Research, intervention, exhibitions and poster (2012)

In 2012, 102 years after being founded, we intervened in the Austrian Association of Women Artists (VBKÖ) by opening the Secretariat for Ghosts, Archival Politics and Gaps (SKGAL). As a first step, the SKGAL installed an archive room in order to enable a constant analysis and examination of the association’s history. The objective was to discuss, through different means, the role of the VBKÖ during the course of Austrofascism and National Socialism along with the association’s class-specific and colonial entanglements.

During the Vienna-based cultural festival WIENWOCHE the SKGAL organized its first program THE MANY ARCHIVES!. It consisted of two exhibitions, a discussion round, a movie night, several workshops and texts in order to reflect the broad spectrum of practices and debates in feminist archival practices and history writing. From different points of view each one of them examined feminist archival politics in the fields of arts, science and activism. Moreover, a blog http://www.skgal.org/ was set up, and a poster distributed to invite people to research into the association’s history.

The poster EINLADUNG ZUR RECHERCHE/INVITATION TO RESEARCH presents the only group photo that can be found in the archive. It shows the members of the VBKÖ from the 1930s. In a quantity of 500, the poster was displayed and distributed for free in order to call attention to both the association itself –its complex history and its largely unknown members– and to the invitation for further research.

Program THE MANY ARCHIVES!:

Saturday, September 22, 8pm: Opening Secretariat for Ghosts, Archival Politics and Gaps
followed by the launch party with music from the Open Music Archive

Sunday, September 23, 6pm: Screening Evening
Hito Steyerl: “Journal No. 1 – An Artist Impression” (AT/DE/2007)

Journal No. 1 was released in Sarajevo, and four years after the collapse of the Communist bloc this newsreel, which has only survived on nitrate film, was lost in the confusion of the fighting in Yugoslavia. “Whenever there are no documentary images available, Steyerl employs images from fiction films produced at Sutjeska (the anti-Fascist Valter brani Sarajevo [Walter Saves Sarajevo] and Do You Remember Dolly Bell? by Emir Kusturica), without however intending to make a complete reconstruction: Multiethnic Yugoslavia remains fragmentary, both in general history and the history of film, a country between the images.” (Bert Rebhandl)

Wednesday, September 26, 6pm: Archives Spaces Histories Futurities

Lectures, followed by a discussion round on practices, investigations and archival politics in women’s and lesbian history and arts
with Joana Coppi (Humboldt Universität Berlin), Li Gerhalter (Forschungsplattform Neuverortung der Frauen- und Geschlechtergeschichte/Sammlung Frauennachlässe, Universität Wien), Margit Hauser (STICHWORT. Archiv der Frauen- und Lesbenbewegung; i.d.a. – Dachverband der deutschsprachigen Frauen/Lesbenarchive, -bibliotheken und -dokumentationsstellen), Manuela Zechner (future archive)

Sunday, October 7, 11am–6pm: Workshop Bring In Take Out Living Archive

Workshop on feminist archival methods by Red Min(e)d
From 6pm: “Feminist Happy Hour”
Thursday, October 11, 7pm: Opening Bring In Take Out Living Archive
by Red Min(e)d

THE MANY ARCHIVES! took place in the frame of Wienwoche „Geschichte neu schreiben“ (A) (2012); with OPEN MUSIC ARCHIVE, BRING IN TAKE OUT LIVING ARCHIVE, FUTURE ARCHIVE, Joana Coppi, Li Gerhalter, Margit Hauser and Hito Steyerl.