To Conjure

“The archive often situates us in conversations around its capacity to hold knowable histories and collective memory. We are prompted to dissect its foundation and ownership, while lamenting overflow and absences. 

As much as there seems to be a saturation of discourse about the archive in recent years, I do believe that exhaustive conversations around archives still offer a place to discuss what an archive for the future looks like. Where do new archives emerge, and how do we tend to them? What of our familial, collective, and imaginative resources do we compel into the space of the archive? 

Shifting what constitutes an archive, artists are becoming more interested in what resides on the periphery of their institutional enclosures. The work in this show engages errant archives in the service of uncovering latent futures. Its artists locate archives in the elsewhere, the otherwise, the elusive, the familial, the obscure, the speculative, the sonic, and the hereafter. Each challenges established linear structures and broadens our understanding of what the archive can be, activating new conduits to summon spaces for storing, inhabiting, and holding time within its tenuous boundaries. 

In the most politically radical sense of the word, the artists in this show are conjurers. They conjure a presence previously unseen but always present. They conjure to affirm the possibility of something more. They are conjuring not in service of resolution within the archive, but for its expansion. They conjure to create, to question, to breathe, to witness, to spill, to break, to convene, to cut, to cloak, to name, to exist.”