, and Productions”, Curator: The Museum Journal, Vol. 2, No. 63 (May 2020), 260.}

^{9. Archivos del Común III: ¿Archivos inapropiables?, ed. Fernanda Carvajal, Moira Cristiá, Javiera Manzi (Buenos Aires: Red Conceptualismos del Sur, 2022), 305.}

^{10. “Red Conceptualismos del Sur”, accessed August 16, 2024, https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/museo-tentacular/red-conceptualismos-sur.}

^{11. Pad.ma, 10 Thesis on The Archive, Beirutt, 2010, accessed August 16, 2024, https://pad.ma/documents/OH.}

^{12. Laura Carderera, "Foreword," in Speak, Memory: on archives and other strategies of (re)activation of cultural memory, ed. Laura Carderera, Kahire, 2010, 9.}

^{13. “Next Steps: The Archive Map", Speak, Memory: on archives and other strategies of (re)activation of cultural memory, ed. Laura Carderera (Cairo, 2010), 94.}

^{14. “Introduction” in The Big Archive, ed. Sven Spieker (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 6.}

^{15. Sven Spieker, “Boris Groys: The Logic of Collecting,” ArtMargins Online, January 15, 1999, accessed August 16, 2024, https://artmargins.com/boris-groys-the-logic-of-collecting/.}

^{16. İz Öztat and Sezin Romi, “Archives in The Making, for The Making” in Stories and Threads: Perspectives on Art Archives, eds. Sara Buraya Bond, Jennifer Fitzgibbon, Sezin Romi (L'Internationale Online, 2022), 37, accessed August 16, 2024, https://internationaleonline.org/publications/stories-and-threads-perspectives-on-art-archives.}

^{17. Amin Alsaden, “The Counter-Archive: Eluding the Erasures of Iraq's Successive Wars,” The American Archivist, V: 86, No: 2 (Fall/Winter 2023), 424, accessed August 16, 2024, https://doi.org/10.17723/2327-9702-86.2.419.}

^{18. Ibid., 424.}

^{19. Ibid., 424.}

^{20. Vasıf Kortun, “Questions on institutions,” January 12, 2018, Salt Blog, https://saltonline.org/en/2009/questions-on-institutions?blog.}

^{21. Miguel A. López, “South-South intersections: Southern Conceptualism Network and the political possibilities of local histories” in Speak, Memory: on archives and other strategies of (re)activation of cultural memory, ed. Laura Carderera (Cairo, 2010), 49.}