The Swell Gallery presents
RELATIONAL ARCHIVESA group show featuring work by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Paula Morales, Juan Pablo Pacheco, and Aaron Wilder

Reception: Thursday, March 10, 2016, 7 pm - 9 pm


Exhibition Dates:ʉ۬March 7 - 25, 2016

Swell Gallery
2565 3rd Street, 2nd Floor
San Francisco, CA 94107

RELATIONAL ARCHIVES is an exhibition that explores the different ways of constructing, interpreting, and re-interpreting an archive in an era of intangibility where the physicality of documents and images is no longer a priority. How can we understand our relationship to the past when traditional archives start losing their authority, and the boundaries between the simulated and the real become increasingly blurred? How do we understand the impulse to record in a time where space and time are shattered through the digital and its relationship to global environmental, social, and political crises?

Our common understanding of the archive is interpretative, meaning that it is based upon our own relation to the objects and information displayed. RELATIONAL ARCHIVES plays with fiction, reenactment, and imaginative intervention to engage with the meaning of the images/objects, not necessarily with the factuality of the events that these are supposed to speak to. Each artist in the show will be accessing, interpreting, and curating the archive of a different artist in the show. Through this collaborative exercise, we seek to open a dialogue about limitations of partiality and the subjectivity of authorship.