Notes on Archives 5

Unnamed Series features a succession of artworks provoked by photographs that art historian Aby Warburg had taken as part of his travels to the Hopi Indians in 1898. Warburg noted that the images should never be published, but in the 1990s, the Warburg Institute in London made the images available as part of a glossy hardcover book. The book circulates around a series of aspects that this famous encounter evokes.

Ines Schaber is a visual artist based in Berlin and Los Angeles. For fifteen years, she has worked on the notion of the archive through which she has examined a set of questions underlying archival photographic practices. The projects, case studies, writings, and artistic works she has produced in relation to these questions seek to trace new or alternate archival practices. Another publication that is part of this field of interest was a collaboration with the sociologist Avery Gordon titled The Workhouse (Brei­tenau Room) (2014), produced as part of documenta 13. Since 2014, she teaches at the California Institute of the Arts, in the School of Art, Program of Photography and Media.

Stefan Pente, Ines Schaber

Notes on Archives 5
Unnamed Series

Published by Archive Books

and Camera Austria Graz

Edited by Ines Schaber

Contributions by Stefan Pente, Ines Schaber and Karen Peters

Design by form und sinn

Softcover, English, 72 pages

ISBN 978-3-943620-89-4

Euros 12,00

Notes on Archives 1–5

Notes on Archives is a series of publications by artist Ines Schaber about archives and the practices we conduct in relation to them. Produced over the course of more than ten years, the publications feature a series of case studies, research, concrete projects, and reflections on the questions and problems that image archives pose today. The aim of the work is not to find or create another institutional archive per se, but to develop a practice in which the set of problems that archives produce is in fact part of the process one engages in.
The artist understands the archive as a place of negotiation and writing. “There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation,” writes Jacques Derrida.