Becoming Anarchival is a collaboration between artist-ethnographers Trudi Lynn Smith and Kate Hennessy that activates precarity and instability as generative forces in museums and archives. Over the past decade, they have oriented their writing and art practice toward the anarchival, both as transformative disruption and as a methodology for engaging time-based media and the material politics of place. Where the archival is the imagined truth and stability of museums, collections, and geographies, the anarchival is the unpredictable, the impermanent, and the speculative. The anarchival signals new instances of becoming. 

Emerging from their fieldwork around a defunded paleontology research centre in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia’s most recently established municipality (built around the Quintette metallurgical coal mine), the exhibition uses documentary photographs, anthotype contact prints, and video works to foreground the anarchival as a condition that erodes widely held belief in archives, scientific knowledge, and civic structures as stable and enduring. Hennessy and Smith explore relationships between media and mining practices, settler-colonial exploitation, and their entanglements in paleontology and archives. The works highlight the fugitive materiality of collections and the image-making technologies used to document them, amplified in our current climate crisis fuelled by the extraction of petrochemical dinosaurs archived in the earth. Fossils, what Hiroshi Sugimoto has called “the first photographs”, are a way into an understanding of the entangled politics and practices of becoming anarchival.

[Read our longer essay on this exhibition]

[Gallery 881 Viewing Room]