Creative and Exhibitionary Archives and Processes: a Museological Analysis on the Violence in Recent Projects by Artist Ioulia Akhmadeeva in Michoacan, Mexico

Abstract

Based on theoretical museological and curatorial concepts, this essay analyses the role of different document and visual archives, and of the biographical archive of Russian artist Ioulia Akhmadeeva, who used them as creative tools to address different cases of social violence occurred in  her own country, in Mexico and in other nations, such as: Germany, Syria, and Ukraine, within the curatorial nucleus called “Muerte y Pacifismo” (“Death and Pacifism”) of her retrospective exhibition Desde y para la memoria (From and for remembrance), inaugurated in 2015 in the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo “Alfredo Zalce” (Contemporary Art Museum “Alfredo Zalce”), Michoacan, Mexico. This exhibition showed the archive materials in the form of dialogue, counterpoint, or in a single voice, with some of her artist books and a new book-installment project, in order to visualize and problematize the violent processes in these different regions of the world. Henceforth, by combining museological, visual, and content analysis of the exhibition with contributions from the commentary notes of the artist, the testimonies of young university students in Morelia regarding their experience when observing the exhibition, this essay poses a current theoretical examination on the role of the archive in contemporary art, as well as information on the violent events that were redefined by the author in the same exhibition. With this, it seeks to develop the discussion on the contributions of the exhibition and of the museographic reflection in the political inquiry, on the positioning, and on the dialogue generated in the exploration of remembrance and violence.