After Archives brings together the work of three artists who engage archival practices, content, and forms to examine, unearth, interrogate, and reimagine aspects of African American history and experience.
Traditional archives – documents, images, objects – are commonly understood as physical sites in which historical knowledge and memory are collected, organized, and preserved. Archives convey a certain air of authority, of neutrality, of completeness. Yet bound up in issues of power and posterity, archives embody the ongoing entanglement of social and historical relations: What is collected, cherished, sought after, ignored? Who and what is made present, salient; what slips between the cracks, into the silences? And how do these choices shape future conditions for navigating the past?
Each artist in After Archives charts a course “between or out of or in the holes” of the archive, navigating the ways in which space, bodies, material traces, and forms of (un)freedom intersect.