Art has long taken on an active part in the narrating and chronicling of history, both its own history and that of larger, "global" events; much recent work made in the documentary vein (mostly video, film and photography) is part of this historiographic tradition in art. Nowadays, however, the fascination with history has taken on a programmatic shape, that of a true "historiographic turn in art": a steadily growing number of contemporary art practices engage in archiving, chronicling, excavating, re-enacting and history-telling, and the historiographic mode has become both the mandate and tone favored by a growing number of artists of varying ages and backgrounds.
Archeology is one particular trope and technique of historiography and history-telling; it has of course long been a powerful metaphor for the various endeavors of the human mind, and has equally long been a source of inspirations for the arts. The truth claims of art regularly borrow from the idiom of archeology: artists excavate, artworks disclose and reveal, works of art are shards, fragments, the lost traces of a whole buried under layers of time. Likewise the archeological ethic of patience and monastic devotion to detail - mirrored in its preferred optic, that of the close-up - approximates the laborious spirit of art. Finally, art and archeology also share a profound understanding of the primacy of materiality in all culture, of "matter" and "stuff"; the archeologist's primary commitment is to earth and dirt, hoping that it will one day yield the truth of time, and the artist's commitment is to his or her material, equally resistant and equally entropic.
These three lines of thought - that of the "haptic" method of close-up viewing, that of laborious, time-consuming scrutiny, and that of a base materialism - casually intersect to define the conceptual core of the current exhibition, which is built around two different conceptions of the archeological: the literal on the one hand (real digging, real dusting off), and the allegorical on the other (retrofitting, recording, historicizing).

Artists: Roy Arden / Boris Belay / Mariana Castillo Deball / Daniel Knorr / Susanne Kriemann / Sophie Nys / Zin Taylor / Els Van den Meersch

Curator: Dieter Roelstraete

November 8 - December 13 in the Ursula Blickle Foundation, Mühlweg 18, D-76703 Kraichtal-UÖ (Germany). Open Wed 2 - 5 pm and Sun. 2 - 6 pm and by appointment.
www.ursula-blickle-stiftung.de