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PROGRAMS
The Archive by Ruth Rosengarten
Lecture
date
Aug 24/Aug 24, 2014
location
Handover Museum, Macau
The passage of memory through the evocative objects that contain and represent it is a complex and often tangential one. The
aspiration towards completion that an archive embodies – its dream of conclusive discipline – is always a shattered promise. At the intersection of testimony and fetish, of bureaucratic and administrative reason and personal recollection, the archive – as methodology, or as medium – has been a central trope in the production of art over the past half century, though its roots lie in the earlier twentieth-century vanguards.
In this session, and taking as our point of departure the Berardo Collection Museum in Lisbon, we shall explore the museological and curatorial potentialities offered by the space that opens out between memory (individual and collective) and the archive. Is the archive a placeholder for memories, or does the systematic order it seems to offer simply put memory to rest? Crucially, is the archive the holder of memories, or does it express the erasure of living memory in the name of collected data? In the context of a museum display, what is the role of a document, and what, if any, archival task does it perform?

Ruth Rosengarten

Artist and Art Historian, Research Associate at VIAD, University of Johannesburg Artist, art historian and independent researcher/curator Ruth Rosengarten was born in Israel and moved early to Johannesburg, South Africa, where she read for a Fine Arts degree before moving to London. She holds an MA and PhD in the History of Art from The Courtauld Institute of Art (London). After making Lisbon her home for twenty years, Rosengarten now lives and works in Cambridgeshire, UK. In her current studio practice she focuses on photography and drawing. She has exhibited her work in various countries and has published widely in both English and Portuguese, mostly on contemporary art and photography, and her most recent work includes explorations of 'the archive' and the effects of digital technologies on photographic practice. In addition to having curated several exhibitions, Rosengarten has taught both theory and practice at various universities in the UK, Portugal and South Africa and is now Research Associate at the Research Centre Visual Identities in Art and Design (VIAD), University of Johannesburg.

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