Eva Bentcheva
Eva Bentcheva is an art historian and curator. She holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, with a focus on transnational performance and conceptual art across Asia and Europe. She has previously served as the Goethe-Institut Postdoctoral Fellow at Haus der Kunst in Munich, Adjunct Researcher for the Tate Research Centre: Asia in London, and Senior Teaching Fellow at SOAS, University of London.
Connected Material
A conversation on compulsive archiving in relation to a private archive of press photography on Liberia.
Beyond the objects in any given archive is a myriad of people, encounters and exchanges. The desire to locate the human element beneath archives is challenged by new technology. As part of ‘Life Stories and Archives’, we began a virtual ‘common archive’. Our collaborative thread addresses pertinent questions arising from shared interests in how individual’s origins, biases, networks and political struggles fuel the need to collect.
Delving into the notion of the desktop as an archival site and methodology, this contribution presents two divergent outputs resulting from collaboration between the participants and co-conveners of the Academy workshop “Desktop Shortcuts”: an in-development simplified database of hyperlinks, and a poetic game of disorder.
A conversation about the entanglement of biographies and archives under the impressions of current social and political ruptures.