Un-Knowing, Getting Lost, Linking Points in Space: artists and the new archival practice

Sven Spieker, Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature, University of California, Santa Barbara

Co-presented with the Power Institute

10 August

Why are artists interested in archives? This lecture focuses on recent contemporary art’s engagement with the archive, and specifically on how artists and archives inform discussions around recent (media) revolutions and progressive politics more generally.

Sven Spieker received a B.A. (with distinction) from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at the University of London (1987) and a Ph.D. from Oxford University (Merton College). After extended stays in Moscow and Los Angeles, Spieker accepted an appointment as assistant professor at Indiana University, Bloomington (1991). In 1995 Spieker took up a position at the Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies - which he now chairs - and the Comparative Literature Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

As an affiliate faculty member in the departments of Art and Art History he teaches courses in 20th-century European as well as Russian and East European art. In 2004 Spieker was a visiting professor at Constance University, Germany. His honors and awards have included fellowships at the Stanford Humanities Center (Stanford University); the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University; and the Literaturzentrum in Berlin. He is the editor of ARTMargins and ARTMargins Online.