CALL FOR PAPERS
Deadline for submission: July 6, 2025
Languages: French and English
Dates: Université Toulouse II – Jean Jaurès, December 4–5, 2025
In 2020 The Disquieted Muses. When la Biennale di Venezia meets History was held in Venice, an exhibition conceived as a reflection on the more than one-hundred-year history of the Venice Biennale. Drawing on materials preserved in the Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee (ASAC) and their dialogue with other archival collections, the exhibition showed (while simultaneously constructing) how the history of the Biennale has been interwoven with processes of social, cultural, artistic and even geopolitical transformation (Alemani, 2020). On the one hand, the curatorial proposal made explicit the relationship between archive and exhibition as a dialectical process, wherein documents not only support the exhibition but are also activated and reinterpreted within it; on the other hand, it revealed the layered complexity of any exhibition and, consequently, the need to approach it through a plurality of analytical perspectives.
The Disquieted Muses is situated within a dense network of debates surrounding art, exhibition and the archive that, at the turn of the century, have given shape to the so-called archival turn (Foster, 2004; Merewether, 2006). Alongside artistic practices that adopt documentary or research-based strategies, exhibitions have increasingly engaged critically with the archive, whether as a dispositif of power, as repository of exhibitable material or as a field of activation through the reenactment of emblematic exhibitions (Arantes, 2016; Baldacci, 2017; Maiorino, Mancini, Zanella, 2022; Jansa, 2009). The persistence of this archival impulse signals the consolidation of the archive as a critical tool capable of producing friction regarding hegemonic discourses and enabling the construction of new narratives.
On this occasion, reactivating Okwui Enwezor’s celebrated proposal concerning the “archival fever” (2008) of contemporary art, we propose to revisit and interrogate the archive and its tensions, this time from the field of exhibition. Indeed, there exists an intrinsic connection between the archive and the exhibition: there is no exhibition without an archive but likewise no archive without exhibition. On the one hand, the archive precedes the exhibition, as it is constituted through the research that makes the exhibition possible; on the other, the materials produced by the exhibition expand and enrich the very archival corpus from which it emerged (Toccafondi, 2014). Consequently, the archive not only precedes but also survives the exhibition, bearing witness to (and preserving) the extended, fragmented and complex temporality that the exhibition activates.
At the same time, far from being a passive repository of documents, the archive is a field traversed by power relations, in which modes of seeing, narrating and remembering have been naturalized through colonial, patriarchal and oppressive perspectives (Foucault, 1969; Mbembe, 2002). In response, exhibitions may function as sites of critical intervention, capable of building transnational networks of solidarity and struggle as well as exposing (and undoing) the violence embedded in archives. More than that, they can operate as dispositifs that disrupt archival logics and generate new meanings through processes of reinterpretation and display. In this process, exhibitions may also become spaces in which the notion of the commons is (re)imagined: spaces where memory preserved in archives can be reappropriated, but also where hegemonic narratives can be questioned and contested, opening up possibilities for rewriting and potential histories (Azoulay, 2010 and 2019).
Furthermore, studying exhibitions through archival documentation can provide new perspectives when understood as “situated intertexts”: they do not exist in isolation, but rather in relation to other discourses, contexts and meanings. Indeed, various forces converge within exhibitions that exceed the strictly aesthetic and encompass political, historical, social and cultural dimensions (Ferguson, 1996). At the same time, exhibitions are also spaces of sociability, that gather artists, critics, art historians and audiences, and where networks of personal, institutional, political and economic relationships that shape the art world are projected (Fernández López, 2020). In this sense, archives not only record the material aspects of the exhibition and the historical and geopolitical context in which the project takes place, but also preserve its relational dimension, offering insights for understanding the exhibition as a complex and situated phenomenon. Thus, the artistic component is only one among many that must be interrogated in order to fully grasp the nature of exhibitions.
Responding to the reflections developed over the past decade within the framework of the international research platform Decentralized Modernities, this symposium seeks to explore exhibitions as “situated intertexts” from the Cold War to the present. In fact, far from existing on the margins of their historical, social and geopolitical contexts, exhibitions have functioned as sites of mediation, critique and resistance, constructing narratives and articulating positions in direct response to the tensions of their time. On this occasion, we invite in particular doctoral and postdoctoral researchers to reflect on exhibitions through the lens of archives and historical records preserved on both sides of the Atlantic, understood as a real and imaginary space shaped by cultural and political relations (Barreiro López, 2019).
