“Archive Fever: Photography between History and the Monument”

Groups and collectives such as the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC), the Guerrilla Art Action Group (GAAG), Women Artists in Revolution (W.A.R.), the Heresies Collective and Political Art Documentation and Distribution (PAD/D) questioned the “archive” as a system represented by institutions such as MoMA and set forth their own alternatives. Decades later, the exhibition curated by Okwui Enwezor, Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (International Center of Photography, New York, January 18 – May 4, 2008), and its catalogue explored “archive fever” in the work of particular artists, although they did not analyse the dissident and experimental archives of these early groups or collectives.