“Caring for the Biography of an Archive” in BASEES Annual Conference 2023 in Glasgow
Art historian Līga Goldberga presents her ongoing work with Zenta Dzividzinska’s archive at the National Library of Latvia in the paper “Caring for the Biography of an Archive: Incorporation of Women Photographers from the Soviet Photo Club Culture into the Canon of Latvian Art” delivered in the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES) conference in Glasgow, 31 March – 2 April 2023.
Līga Goldberga’s paper was presented at the BASEES 2023 annual conference which took place at the University of Glasgow. It was part of a panel collaborated with Agnese Lūcija Zviedre and Ineta Done “Illuminating Misplaced Archives: Researching Soviet and Post-Soviet Photography in Latvia” which discussed works of Soviet and early Post-Soviet photographers and their inclusion in art history.
Līga Goldberga, “Caring for the Biography of an Archive: Incorporation of Women Photographers from the Soviet Photo Club Culture into the Canon of Latvian Art”
Abstract
Archives, like people, have versatile biographies for they are entangled in complex networks of performative relationships both with human and nonhuman actants. Their status, roles, and possible trajectories shift and vary in relation to different contexts, positioning, and discourses of art and politics, and likewise, their vibrant agency affects other actants and settings they inhabit. By engaging with the archive of Latvian artist and photographer Zenta Dzividzinska I set out to explore the complex and to this day fragmented scene of Latvian photography from the 1960s to 1970s, and more specifically the inclusion of women photographers from the Soviet photo club culture into the history of Latvian art as well as contemporary practices. My set of tools and methods are interdisciplinary and derived from the fields of cultural anthropology, art history, humanities, and curatorial field, and I ground my position in critical theories – new materialism and posthumanism, feminism, and feminist archiving. This research is at an early stage and the presented paper introduces one segment of the wider project – “Caring for the biography of the archive” which discusses the circulation of women’s archives by addressing the ethics and politics of care in the field of Latvian art photography and its histories, and maps curatorial strategies that enable care for archives of women photographers that have been misplaced from the history of art.
I became familiar with Dzividzinska’s archive through the exhibition “I Don’t Remember a Thing: Entering the Elusive Estate of Zenta Dzividzinska”, which was curated by Zane Onckule in art gallery KIM? in Rīga in 2021. Artist’s daughter art historian Dr Alise Tīfentāle loaned her mother’s archive for the exhibition in which Austrian-Polish artist Sophie Thun took the role of a lab technician to develop so far unseen negatives of Dzividzinska’s works, and I performed archiving in situ. During the exhibition, the body of the archive was changed through my work, and the perceptions about Dzividzinska’s works changed through Thun’s selections and newly developed prints. This unconventional exhibition and the performative archiving experience have determined my research trajectory. After the exhibition, the archive was donated to the National Library of Latvia and the institutional framework impacts what actions will be allowed with the archive in the future. I began the systematization of Dzividzinska’s archive in the exhibition space and now I am continuing it as a specialist of the Library’s photography collections.
The paper presented at the BASEES 2023 conference discusses the question: what circumstances enable or limit a fortunate career of an archive? And I argue that the successful circulation of photographic archives is determined by the politics of care practised by their holders and borrowers as well as professionals from the field of art history and curating (in this case study by the artist herself, heirs, collection keepers of memory institutions and independent curators) and that these sets of actions regarding the safekeeping and accessibility shape how women photographers are inscribed in the history of photography.
If the biography of the archive is a conceptual starting point for my research, “thinking with care” and caring for the biography of the matter is the ethical base, which then allows opening a critical discussion about how knowledge is constructed, in this case, studying how and why women’s archives have been misplaced from the canon of Latvian photography and art in general and thinking about ways how to integrate them in discussions about art. The archive is usually used as evidence, as something legitimizing objective truths and showing proof, and as it is in the case of art history – to validate someone’s place in its hierarchical author-centred system. Yet by caring for the materiality and biography of the archive, serving one or another objectivity is no longer the main function of the archive, as the produced truths are multiple, fluid, and shifting through different times and modes of seeing. My positioning in this performative ecosystem is to be responsible for following the guidelines of the National Library of Latvia in caring for the archive as well as response-able as a curator and feminist archivist in being reactive to the agency of the archive.
Līga Goldberga (1991) is a PhD student at the Art Academy of Latvia (since 2022) and collections expert of photographic collections at the National Library of Latvia (since 2019). Goldberga obtained a bachelor’s degree in social and cultural anthropology from the University of Latvia (2014) and a Master’s degree in art history and curatorial studies from the Art Academy of Latvia. Her research interests are on the social circulation of photographs, and collections curating.
The British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES) is the UK national learned society for the study of Russia, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The main activity of the association is the annual conference with participants drawn from the UK, continental Europe and North America as well as Russia and Eastern Europe.
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