Will to Keep

WILL TO KEEP

An Archive_ ARI satellite project

Jack Condon | Dan Connell | Pat Cremin |Saskia Doherty (VIC) |Teelah George (WA) |David Greenhalgh & Katrina Stamatopoulos |Sarah Kukathas |James Nguyen | Lisa Sammut |Jack Stahel

THE READER

Kate Britton | Jack Condon | Dan Connell | Pat Cremin | Polly Dance (TAS) | Saskia Doherty (VIC) |Wilna Fourie | Nick Garner | Teelah George (WA) |David Greenhalgh | Therese Keogh (VIC) | Sarah Kukathas | Gillian Lavery | Luke Letourneau |Katriona McLaughlin | James Nguyen | Macushla Robinson | Lisa Sammut | Adele Sliuzas (SA) | Jack Stahel | Katrina Stamatopoulos | Chloé Wolifson

The formation of the Archive_ project was a direct response to what was seen by the members of Archive Space as a lack of proper historical memory amongst Sydney’s artistic community. The act of remembering, documenting, revisiting and examining a subject is as important as an artistic practice itself: if we view art as a historical conversation between ideas, the ideas that came before us become the primary artistic muse.

Will to keep is an exhibition of works that contain a sense of the past. It is an attempt at reckoning with our own histories either real or reinvented and the desire to hang on, pack away or store for the future. Engaging in the many versions, functions and mechanisms of historical memory including archival processes, collections, records and documents of past and present, this exhibition seeks to uphold the importance of acknowledging the discipline of history to contemporary art practice. The study of history is an acknowledgement of our position in a continuum, influenced by what has come before and influencing what will be after. An engagement with history, therefore, is a willful shaping of the future by investigating not only the past, but how it is communicated, what it said and also what is left unsaid. The Will to keep looks at the unavoidable imperfections of history - its subjectivity, how it can be bent and moulded and for art practices to shape the future through its guidance of the past.

Will to keep will consist of two major components, an exhibition and reader. The exhibition will include work by both Archive Space coordinators and a small group of invited emerging artists. The reader will comprise of a collection of texts+diagrams by contemporary emerging artists, curators and arts writers to be published online on our digital archive (archivespace.com.au) and as a small booklet printed edition, available on opening night.

Opening Wednesday 7 May 6-8pm

Exhibition Continues until Sunday 18 May

Open Thursday to Sunday 12-5pm