Whitechapel Gallery, London – 30 January 2014

 

Curated by Mnemoscape, supported by the Whitechapel Gallery,

the Journal of Visual Culture, the University of Westminster and

The International Association for Visual Culture.

 

 

 

Autobiography and the Archive was a film screening that featured three films:

1942 (Poznan) by Uriel Orlow, Why Colonel Bunny Was Killed by Miranda Pennell and Stages of Mourning by Sarah Pucill. The screening explored the links between archives, collective memory and personal history.

 

In particular, the films investigated the figure of the archive through the lenses of autobiographical narratives. In different ways, the three films explore actual, latent or personal archives as liminal spaces where the borders between public and private become blurry and confused. The autobiographical motif offers both a key to access the disproportionate and gigantic dimension of historical archives and a possibility

to establish a more personal connection with the narrated past.

 

This screening marked the launch of The Archives Issue (Journal of Visual Culture), which features contributions from Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme

(with Tom Holert), susan pui san lok, Marquard Smith, Uriel Orlow, Chris Horrocks, Shezad Dawood (and Mark Bartlett), Sas Mays, Nina Lager Vestberg, Gary Hall,

and Trevor Paglen and Juliette Kristensen.