Exhibition

Archival Chain Reactions: Between and Beyond Archivo Pinto mi Raya, re.act.feminism, City of Women

Lydia Hamann & Kaj Osteroth, Admiring Polvo de Gallina Negra, mistresses of feminist art, oil on canvas, 115x160cm, 2016

With works by Milijana Babić, selma banich, Laura Anderson Barbata, CADA, Graciela Carnevale, Ana Čigon, Diamela Eltit, Exterra XX, Else Gabriel, Regina José Galindo, Anna Bella Geiger, Lydia Hamann & Kaj Osteroth, María Teresa Hincapié, Ana Victoria Jiménez, Magali Lara, María Evelia Marmolejo, Mónica Mayer, Lorena Orozco, Giulia Palladini & Rodolfo Suárez Molnar, Polvo de Gallina Negra (Maris Bustamante & Mónica Mayer), Producciones y Milagros Agrupación Feminista (Rotmi Enciso & Ina Riaskov), Jesusa Rodríguez and Liliana Felipe, Maja Smrekar, Gabriele Stötzer, Cecilia Vicuña, Lorena Wolffer.

The exhibition Archival Chain Reactions emerged from a collaborative project dedicated to connecting and activating important yet precarious archives of feminist art. By addressing the historical erasure of women* and gender-nonconforming, queer feminist artists, this project aims to counter the threat of disappearing feminist archives and emphasises the necessity of networking and exchange among archives in different global contexts. The project brings together Pinto mi Raya (Mexico City), an archive built by the artists Mónica Mayer and Víctor Lerma, focusing on experimental art production and writing since the 1970s with a particular emphasis on performance and feminist artists; the project re.act.feminism (Berlin), which has been travelling as a living performance archive across Europe in several instalments since 2008; and City of Women (Ljubljana), with its significant, but dispersed archive accumulated over 31 years of festival and programme activities.

Rather than viewing the archive solely as a static repository, Archival Chain Reactions highlights it as a vital, performative infrastructure for contemporary art, that requires continuous care, maintenance, and exchange. The exhibition has been developed through a yearlong dynamic dialogue between the three archives, shifting between deep dives and bird’s-eye views. What has come into focus are some selected works and documents and a set of methods – fostering mutual relations, resonances and effects – which we have termed “archival chain reactions”. Methods that can be encountered across the three archives are infiltrating and lubricating, nesting and anchoring or travelling and circulating. For more insights view this commissioned video featuring a conversation between the theorist Giulia Palladini and the artist and archivist Mónica Mayer, revealing an intimate and critical reflection on feminist archival practices, and on the particularity of the Archivo Pinto mi Raya, in which art and life continuously overlap, ceaselessly bringing together the domestic and political dimension of inhabiting and defending a feminist archive.