Artists and records: moving history and memory

Abstract

Over the past several decades the archival turn in contemporary art practice has produced a panoply of visual, performance and literary art works that activate the archives. Artists working within this turn often employ critical-aesthetic strategies to records in order to reconsider historical narratives, expose missing or silenced voices, interrogate modes of representation, or investigate relations between official and personal memory through art-making processes and works. Other artists combine these strategies with socially and community-engaged practices, as did poet Kaia Sand and interdisciplinary artist Garrick Imatani, who were artists-in-residence at the City of Portland Archives and Records Center in Portland, Oregon from 2013 to 2015. This paper explores how Sand and Imatani affectively engaged history and memory with a collection of police surveillance records, transforming records of control into works of art that commemorate the lives and work of activists. Employing interdisciplinary thinking about the nature, use and movement of records through time, space and circumstances, this paper argues that records are affectively charged objects able to evoke sensations and feelings, orient thought, and stimulate ideas about ways in which they can be used, which in turn generate new connections, relations and possibilities between the past, present and future.