The Archival Impulse: Textures of Reality in the Arts

6th December 2026, Crawley

University of Western Australia

CFP deadline: 31st Aug. 2026

Over 20 years after Hal Foster observed an ‘archival impulse’ in contemporary art, the desire to incorporate archival material into practices across the arts has only strengthened. The artistic deployment of sketches or notes, audio or textual fragments of eyewitness testimony, historical video footage, found sounds and found objects, photographs, and other materials sourced from archives, often speaks to a desire to recover the texture of reality, or to press against notions of originality, authorship, and truth. As Foster noted, the archival impulse can ‘make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present’, while at the same time emphasising ‘the nature of all archival materials as found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private’.

Today there may be an additional urgency behind the archival impulse—a sense in which the unprecedented flattening out of fact and fiction (a key pillar of the representational regime) requires some kind of archive-driven aesthetic response. This comes in the form of collecting, reenacting, commemorating, adapting, assembling, and revising—devices that have rich aesthetic histories all their own. These devices engage complex themes of verisimilitude, realism, citation, and juxtaposition (‘quasi-archival logic’), the aestheticization of violence and trauma, cultural memory, or objectification.

We invite papers for a study day exploring recent and historical tendencies in the ‘archival impulse’ across the arts, as well as within and about the practice of archiving, to assess the renewed implications of the archival impulse in our so-called ‘post-truth’ and AI-saturated context.

Possible topics might includes (but are not limited to):

• Genre and the artistic use of archival material

• The relationship between the archival impulse and traditions of realism, actuality, or verisimilitude

• Archives and the idea of reality and representation

• AI and the archive

• Archives and truth-telling

• The archive of the internet

• The use of pre-existing media as raw material for artworks

• Docu-genres (eg. docu-drama, docu-opera, mockumentary, infotainment)

• Archival textures, objects, and materialities

There are two options for papers:

1.) Standard Paper: 20-minute presentation, plus 10 mins for question; or

2.) Position Paper + Discussion: 10-minute position paper, plus 20 mins for discussion of a set reading

Please send a 250wrd abstract for your proposed paper (and if presenting a position paper please also identify a reading for discussion) to sarah.collins@uwa.edu.au and cecilia.sun@uwa.edu.au by 31st Aug. 2026.

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Dimanche 6 Septembre, 2026