Sara Callahan
Sara Callahan is an art historian, based at Stockholm University. Her book Art + Archive: Understanding the Archival Turn in Contemporary Art was published in January 2022 by Manchester University Press in their series “Rethinking art’s histories”. Callahan currently works on a project that investigates how photographic motion studies from the late-19th and early 20th century have been used in different contexts over time, and to what effect.
Session
The archive has been one of the most persistent buzz-words in the international art world since the mid-1990s. While some claim that it is used with such abandon that its usefulness is questionable at best, others view the archive as an indication of an important theoretical framework, necessary to make sense of some of the most important artworks from this period and beyond. My presentation considers the archive art phenomenon through the lens of its historical roots, and asks to what extent archival theory can address the most pressing concerns of the present moment: from post-critique to environmental destruction, big data surveillance and so-called new materialism.