Liquid Archives – Notes on Relations, Ruptures and Silences

December 10, 2009 to February 03, 2010

“History is the fruit of power, but power itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous. The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots.” Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History.

Opening in December 2009, the exhibition Liquid Archives – Notes on Relations, Ruptures and Silences, presents new and existing works of emerging and established contemporary artists.

The central concern of the exhibition is to critically rethink the production of history, particularly with regard to the production of national histories which are characterized by a focus on the narration of shifting national borders, their administrative structures and leading individuals. A critical investigation of ocean-space, as a counter-space to land territory thus enables a productive change in perspectives. Ocean-space functions under its own paradigms and is embedded in complex relations and that are inherently multi-literal, or rather, global. It therefore comes with a wider spatial and temporal trajectory, one that enables new modes of access to global history as well as to the present moment. As an historical space, the ocean recounts of the formation of the global capitalist world-system. However, as an imaginary space it highlights infinite stories of relations, but also of boundaries.
The fine line between truth and fiction, between the reception of histories and their production, that inevitably is characterized by an uneven access to the means of the production of history (language, translation and its mediation), are fundamental structural aspects that are equally relevant in exhibition-making. By evoking an imaginary, by staging a narrative, an exhibition fictionalizes the real and thereby is itself a part of the production of history.

The exhibition Liquid Archives – Notes on Relations, Ruptures and Silences aims to make these structural antinomies that entail their own discourse of power, visible though curatorial concept and exhibition design.