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A Study on the Impossibility of Representing the Archival Memory and Reconstruction of a Futuristic Fiction: Works by Ayoung Kim and Lindsay Seers

  • Journal of History of Modern Art
  • 2024, (55), pp.55-77
  • Publisher : 현대미술사학회
  • Research Area : Arts and Kinesiology > Art > Arts in general > Art History
  • Received : April 29, 2024
  • Accepted : May 30, 2024
  • Published : June 30, 2024

Gaeun Ji 1

1홍익대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to review works by Ayoung Kim and Lindsay Seers, focusing on their world of fiction in an effort to ascertain the infeasibility of a total representation of the archival memory and examine its artistic practices and strategies. Both artists compose their works based on fragmented archival records about the past episodes, but their epics are recomposed into fictions blurring the boundary between reality and virtuality. Furthermore, they doubt the concept and system of the archive as historical evidence of the grand narrative or as a social construction of a universal symbolic order, and thereupon, advance into the archive to suggest an indirect possibility of reaching the past. In his work Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995), Jacques Derrida showed insight into the contradictory duality of the archive. He argues that we are captured by a repetitive desire of regressing to the Archive as sources and origins of memory, but ironically, this compulsive desire aims at destroying the archive, while at the same time empowering it. This study focuses on the following aspects. First, I analyze the two artists’ works dramatically featuring the contradictory duality of the archive, namely, the co-existence between archival and anarchival impulses. Secondly, I argue that the archive opens a futuristic possibility of the epic recomposing the multi-sensory experiences and non-linear approaches rather than returning to the first starting point of the past memory, based on the multi-sensuous experiences and non-linear approaches.

Citation status

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