Members Show curated by Ciara Corscadden Hennessy, Co – Director at 126 Artist-Run Gallery and Studios.
The Portrait has served as a visual archive, a means to acknowledge existence, preserve beauty and act as witness. It offers the promise of immortality and the display of status and power. Anarchive seeked to explore the limitations of the traditional Portrait.
Anarchive brought together artists working across diverse media, the exhibition interrogated the conventional role of portraiture, as a stable archive of memory, subjecthood, and power. Instead foregrounding the unruly, the partial and the ephemeral.
Rather than exploring direct representations, Anarchive explored disruption, erasure and transformation. Each artist approached this uniquely, some engaged with material instability using fragile forms and performative processes, others deconstructed identity through fragmentation, multiplicity, or absence. Across these practices, portraiture is treated not as a finished object but as a shifting negotiation between visibility and absence, construction and collapse.
The exhibition posits the Anarchive not as an absence of archive, but as an addition to a conceptual framework that interrogates the relationship between past and present. In this context, the portrait becomes a field of contention, where power dynamics, status and selfhood become sites of inquiry.
Anarchive invited the viewers to encounter portraiture as a space of uncertainty. It offers no stable gazes, no singular truths, Instead it opens up possibilities for reimagining how we depict, remember and relate to one another beyond the bounds of the archive.
