Since 2005, Ines Schaber has been pursuing the idea of a “working archive,” an archive not intended for storing documents and knowledge, but which rather constitutes the space of current knowledge production. Starting from the assumption that the archive is not only a place of storage, but equally a place of production where our relationship to the past is materialized and where our present becomes inscribed in the future, 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 in Mal d’archive (1995; Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, 1996). For the exhibition at Camera Austria, her first institutional solo show in Austria, Schaber forges new links between series from recent years: Culture Is Our Business(2004), Picture mining (2006), Unnamed Series (with Stefan Pente, since 2008), and Dear Jadwa (2009). The exhibition constructs a space in which visitors are confronted with the fact that archives do not document any past(s), but instead raise the constitutional democratic question about how the present is written.

Link

https://2018.steirischerherbst.at/en/collateral-program/camera-austria