"How can an archive be both a record of its time and a living organism shaped by its histories? In an era when contemporary culture tends to privilege immediacy, the archive offers resistance by inviting slowness, friction, and a longer view. In this three-part series, Document turns to curators Ruba Katrib, Jovanna Venegas, and Drew Sawyer, photographed on location, wearing Vowels, the brand that finds its own voice through archival research."
"For Jovanna Venegas, Associate Curator at SculptureCenter and former Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at SFMOMA, a single poem, even a conversation or an object, can trigger a quest of curatorial research spanning continents and disciplines. Her introduction to archival practice began at home. At her parents' photo studio in Tijuana, her mother kept a 30-year chronicle of the city's social life. This early encounter with collective memory shaped Venegas's curatorial sensibility, attuned to the ways artists preserve, embody, or reimagine their own histories."
The archive functions as both a physical record and a living concept that resists immediacy by inviting slowness, friction, and extended perspective. Curators center archival practice as a method for commissioning and exhibiting work rooted in institutional holdings, collective memory, and ephemeral traces. Personal histories can initiate expansive research: a poem, conversation, or object can catalyze investigations across continents and disciplines. Early encounters with family photo archives condition sensitivities to how artists preserve, embody, and reimagine histories. Curatorial practice can privilege vulnerability and risk, allowing knowledge to move through bodies, places, and gestures as a generative process.
Read at Documentjournal
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