About The Exhibition
In Archive_Belfast the archive, repository of the city's conflictual past, is the object of investigation. Hils focuses attention away from the visible outcomes of conflict towards the underlying structures and patterns of thought by which conflict is both determined and contained. Hils' fascination with Belfast's archives lies not so much with their content, as with the systems, within which objects and facts have been, and continue to be, collected and organised. Simultaneously shaped by and supporting systems of social organisation, management, surveillance and control, the archive becomes in time the sum and store of these processes, product and guardian of the particular thinking behind its own construction. As the process of categorisation moulds fact into meaning, the archive itself becomes an object of enquiry, a cipher to be broken, a key to deeper understanding. The place in which our future may be revealed, encoded within conceptions of the past.
The Artists
Claudio Hills
Archive_Belfast has been supported by the following organisations: Ballymacarrett Arts & Culture Society | Belfast Central Library | Belfast City Hall | Clonard Monastery | Ex-Prisoners Assistance Committee | Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland | Linenhall Library | Irish Republican History Museum (Conway Mill) | People's Museum at Fernhill House | Public Records Office of Northern Ireland | Museums Council of Northern Ireland | RUCGC Historical Society | Police Service of Northern Ireland, Knocknagoney | Police Service of Northern Ireland, Musgrave Street | Royal Ulster Rifles Museum | Royal Victoria Hospital
Archive_Belfast is a Belfast Exposed new work commission. It is being published by Hatje Cantz with texts by Klaus Honnef, John Taylor and Anna Eifert-Kornig.