Title THE IGNORANT ARCHIVE
Year 2019
Cooperation with Olga Vostretsova
Location Museum für nonkonformistische Kunst & Goethe Institut St Petersburg
THE IGNORANT ARCHIVE is a cooperative project with the curator Olga Vostretsova, which deals with the mediation and archiving of historical artist personalities. The title is based on the essay "The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation" by French philosopher Jacques Rancière. Here, equality is a central motif of an educational program that does not know any hierarchy between knowing and ignoring. Rancière's method is applied to the persona and work of the Russian artist Timur Novikow: Relevant and irrelevant, history and future, public and private, text and image flow into the processing and re-sorting of the archive material. The basic structure consists of five lessons for a group of participants with different backgrounds. The collaboration is designed in the spirit of non-conformist art as a common approach to archive material in the form discussion, collective production and parties. In an open process we formulate new meaning and aesthetic messages dealing with the historical material and our own knowledge and ignorance.