Performing the archives 

Let's Perform the Archive! is to be understood as a working basis, a curatorial concept, but also as a guide for visitors.
The exhibition in the Festraum Club 2.0.0 of the Badischer Kunstverein shows works and projects that explore the reciprocal relationship between photography and exhibition. The starting point is formed by the various photo archives of the Badischer Kunstverein - from the General State Archive, the Karlsruhe City Archive and the collections of exhibition documentation by the in-house photographers and exhibition catalogues to the folders and boxes in the Kunstverein's offices and private archives. Based on the viewing, contextualisation, reflection and further examination of the material, the students have developed various approaches. They negotiate photography in its multiple meanings as an object, medium, technical process and documentary and artistic practice.
In their works, they address, among other things, exhibition photography as a feedback process, categorisation as a dispositive and the potential of interpreting historical images. To this end, they make use of the practices of documentation and strategies of visualisation and work with archival processes. In the exhibition, transfer processes from the analogue to the digital and their reversals become clear, power mechanisms of the visible and invisible are questioned and the physical locations of the archives are made tangible for visitors. In this way, the 200-year chronicle of the Badischer Kunstverein also provides access to the almost as old history of the medium of photography in all its meanings - from the 'purely documentary' image to the independent work of art. On the one hand, a large part of this history was determined by the fact that photography first had to assert itself as an independent artistic process. On the other hand, from today's perspective, through photographic documentation, every exhibition can be thought of as a photographic image. At the end of the exhibition's duration and physical existence, photography preserves it for a small eternity.
The process-orientated exhibition Let's Perform the Archive! ties in with current discourses on the question of the performativity of archives and shows how photography is not only understood as a historical image document, but as a practice that constantly generates and questions the archive anew.