Article Number: 1441
English, 6 Pages, 2006, Jan van Eyck Academie
Stefanie Seibold

A reader

A visual archive

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A READER represents a realm of desire dealing with the development of strategies to denaturalise normative concepts of identity, bodies, sex and gender.

Stefanie Seibold, researcher Fine Art 2004–2005, has published A READER. At first sight A READER is a collection of disparate materials, including photos, newspaper articles, drawings, posters, literary quotes, pop lyrics, propaganda slogans, manifestos, Seibold’s own materials and samples, group projects, collectives, individuals and more.
The elements of A READER are combined through several underlying themes and principles, with a particular focus on their gestural and performative values, as well as their utopian potentials. The very way in which A READER is constructed activates its performative energies. The pin-board becomes a poster made of images, which can be read like an image-atlas – a visual archive which not only stores and collects, but which also activates its elements and connects them, thus generating meaning and representing in itself the ideas of the performative: the posters make visible the processes of arrangement and structuring, almost parallel to the content-transfers between signs and gestures, in this case, the markings of sex and gender.

Addressing an audience in different contexts, the single image represents not only a sophisticated quotation of contemporary ideas, but functions as a hyperlink to the history of images - which are like organs expressing social expectations, and thus a means of artistic as well as political communication.