Archiv Newsletter No. 14

April 2025

Theorist and curator Doreen Mende in conversation with Maurin Dietrich and Gloria Hasnay on the subjectivity of the institution and its archive.

The Archive as ... a Recording Device

Maurin Dietrich Over the past three years, we have begun to interrogate the archive of the Kunstverein, tracing its paths and traditions, to arrive in a present from which we can cast a glance towards the future. But why even do archival work at a Kunstverein? And what are we actually talking about when we speak of an archive in the context of the Kunstverein’s history in Munich? Is it not the present, an unfixed contemporary situated in the now, the almost ahistorical, that sets the Kunstverein apart from and against other institutional forms, such as museums and their collections?

Doreen Mende In contrast to museums, Kunstvereine don’t maintain collections of artworks in adherence with an institutional collecting mandate that serves as a mode of chronological historiography. In collecting, decisions are made subjectively, or by a subjective collective, which orients itself towards an art historical canon, or indeed, speculates on its future status within the canon. With a Kunstverein, historiography cannot be gauged according to the value of its collection. On the contrary, the archive provides information about the conditions of institutionalization without a claim to ownership. Archiving follows a different process. On the one hand, with reference to documents, the labor economies of the various actors (directors, curators, artists, assistants, accountants, board members, and so forth) become apparent. On the other hand, the production conditions of exhibition practices can also be recognized as infrastructures for the facilitation of artistic as well as curatorial action. Therefore, with regard to archiving in an art institution—and in this sense, museums and Kunstvereine scarcely differ—I would speak of the subjectivity of the institution itself, which emerges out of a network of activities in accordance with art-making: correspondences, insurance policies, drafts of contracts, invoices, design drafts, recordings or transcriptions of discussions like this one, project sketches, minutes of meetings, sick notes, invitation cards, newspaper articles—so, the paratexts of art, which produce an archival and non-hierarchical construct. With that, the archive goes beyond what is publicly visible in the artwork and indeed the exhibition.

MD In view of this concept of the subjectivity of an institution, you illustrated the difference between a collection that emerges through one (potentially collective) subjectivity and an archive that embodies the subjectivity of the institution itself. Could you elaborate on that?

DM Archiving has the capacity to produce an instituting subjectivity that is always also collective and collaborative, though indeed conflictual, as well. In any case, it is clear that an institution like the Kunstverein is embedded in social contexts. Hence its subjectivity emerges in tension with history as an incomplete process. Let us consider the archive as a recording device; not only for recording meetings, hard facts, or documents, but also the gaps in transmission, the background murmur, the illegible, the poetics of the everyday in the form of marginal notes, or a phone number without a dialing code— for conflict or an undocumented memory. The archive brings together not only that which can be assigned exclusively to the sayable—in the sense that Michel Foucault described a theory of the archive in the twentieth century—but in it there are also inscriptions that have tremendous relevance in the moment of being archived, though they may be consciously concealed, omitted, erased, or vulnerable to the act of public exposure. Or the other way around, inscriptions that appear to have erroneously less meaning in the moment of archiving, but whose enormous knowledge is always latent constituting a “critical-poetic virus” —as the philosopher, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist Suely Rolnik puts it.[1] We may understand such a virus, thinking with Rolnik, to carry an “unconscious repression” that is “inscribed with the experience of that articulation, which waits for the right conditions to reactivate itself and escape from its confinement.”[2] It turns the authority over knowledge upside down: Neither the director nor the “archon”decides for the archive to reactivate its narratives. Instead, the “critical-poetic virus” activates the archive’s own agency to mobilize and “infect,” epistemically speaking, the host—that I suggest to situate within or nearby the institutional body. In other words, the work with the archive is linked to the conditions of social processes, through which the para- and infrastructures of the Verein become visible.