This symposium proposes to examine the intrinsic relationship between exhibitions and archives from a multiplicity of analytical perspectives. Firstly, it seeks to reflect on both as interdependent structures engaged in an ongoing dialogue, entities that not only shape the exhibitions history but also transform one another over time. Simultaneously, the symposium aims to explore the multiple layers (artistic, cultural, social, historical, political and economic) that constitute an exhibition and wants to investigate how these layers intertwine and become visible through archival documentation. In the same vein, it seeks to investigate how the study of exhibitions through and alongside archives not only enriches their understanding but also triggers a continuous mobilization of meanings, capable of fostering critical processes of (de)construction and historiographical (re)writing. Finally, participants are invited to consider how exhibitions not only display archives but also reactivate and even re-signify them as well as project them toward novel forms of memory, history and future, while at the same time the display is a central element in this operation.
Possible proposals include, but are not limited to, the following thematic areas:
- Exhibitions and their archives as vectors and witnesses of the tensions during the Cold War and the Globalization
- The archive as a space for the critical (de)construction of exhibition history
- Methods and challenges in researching exhibitions through dispersed, informal, and incomplete archives
- Tensions, resonances and reciprocities between archives and exhibitions
- The role of the display in the activation and re-signification of the archive within the exhibition
- Case studies focused on the archives of specific exhibitions
- Historiographical (re)writing through exhibitions and documentary collections
- The materiality of the archive and its chosen presentation exhibition
- Exhibitions as acts of solidarity, political engagement and struggle.
Submission Guidelines
The symposium will be held on December 4–5, 2025, at the Université Toulouse II – Jean Jaurès.
The official languages of the event are French and English.
The deadline for application is July 6, 2025. Please submit a 500-word abstract including a short biography to anita.orzes@univ-tlse2.fr, “Conf_Fièvre des archives dans l’exposition” as subject.
Organization
This symposium is organized within the framework of the international research platform Decentralized Modernities and the Atelier “Images du Commun” of the Laboratoire FRAMESPA of the Université Toulouse II – Jean Jaurès, with the support of artistic residency center La Lanterne.
Direction: Paula Barreiro López (Université Toulouse II – Jean Jaurès) and Anita Orzes (Université Toulouse II – Jean Jaurès)
Coordination: Noa Buffavand (Université Toulouse II – Jean Jaurès)
Scientific Comitee: Paula Barreiro López (Université Toulouse II – Jean Jaurès), Nathalie Boulouch (Université Rennes 2), Elitza Dulguerova (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), Olga Fernández López (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), Tobias Locker (Saint Louis University, Madrid) and Anita Orzes (Université Toulouse II – Jean Jaurès).
Bibliographic References Used
Alemani, Cecilia, “Introduzione / Introduction.” In Le muse inquiete. La Biennale di Venezia di fronte alla storia / The Disquieted Muses. When La Biennale di Venezia meets history. Venice: La Biennale di Venezia, 2020, pp. 25-27.
Arantes, Priscila, “O arquivo como dispositivo curatorial.” In História das exposiçoes. Casos exemplares, edited by Fabio Cypriano and Mirtes Marins de Oliveira, 99–124. São Paulo: EdUC, 2016, pp. 99-124.
Azoulay, Ariella. “Archive.” Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon 1, 2010.
Azoulay, Ariella. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. London: Verso Books, 2019.
Baldacci, Cristina. Archivi impossibili: Un’ossessione dell’arte contemporanea. Milan: Johan & Levi, 2016.
Barreiro López, Paula, “Introducción. Modernidad(es) Descentralizada(s) en el Atlántico Frío.” In Atlántico Frío. Historias transnacionales del arte y la política en los tiempos del Telón de Acero, edited by Paula Barreiro López. Madrid: Brumaria, 2019, pp. 11-27.
Enwezor, Okwui. Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art. Göttingen: Steidl; New York: International Center of Photography, 2008.
Ferguson, Bruce W, “Exhibition Rhetorics. Material Speech and Utter Sense.” In Thinking about Exhibitions, edited by Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne. London/New York: Routledge, 1996, pp. 126-134.
Fernández López, Olga, Exposiciones y comisariado. Relatos cruzados. Madrid: Cátedra, 2020.
Foster, Hal, “An Archival Impulse.” October 110, 2024, pp. 3–22.
Foucault, Michel. L’Archéologie du savoir. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1969.
Janša, Janez, ed. RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting. Ljubljana: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, 2009.
Maiorino, Massimo; Mancini, Maria Giovanna; Zanella, Francesca (eds), Archivi esposti: Teorie e pratiche dell’arte contemporanea. Macerata: Quodlibet, 2022.
Mbembe, Achille. “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits.” In Refiguring the Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid and Razia Saleh. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002, pp. 19-27.
Merewether, Charles (ed.), The Archive. Documents of Contemporary Art. London: Whitechapel Gallery / Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.
Toccafondi, Diana, [lecture] In Archives and Exhibitions. Proceedings of the Second International Conference Archives and Exhibition. Venice: La Biennale di Venezia, 2014, pp. 175-187.
Image: View of the exhibition The Disquieted Muses. When la Biennale di Venezia meets History, 2020.