Urška Savič
Abstract
The reflections on the archive’s role in forgotten heritage research are based in the positioning of the archive as a strategy for re-writing histories in the contemporary art field. The text dives into the narrative of video art development in Slovenia until 1991 and exposes some of its representatives, while for the period from the 1990s until today the interest is not on the video art timeline, but rather on the archival approaches that were present and were shaping video art history making. The case study of an archival institution concerns the Center for Contemporary Arts SCCA-Ljubljana, meanwhile the individual artist examples are Ana Nuša Dragan, Zemira Alajbegović and Ema Kugler, female representatives of a specific use of the video medium from the 1960s until the 1990s, selected as representatives of the ‘Not Yet Written Stories’ project. The emphasis is not on their practice, but on how they were treated by the evolving narratives of performance and video-art. The institution of the archive and the archive as an approach towards historicisation in contemporary art history are discussed.
Urška Savič is a critic and journalist active in the fields of visual arts and cultural politics, working also as a photographer and radio artist. She finished her BA in photography at FAMU (Prague, 2014) on the topic of collage and photomontage. Her master’s thesis at the Department of Sculpture at ALUO (Ljubljana, 2020), on the use of documentation and archiving practices in contemporary art, received the Prešeren Award for Students from the Academy. Since 2017, she has been an active participant in cultural programming at Radio Študent, one of Europe’s oldest and strongest non-commercial, alternative radio stations. There, she has been a cura- tor of the open radio (art theory) research platform RADAR since 2019.
