Re-processing archival images: artists as darkroom technicians

Abstract

This article argues for the need to reflect on how contemporary artists use archival documents as a form of visual reparation. Artists Deanna Bowen, Krista Belle Stewart and Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn developed strategies for critically casting the past into the present in their own video work by relying on state-sanctioned archival images, specifically documents produced by and kept by the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC), once intended for a white audience. The author argues that these artists rely on their corporeal knowledge as, in photographic terminology, developer baths for re-processing latent historical images. The nexus of production labour and artistic research by self-identified BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People(s) of Colour) artists becomes a site for creative reparations and for a future world-making.