Archive_Belfast

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.