Archive

In recent years, the practice of the Jakarta-based collective ruangrupa has gained exceptional traction in the contemporary art world. The book How to Pin Down Smoke: ruangrupa since 2000, published in 2025 maps out the genealogy of the animated and complex ecosystem that ruangrupa has cultivated and which has shaped the trajectory of the group’s practice. Carlos Quijon, Jr talks to the volume’s editors to discuss their editorial processes and considerations.

Maya Varma: A lot of your work turns toward the lineages that shape Dalit life and knowledge. When you think about these histories, how do you understand the inheritances you’re carrying forward? What pasts are you in conversation with, and how do you imagine the canon you’re stepping into? Shrujana Niranjani Shridhar: I think we…

In looking at photographs of live models, plaster casts of Greek sculptures, and students on the website (figs. 1a and 1b) of the Sir J. J. School of Art (JJ) in Bombay (present-day Mumbai), one notices how the condition of the body and labor in relation to art is a haunting presence in 20th-century photography. Shot between the…

Debates around the ownership of cultural heritage and decolonizing museums have become increasingly visible and polarizing in the public domain, leading to attempts to redefine the term “museum” itself.1The International Council of Museums (ICOM) Extraordinary General Assembly approved the following new definition of “museum” at the 26th ICOM General Conference held in Prague in August…

Since the 1950s, there has been an active production of experimental film, animation, and video art in Asia. Yet, much of this work has not been consistently conserved or shared with the public due to the lack of accessible archives or organized collections dedicated to its preservation and dissemination. The conference “The Archival Impulse: Collecting…

Milan Knížák was a key figure in the development of action art and performance in Prague in the 1960s. His Performance Files, now in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art and published here in their entirety, constitute a tremendous resource, as they bring together images and texts related to many of the artist’s independent…

A notebook, a letter, a photograph, a musical score with a set of instructions from 1962: what do these objects tell us today? How and why do we organize and rank them in order of importance? What is their significance to the histories of music, design, and performance art? In the following exchange, documented during…

At an Archival Workshop at MoMA’s Queens facility in June 2012, Jon Hendricks, MoMA’s Consulting Curator for the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, ruminates on the status and categorization of Fluxus works in the museum. I think that we are missing the art for the trees. Throwing things into preconceived categories obscures potential experience…