Your work on the Kunstverein’s archive, which you are undertaking through both artistic and curatorial means, particularly in collaboration with the current archivists, Johanna Klingler and Jonas von Lenthe, seems to me akin to the investigation into an institution’s subjectivity. Your initiative to set up an Archive Space as an active site within the institution makes the processual nature of the archive apparent. I’m interested here in the reasons why, at this precise moment, there are “the right conditions” for this archive virus to activate and move towards visibility? In this process, history is recognized firstly as an incomplete process, in the way that Okwui Enwezor did with The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945–1994 at Munich’s Museum Villa Stuck in 2001, as a postcolonial constellation and as a demand of European museums. Secondly, in the context of the 200-year history of Kunstverein München, it is also a matter of accountability of institutional subjectivity. Accountability could be translated into German as “Verantwortung” (responsibility), but also as “Haftung” (liability) in the sense of “being called to account,” or else as the capacity to provide a response to the violence of sovereignty over meaning, to ignorance, to structural racisms and fascisms, which can be found in the archives of almost every bourgeois institution in Europe. Why is the “account-ability” of the Kunstverein important in this precise moment? Why are there the “right conditions” for it now? Would this be a process of de-/re-institutionalization?

Gloria Hasnay An archive also always stands for a specific way of conceiving reality, which is determined and managed by only a few. This necessarily results in a power relation between that which is preserved, and by whom—and that which is not. Contemporary archival practice is deeply ambivalent toward the rhetoric of truth and authenticity, that is, the supposedly “real.” In this context, the construction as well as the transmission of “the real” is implemented through the tension between representation and production, between the public and the private, between the objective and the subjective.[3] So, what if archives—unconsciously or consciously—work against something or someone?

DM The power and violence inherent to the archive is frequently, and quite rightly, criticized. However, the concept of the archive changed significantly at the end of the twentieth century. Here you address what I find to be an extremely important capacity of the archive: its being both one thing and another. Less in the sense of a dialectic, which leads to something third or synthetic, the archive rather always entails a conflictual tension. I would add to this the capacity for the co-existence of “exhibition” and “inhibition.” It’s not possible to display an archive. Only some excerpts of the archive are visible (exhibition), while others remain invisible (inhibition), or for which the “right conditions” have either already been created or are still in process. This characteristic is connected to a constellation of different forms of practice, which produce a diversity of networks within the archive.

MD This constellation of different forms of practice sums up the last three years of archival work very well. Previously you referred to the work of those actors whose presence can only be detected in the archive. It’s a very positivistic notion of the archive that they will find visibility there. However, as Foucault wrote in 1969, “the archive is first the law of what can be said.”[4] You refer to this in your text “The Undutiful Daughter’s Concept of Archival Metabolism” (2018), subsequently posing the question: “[w]hat if that which refuses to be forgotten escapes language? Or what if [it] speaks a language that the law’s system fails to recognize?” You thereby raise the question of how to deal with everything “that cannot be said” and its capacity for resistance.[5] Following from this, the question arises for me as to how speechlessness is reflected in the archive at all, or how it becomes visible, when we are dealing with documents that are based on language, numbers, or signs. Is it only the lack of it that presents itself in relation to what already exists? Or, put differently: does the archive “help” us to remember, or does it contribute to our forgetting?

DM Your critique of positivistic thinking is an important point, since the archive is obviously not a universal remedy. It can neither fill the gaps, as though there had never been this violence of omission, nor can the archive retrieve what has passed. Over the past years I have been trying to negotiate the asynchronous simultaneity of opposites within the archive with the notion of archival metabolism. My thoughts are informed by two things: firstly, working with non-institutional archives because of the absence of their content (in the form of “historical knowledge”) in museums, universities, and libraries.[6] Secondly, situating the archive in relation to political-systemic ruptures as they occurred worldwide around 1990. Here I am not interested in the competition between the institutional and the non-institutional archive, nor is it about the possibility of correcting or completing a historical narrative. Much rather, it has become clear to me that the activation of an archive in the present does not result from a copy-paste practice of set pieces from the past into the present. As much as we need the “history lesson,” which must be about the most accurate reconstruction of historical moments on the basis of facts, dates, and documents, the archive itself is subject to the challenges of transgenerational transfers. The ”archival metabolism” attempts to recognize this transgenerational transfer, which is characterized by misunderstandings, different languages, and terms, decontextualizations, untranslatability, and speechlessness as part of a transhistorical knowledge process. In this sense, remembering is not in competition with forgetting, but is rather a remembering of forgetting—an intertwined process.

