Over the course of 2023 and 2024 the Art + Australia team worked to redevelop our archive platform. The Art and Australia archive tells a story of Australian art through a repository of over 4000 articles, advertisements, auction listings and short reviews dating from 1963 to now. Our desire for the undertaking was not only to have high resolution scans to counter the poor quality of our previous platform, but to also open the archive beyond the confines of a pay wall. We believe that the knowledge contained in the Art and Australia archive is an integral document of contemporary Australian art history that should be available for all to explore, research, critique and engage. We are excited to now share this platform with you, our readers.

During the process of developing the platform we dove in deep and wanted to interrogate the purpose and meaning of an archive for contemporary art and scholarship. This issue, ‘The Fever’ and its sequel to be published early 2025 look to interrogate these questions.

The titular ‘fever’ borrows from Jacques Derrida’s now famed Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Written just before the new millennium, Derrida aptly draws our attention to the etymology of the word ‘archive’ rooted in the Greek arkheion,

initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded.¹

By tracing the term's origins Derrida judiciously points out that the archive is not just a repository of knowledge but comprised of power structures, which dictate what is preserved and remembered. ‘The Fever’ explores this arena, as artists, collectives, historians and writers contend with the notion of an archive, disassemble received knowledge and challenge structures that continue to be laced with omissions, violence and dispossession.

The issue begins with a rich dialogue between Peta Clancy, Jahkarli Romanis and Kirsten Garner Lyttle. The artists take readers, listeners and viewers on a journey through the processes and concepts that these First Nations artists bring to the discipline of photography. The artists reclaim photography’s colonial and anthropological underpinnings as a method to explore personal archives, Country as archive, colonial photographic archives and the body as archive. As they elaborate on their artistic processes, Clancy, Romanis and Lyttle chart how they literally and metaphorically weave together counter-narratives and histories through their engagement with the medium’s physical, indexical and historical properties.

Artistic approaches to the archive have feverishly proliferated in the two decades since Hal Foster’s ‘archival impulse’ entered art parlance. And this impulse, whereby artists agitate, excavate and rework archives, has arguably become one of the most pervasive genres of contemporary artistic practice. And while much has been written and documented in relation to this movement—from laments and indignations, to celebrations—this impulse shows no sign of abating, as artists continue to draw on the vast and flawed repositories of the past. Through practices engaged with archives artists confront western collections, often rife with imperialist objects plundered and stolen, to contest not just their holdings but the structural logics that underpin their formation and access.

In a discussion between curator Jacqui Shelton and artist Roberta Joy Rich they describe the partial records and in/accessibility of an institutional archive with holdings collated during European Imperialism. Their discussion coincides with Rich’s project Lying Inside (2024), the biannual façade commission at La Trobe Art Institute, Bendigo. Taking to task La Trobe’s Ethnographic collection, Rich engaged with South African cultural materials sequestered in the university’s holdings with little information about their origin, creators and owners. As Rich and Shelton discuss the processes that led to Lying Inside, they speculate on how repatriation may emerge through conversation and communal access to cultural materials that lie oceans away from their motherland.

As Derrida’s Archive Fever describes the compulsive, repetitive desire to archive, he also notes the anxiety and fear of forgetting, as he states,

It is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive, right where it slips away.²

This fever, that signifies both the longing to capture everything and the impossibility of doing so fully, is particularly pertinent to Thomas Moran’s article ‘The Irretrievable Archive: Lost Films And Analogue Elegies’. Moran draws a line between the contemporary revival of analogue film by artists Tacita Dean and Bill Morrison and 250 silent films made in Australia between 1906 and 1930 of which just over fifty survive. Dean and Morrison poetically conjure the obsolescence and entropy of analogue film, endemic qualities of the medium that Moran connects to the missing Australian films to ask: ‘What are we to make of the irretrievable archive at the origin of antipodean film history?’³

While the archive may be conditioned by loss and forgetting, it too, as Loqui Paatsch, Caitlin Hughes and Lisa Liebetrau contend, is a work in progress that can ‘tell us about issues we have overcome and those that sit with us today.’⁴ Grassroots archival projects such as the Women’s Art Register (W.A.R) and the Queer Indonesia Archive (QIA) discussed in the issue act to counter dominant historical narratives through archival practices of intergenerational collectivity.

Paatsch provides an overview of the Women’s Art Register (W.A.R) an archive that has been collectively run since its inception in 1975. Nearly fifty years on W.A.R continues to assert the presence of Australian women artists through indefatigable collection and education strategies.

In ‘ARSIP As SIKAP: Positioning The Queer Indonesia Archive’ Caitlin Hughes looks to a comparatively contemporary archive: the Queer Indonesia Archive (QIA). A digital repository, which like W.A.R, approaches the accumulation, distribution and framing of particular histories of marginalised groups by the communities themselves. In a method Hughes calls ‘sikap’, a ‘Bahasa Indonesia noun that explains an embodied attitude: a way of behaving, positioning oneself, and thinking’, she establishes QIA’s growing platform outside dominant urban centres of Indonesia where most archival repositories are held.⁵ QIA’s decentralised, openly accessible, digital archive is one of action that extends to include oral stories, keepsakes, mementos and historical ephemera pertaining to the queer histories of the archipelago.

In Lisa Liebetrau’s article ‘Trust Me, This Is Not A Neutral Space: Risk And Disclosure In The Perth Institute Of Contemporary Arts Archive’ she draws on documents pertaining to the Artist Regional Exchange (ARX) discovered during a residency at the gallery in 2022. Liebetrau contends that the archive can be a place of truth-telling, as she charts political histories that occurred during ARX's program and their correlative relationship with ongoing Indigenous activism against corporate intrusions on Perth's civic space.

Across ‘The Fever’ we see many articles that document how artists contend with archives, whether personal or institutional. Leyla Stevens, Victoria Hunt, Diana Baker Smith and Theaster Gates revive and animate historical ephemera as living memory expressed through the body, performance and social action. Whether it be the Batuan paintings animated by Leyla Stevens in her new film commission Pahit Manis, night forest (2024) for the Art Gallery of New South Wales and Art Space, Sydney; Victoria Hunt’s performance KŌIWI (2022) that draws on Māori epistemologies; and Diana Baker Smith’s visual, aural and performative installation This Place Where They Dwell, which draws on the life of Margo Lewers, these artists conjure, as Brownwyn Bailey-Charteris highlights, a transhistorical ‘wave in the mind… where artists find themselves in a phenomenal, communal experience of world-making.’⁶

As we see across ‘The Fever (Part One)’ the archive as a structure and its ephemera are in a constant state of accrual, decomposition and reimagining. It is the work of artists and communities who work on and through the archive to tangibly outline the archive’s limits and capacity to connect people, culture and places. But as the ever-evolving technical apparatus of the archive charges forward we see that archives can also fail us. As artist Tim Burns and curator Aimee Dodds highlight in their discussion of Burns accumulated and dispersed archive, that artists and curators frequently contend with material obsolescence, disintegration and state powers who withhold information.⁷ And while the proliferation of information precipitated by the digital amplifies the feverish and futile attempts to retain and distribute the past, it is the animating forces of bodies, connections and practices that allow histories to speak and resonate. Like the archives under discussion here, Art and Australia’s archive is but one mechanism in a broader conversation that we look to see reanimated, engaged with and contested. Until, The Fever (Part Two).

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