With and Against the Archive

Archives are not only powerful tools of domination from above: they have also been used from below, as sites of resistance against erasure. Especially in postcolonial, postpartition and postwar contexts, contemporary artists doing memory work often navigate a tension between appropriating the position of the archivist as an emancipatory act and problematizing that very position from a transnational perspective. Rebecca Hanna John sheds light on this understudied aspect of the archival turn in art, showing how Akram Zaatari, Jumana Manna, and Farah Saleh critically engage with archives in order to tell stories of transnational connections, trajectories, and entanglements.