Readings From Below

About

While the traditional institution of the archive with its sense of permanence and timeless solidity, its physical location and architecture continues to exist, in today’s world of digitized information, archives are becoming radically decentralized, temporalized, and multimodal, in line with a dynamic user culture. Anything retrieved from these various archives can be reused, re-inscribed, or restaged, offering ongoing possibilities for their reconfiguration in any given order. More than ever before, artists today work with archive documents, research, and information, processing their material in innovative ways and opening it up to our collective memory for rediscovery and reinterpretation.

Readings From Below brings together works that offer less obvious, unconventional suggestions as to how to read our world, often starting with a subjective perspective, a daily environment, a particular location, or a contextual detail, only to engage us in broader social and political constellations. The themes that will weave through this exhibition focus on the impact of the future on the past, unresolved identities, narrated sound and performed language, and readability and unreadability, thus representing a free play with contradictions and polyphonic voices. Reading the world from below also means highlighting what is hidden, silenced, and suppressed in everyday life or in the archive, opting for a reflective mode, and attending closely to our surroundings.

The exhibition will combine existing work with new commissions, and it will be accompanied by an event program with screenings, performances and talks. It will take place as part of Berlin Art Week (September 9–13, 2020).