An Unhappy Archive brings together artistic and activist works such as photographs, videos, books, drawings and paintings that question the social norms of happiness. The title is drawn from the theorist Sara Ahmed, who describes “unfortunate archives” as a collective, feminist-queer and anti-racist project. This not only promotes social criticism and resistance, but also the pleasure and the utopias that are made possible by alleged antifigures like “the feminist killjoy.”
An Unhappy Archive was initiated as an exhibition at Les Complices in Zurich by Andrea Thal in 2013, reinstalled in 2014 at the Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe and is now being presented in an expanded form in this imagined exhibition space of the edition.
For the presentation of the An Unhappy Archive edition, an “Unhappy Evening” organized by OOR SALOON took place on October 15, 2016 at Galerie Mark Müller in Zurich with international artists Maya Dunietz, Evan Ifekoya, AKW, Li Tavor & Moni Schori. The audio recording of this “Unhappy Session” is included in the edition on vinyl; this recording, as well as a PDF with photographs documenting the occasion, is also available for download. —edition fink
