Archaeology of the Self: Archives, Anarchives & the Artist

The Archaeology of the Self: Archives, Anarchives and the Artist, curated by Dr. Arshiya M. Lokhandwalla invites artists to explore their own practices, digging into personal archives that tie the past, present, and future through their body of work. The archive, for the artist, serves as a source of inspiration and material, engaging with historical and cultural artifacts like photographs, documents, and objects. Art historian Hal Foster explains that archival artists aim to make historical information, often displaced or lost, physically present, while Walter Benjamin suggests that archives are not merely repositories of facts, but also sites of cultural memory. As we move swiftly into the future, our need to engage with the past through archives grows stronger, with the exhibition also addressing anarchives—unrecorded historical material.

The exhibition features nine contemporary artists—Anita Dube, Astha Butail, Jitish Kallat, Mithu Sen, Nikhil Chopra, Pushpamala N, Raqs Media Collective, Thukral & Tagra, and Vivan Sundaram — who each reflect on the archive in unique ways. They explore it as a site of resistance, challenging dominant narratives and power structures, and presenting archives not as static entities but as constantly evolving. Raqs Media Collective revisits earlier works, while Kallat and Sundaram merge past and future. Sen and Pushpamala N highlight hidden archives and the struggle to bring them to the public consciousness, while Dube and Thukral & Tagra address the volume of information an archive holds and its potential for censorship. Finally, Butail and Chopra explore the concept of anarchive through oral traditions and performance-based works, reimagining the role of archives in shaping cultural memory and future history.

For additional details about the artists and the exhibition, click Download Catalogue