GH When we started working at the Kunstverein, we were aware that there was a “before,” but also that there is an “after.” In discussions with the various authors in this publication, along with former colleagues, we kept coming back to this point that something cannot be considered conclusive even at the moment of its publication. The latter is a stocktaking, an interim position in all its ephemerality. Our view on the archive changes constantly as we find new documents or come across new people. What we are interested in with our work here, as with our curatorial interests in general, is how an institution constitutes itself through all of its paratextual as well as infrastructural elements, and with that, how it goes far beyond its public program. Where are we situated and who is working within these structures? For that reason, we always look back on past moments of politicization and reconfiguration in the Kunstverein’s history since they give us information about a form of institution-building. One example is the exhibition Transform the world! Poetry must be made by all!, which was organized with students of the Academy of Fine Arts Munich in 1970. The students were publicly protesting the ongoing employment, without any review and reconsideration, of longstanding staff members at the Academy and other universities following the end of World War II.[7] A more recent example for the politicization of the Kunstverein would be No River to Cross (2021) by Bea Schlingelhoff, whose exhibition included a proposal of a change of statutes, which was negotiated at an extraordinary meeting of members.[8]
Trinh T. Minh-ha’s concept of “speaking nearby,” as opposed to “speaking for” or “speaking about,” appears as a useful frame of thought for considering desirable methods of archival work.[9] We don’t want to talk about history and its actors but rather with them, alongside them. The narrative should be ceded, so that in doing so, one’s own position (and subjectivity) opposite that which is being discussed and collected can be simultaneously disclosed and problematized. This may also bring to the fore the difficulty of an alliance that can be perceived as non-conforming and threatening for some and not for others.

DM The archive’s potential is never exhausted if we refrain from searching it for documents solely as pieces of evidence—since this often does not yield results, while “potential histories” proliferate nonetheless.[10] Could we find circumstantial evidence for the fact that the Kunstverein’s program, for example, reflected the partitioning of the African continent within the framework of the colonial Berlin Conference of 1884/85 under the leadership of Otto von Bismarck with 13 other representatives of imperial states or great powers? Is the founding of the Initiative Schwarzer Menschen in Deutschland (Initiative of Black People in Germany) in 1986 reflected in the archive somehow? How does the Kunstverein München archive address the dissolution of the GDR around 1990? Does the archive whisper about it from the sidelines? Has the archive forbidden the languages in which these voices speak?

A longer version of the conversation first appeared in 2023 as part of the anniversary publication FOR NOW - 200 Years Kunstverein München.

Doreen Mende is a curator, theorist, and director of the Research Department at Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. Since 2015, she is associate professor of the Visual Arts Department of HEAD Genève in Switzerland, where she conducted the project Decolonizing Socialism Entangled Internationalism (2019–2024), funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, in collaboration with blaxTARLINES in Ghana, Oralities Research Lab in India, Van AbbeMuseum in the Netherlands, a.o. She is co-editor of Navigation Beyond Vision (with Tom Holert and e-flux Journal), and has published numerous scholarly and essayistic articles with Sternberg Press, MIT Press, e-flux Journal, The Oxford Handbook for Communist Visual Cultures, Bloomsbury Publishing, Jerusalem Quarterly, Archive Books, and spector books. She is a founding member of the Harun Farocki Institute in Berlin.