Archival Sites of Speculation: Storying the Silence

Austrian Association of Women Artists (VBKÖ)
January 12th – February 11, 2024

Curated by Georgia Holz, and Stephanie Misa

“Silences have frequencies. I want us to ask, ‘How can we learn to hear silences that echo loudly, softly, or in code?’” – Panashe Chugumadzi, “Hearing the Silence”

The exhibition Archival Sites of Speculation: Storying the Silence seeks to contribute to critical discussions on the archive as a space of artistic research and the experimental methods used in exploring convergent and divergent histories. It creates an experimental space within which methodologies of proximity and engagement with archives can be divulged. The participating artists seek to negotiate the constitutive limits of the archive. The artworks envisage what is missing from documentation, testimony or kept historical material. With these methods, historical and archival research is combined with a critical fabulation to make productive sense of absence within an archive.

This exhibition is a culmination of a year-long research project Anonymity and Absence – Archival Sites of Speculation, supported by the Program for Inter- and Transdisciplinary Projects in Art and Research (INTRA), at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. The project seeks to contribute to critical discussions on the archive as a space of artistic research, crucially asking how one performs the missing parts of an archive, and how can we weave alternative and unwritten histories into what is present within a collection.

With works by Katharina Birkmann, Maja Bojanic, nathan c’ha, Mark Chehodaiev, Alessandra Ferrini, Onyeka Igwe, Belinda Kazeem-Kaminski, Ivana Lazic, Arina Nekliudova, Carmiña Tarilonte Rodríguez, Elske Rosenfeld & Olia Sosnovskaya, SKGAL (Nina Höchtl, Julia Wieger), Tsai-Ju Wu, Lorenz Zenleser

Photos by Daniel Hill