2016 Relational Archives Collaboration

The Swell Gallery in San Francisco, CA, USA presented RELATIONAL ARCHIVES, a collaborative group show featuring work by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Paula Morales, Juan Pablo Pacheco, and Aaron Wilder from March 7th to 25th, 2016. RELATIONAL ARCHIVES was an exhibition that explored 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 when 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 accessed, interpreted, and curated the archive of a different artist in the show. Through this collaborative exercise, the artists sought to open a dialogue about limitations of partiality and the subjectivity of authorship.

Aaron Wilder's reflection on this experience can be read here.

Interview of Paula Morales on Working with Zulfikar's Archive (not available)

Interview of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto on Working with Juan Pablo's Archive on Vimeo

Interview of Aaron Wilder on Working with Paula's Archive on Vimeo

Interview of Juan Pablo Pacheco on Working with Aaron's Archive on Vimeo (not available)

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