Anarchéologie

All power,” writes Michel Foucault, “only ever rests on the contingency and fragility of a history.” The development of archaeology as a science in the early 19th century testifies to an imaginary of origins that accompanied the creation of the European nation-states. Witness to this are the idea of the universal museum and the collections of casts intended to extend knowledge even as they firmly set the confines of art. If this “Western heritage” has today been brought into question by postcolonial critique, the myths of the past remain, shifted, reformulated and revitalised more than ever in a globalised world.

“Anarchaeology” was a word coined by philosopher Michel Foucault when, in his lectures at the Collège de France in the late 1970s, he imagined an anarchy of knowledge where the various regimes of truth could be investigated inch by inch. With this word, he sought above all to argue “the non-necessity of power as the principle of intelligibility of knowledge itself.”

The different artistic projects assembled in this exhibition are all concerned in one way or another with archaeology itself. In forms both visual and discursive, Ali Cherri, Christoph Keller, Oliver Laric, Amina Menia, Jumana Manna, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Maria Taniguchi, and the collective Umashankar and the Earchaeologists – consisting of Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Nida Ghouse and Umashankar Manthravadi – all cast a lucid and critical eye on the archaeological imaginary and its effects today. Their works above all touch on an erosion of certainties, engaging in artistic meditations on discordant truths. The abolition of time and space in the digital condition marshals together, on the same plane, the most contemporary of technologies and ancient skills revived. It is through such dyschronic moments that these works interrogate the regimes of knowledge of both past and present.