Collecting/Creating: Archive-Based Moving Image in Eastern Europe and Beyond
The archive has emerged as one of the most productive, cross-disciplinary frameworks for understanding contemporary media ecology. It operates as a site of collection and preservation, and also as a generative stimulus to creative artistic practice within a rapidly transforming media landscape. While the “image” in the digital age is often characterised by its fundamental processuality–accessible, malleable, and endlessly reproducible–the archive continues to signal questions of materiality, institutional authority, and ideological charge. If the archive “presents itself as the ultimate horizon of experience” (Callahan 2022), how does this horizon operate for artists working within precarious archival infrastructures? How can artists negotiate the potentials and limits of the archive across different geopolitical and institutional contexts in Eastern Europe and beyond?
This conference seeks to examine how artists and archivists mobilize visual media (ranging from state-produced visuals to home movies and family photographs) to reanimate the archive. It asks whether thinking in terms of a distinct Eastern European archive-based art is productive, and if so, how this perspective might help reveal the particular conditions, practices, and creative interventions that shape engagement with archival materials in precarious contexts.
In conjunction with the conference, a special screening by Hungarian media artist Péter Forgács and a public conversation with the artist will offer an opportunity to reflect on the practical and conceptual dimensions of archive-based art. While the conference aims to explore archive-driven artistic practices from an international perspective, this event highlights Forgács’s work as a significant point of reference within the broader landscape of media art.
Topics to discuss and analyZe archive-based intermedial works may include:
- Collecting and creating in the post-cinematic age
- Dialogues between the archive and research-based art practice
- Digitisation and the transformation of archival labour
- Eastern European archival ecologies in transnational perspective
- Comparative perspective on audiovisual archives in precarious contexts
- Archiving, selection, and ethics in artistic and curatorial practice
- Transnational perspectives on archive-based art from Eastern Europe
- Works of Péter Forgács in the cross-section of media art, home movie heritage, and other artistic practices
- Comparative analysis of found footage films reworking public and private archives
- Remediation and intermediality in archive-based moving image
- Archive-based moving image and exhibition contexts: museums, galleries, festivals, and online spaces
- Materiality, instability, and the sensory dimensions of archives
Call for Papers:
The conference welcomes submissions for individual twenty-minute presentations as well as for full panels and workshops. Proposals should be no more than 300 words, accompanied by an indicative bibliography and a brief third-person biography.
Deadline: June 19, 2026.
More info: collectingcreating@gmail.com