ARTMargins Volume 12 Issue 3

The writings in this issue all share a preoccupation with the silences, disappearances, and contradictions within historical archives. Across national, regional, and diasporic spaces, they attend to the deliberate acts of remembering and forgetting that accompanied the political, economic, and technological shifts of the postwar era. Often violent, sometimes incomplete, these shifts required and begat different roles for artistic practice. The turbulence and legacies of 1968, the collective traumas of ethno-nationalist wars, or the ongoing struggles of liberation and neocolonialism have led artists in Mexico, Britain, the Balkans, and Palestine to revalue materials, approaches, and commitments to community.

Our now rich and varied discussions of the form, content, and allure of modernist archives have led to attempts to imagine counter- or nonhegemonic archival forms that redress and revise extant historical narratives and measures of truth. The contributions to this issue invite us to consider the promise of such future archives,...