Margaret Tali has co-edited the anthology ‘Archives and Disobedience. Changing Tactics of Visual Culture in Eastern Europe‘ (Estonian Academy of Arts Press, 2016). This anthology deals with the role of archives in visual culture, art and public discourse. It includes theoretical and artistic contributions that tackle archives from different critical positions by bringing together the notions of ‘archive’ and ‘disobedience’.
Archives and Disobedience. Changing Tactics of Visual Culture in Eastern Europe (Estonian Academy of Arts Press, 2016)
Edited by Margaret Tali and Tanel Rander
This edited collection deals with the role of archives in visual culture, art and public discourse. It includes theoretical and artistic contributions that tackle archives from different positions bringing together the notions of ‘archive’ and ‘disobedience’. Archive is understood here as a form of governing and a means of identity politics that controls the dominant system of values, behaviour of people, use of language and subjectivity. This approach dwells on presupposition that archives as discursive practices not only preserve and accumulate knowledge, but also shape and create subject and object positions.
Visual culture used by artists and social movements has acquired several new tactics of intervention that the texts discuss, sheding new light to the roles of images in the course of social transformation. The notions of ‘archive’ and ‘disobedience’ offer a theoretical perspective through which we focus on these complex changes. The texts discuss the particular agencies related to visual archives, archival time and its swallowing, the notions of aestheticisation and politicisation, the operations of categorisation and criminalisation, the roles of spectrality and counter-archives.
The collection includes contributions by Tina Bastajian, Achille Mbembe, Marina Gržinić, Andrej Kurnik, Vesna Madžoski, Eléonore de Montesquiou, Anu Pennanen, Marko Raat, Oliver Laas, Margaret Tali, Tanel Rander ja Anna-Stina Treumund.
