Artist Curation as Queer Archival Practice

The push for LGBTQ state recognition, civil rights, and cultural visibility has been accompanied by a push for the recording and preservation of LGBTQ history as an epistemic right. Carleton University professor Ann Cvetkovich will address the recent proliferation of LGBTQ archives as a point of departure for a broader inquiry into the power of archives to transform public histories. These new LGBTQ archival projects must respond to historical and theoretical critiques, including decolonization, that represent archives as forms of epistemological domination and surveillance or as guided by an impossible desire for stable knowledge.

Drawing on the work of Tammy Rae Carland, Ulrike Mueller, Kent Monkman, and others, Cvetkovich’s talk will focus on how artists use creative and queer approaches to archives that are simultaneously critical and transformative. Their experiments in archival preservation and innovative media practices grapple with the materiality of the archive in order to reveal its ephemeral and affective dimensions.

Ann Cvetkovich is Director of the Pauline Jewett Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies at Carleton University. She is the author of Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism; An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures; and Depression: A Public Feeling. She is currently writing a book about the state of LGBTQ archives and their creative use by artists to produce counterarchives and interventions in public history.