Michelle Yeonho Hyun makes exhibitions and events with artists and others. She sometimes writes and talks about art, among other things. She is the founding director and curator of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) at NYU Shanghai since 2018.  She worked previously as a curator for Shanghai Project (2016), Gwangju Biennale (2014), and the University of California San Diego (2012-14).  She has also organized projects for the New Museum (New York, 2012), Creative Time (New York, 2011), and What, How & for Whom (WHW) (Zagreb, 2010).  She studied curating at the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS) at Bard College and political economy at George Washington University.

Lightless Fires: fermenting the archive of history

Departing from Another Knowledge Is Possible (2021-24), the ICA's forthcoming artistic research program will delve further into archival knowledge and historiography, along with “fermentation” as a nearby figure of thought.  

Under the guise of passively storing knowledge, the archive is an active epistemic intervention, actively producing knowledge through selection and exclusion.  According to sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, this "other face of the archive" is "modern epistemicide and all its historical repercussions."  And yet, a sociology of absences also begets a sociology of emergences -- a return of the repressed/suppressed, often manifested in aesthetic interventions, counterhegemonic archival exercises, and prefigurative imagining by artists.  Death by archive becomes a transfigurative passage, a phase-change for suppressed knowledges before putrefaction and decomposition. Fermentation, in a conceptual and historical sense, has always been bounded with a generative idea of change, a teleological shift from potentiality to actuality.  

With theories of fermentation nearby critical understandings of the archive and historiography, this talk considers some practices and projects of various artists in preparation for the ICA's next artistic research program.