It was just thirty years ago, in 1993, that Mike Kelley curated Uncanny, a paradigmatic exhibition that was the first to detect the defining role of the archival and the ghostly, or the “ghostly archival” in postmodern art. The subversive exploration (anarkhé) of collective, family or individual traumas and conflicts that break the apparently rational order of the archive (arkhé) has been a dominant contemporary artistic strategy ever since.
Karina Horitz’s more recent works are also related to this line: after her exhibition (Hybrid Memories, Somorja Synagogue), which reimagined Holocaust representation through the performative deconstruction of archival photographs, this time she confronts the ghosts of the family archive, further reflecting the axial symmetry and duplication inherent in the unusual letters, objects and photographs.
Rather than suppressing or artificially harmonizing the internal antinomies of the archive, they are able to evoke the nature of Freudian repetition constraints to reveal the synchronic asynchronicity that is also present in biographies, the repetitions of affections and traumas, the ghostly symmetries of disconnected lives and parallel deaths.
Barnabás Zemlényi-Kovács