“Archive Fever–Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art” is the name of a thoughtful, critical exhibition at the International Center of Photography in NYC. The exhibition brings into the foreground a new engagement with the “archive”–not as a place where old documents lie awaiting discovery but as an active critical practice pondering the ways in which images are put together and acquire historical meaning. It makes for a wide-ranging and highly stimulating collection of works, all of them introduced with stylish, incisive ease by the curator Okwui Enwezor.

Here is a review of the exhibit by the ever-reliable Holland Cotter.

I was struck again and again by the ways in which artists with quite contrasting styles have been so preoccupied with the manner in which iconic images as well as more obscure records shape and become a part of our collective memory–and I was especially grateful that the curator’s eloquent readings of these works, assembled in this manner for the first time, deftly outlined the differences between them. Zoe Leonard’s parody of the archive being quite distinct from Glenn Ligon’s no less brilliant orchestration of dialogue around Mapplethorpe’s images; or Harun Farocki’s presentation of the videograms from the Romanian revolution presenting media critique in a manner quite separate from Anri Sala’s recovery of a video-interview tape from his mother’s militant past, its words recovered with the help of lip-reading conducted by deaf-mutes; or Eyal Sivan’s re-editing of the Eichmann trial tapes from Fazal Sheikh’s immensely impressive project of bringing together images and words from Afghanistan’s brutalized past. Highly recommended!

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