Series of 5 × 3 photos
Inkjet-Print with text
2022

© 2023 Pille-Riin Jaik

The photographic series is an attempt to grasp the essence of toxic bureaucracy and problems of knowledge production. It deals with the question of inclusion and exclusion inside institutional archives. The 16 kg of paper flowers and weeds were made originally for an installation ‘so, i weed’, where artist went through the massive bureaucratic tail of research materials leftovers (collected in the research group 'Spezialschule' lead by Jakob Krameritsch and Simone Bader) about the times when Academy of Fine Arts Vienna was (second time) considering granting women the right to study (1911 to 1913). What was found was a lot of paper production, various meetings about other ‘more important’ matters and after those two years the thirty handwritten Bohemian and Moravian women‘s associations petition letters got a clear answer ‘never’. The petition letters themselves were excluded from the archive, only men talking with men was what prevailed. With the paperflower installation Jaik tried to reinsert those missing letters back to the Academy’s history. In this photographic series the different paper plants created for that installation are shown as universal characters possibly weeding around in most of the world’s archives. They are brought up close to be better seen in hope to avoid repetition of past patterns and to create possibilities for better world-buildings.

The work was developed during the Mentorship Scholarship of Academy of Fine Arts Vienna 2022 in discussions with mentor Yasmina Haddad and part of it belongs now to the Graphic Collection of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.