Day one of the March Meeting is dominated by what one speaker self-deprecatingly describes as “archive fever.” The popular hit of the day were images of stamps from an intriguing presentation on the UEA’s visual identity in its formative years, 1965-1975. The martyr series [MKG, JFK, etc.] went down well graphically, but a collection depicting the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, with a looping approach trail, was triumphant [see also Naeem Mohaiemen’s text Kazi in Nomansland in the Manual for Treason for more on stamps of this kind].

Critical hits included Suman Gopinath’s 'Re-presenting Histories'. Gopinath is a curator from Bangalore focused on a particular process of re-archivism with the markedly varying practices of just two artists; Nasreen Mohamedi and KP Krishnakumar. It’s a process that shares recoveries, repositionings, cultural rewriting and forms of restoration, even retribution, with the fevered archivism evident at the Biennial too.

I wrote a catalogue text for the first exhibition of Mohamedi’s in the UK [Drawing Space 2000] and reviewed a fuller retrospective of her work [NM. Notes on Indian Modernism Pt 1] for Bidoun in 2009. In both cases, despite her ‘discovery’ at Documenta 11 in 2007, British responses were hard to detect. The retrospective has travelled well through Europe but, as Suman said, links between Sharjah and the subcontinent are naturally closer [as the ‘world’ of the Indian Ocean revives] and might be more productively explored.

All this archivism makes some people, including myself, itch. At least, there’s a critical dividing line when it comes to effectivity. Mohamedi exemplifies what this might mean in that there is an ongoing process of writing her back in to the history of 20th Century art which is uncontroversial. But, for example, there’s also a need to explore and articulate further the sources of her own Minimalism.

In re-archiving or re-presenting Mohamedi it becomes necessary to articulate the ways in which her work links to Islamic legacies, practices of writing and illustration including the radicalising of the miniature tradition undertaken by the influential Pakistani artist Zahoor Ul Akhlaq [his estate is represented by Hammad Nasar’s Green Cardamom gallery in London and has been showing at Art Dubai this week]. Mohamedi was born in Karachi, and though she lived in Delhi before settling to work and teach in Baroda, India, she made frequent and often self-searching visits to her family after they moved to Bahrain and established a still flourishing business [Ashrafs].

Connections are frequently advertised with Agnes Martin’s work and Carl Andre’s admiration. However, it’s far more interesting to tease out interior connections with the work of the Karachiite Zahoor, whose work bears occasional very direct visual continuities rooted in the traditional elements of miniature schooling. Part of the difficulty here lies with India’s persisting discomfort with Islamic legacies and its subcontinental neighbour, so art critical reference in relation to Mohamedi remains narrowly Indian thus far [to Gaitonde, etc.].

The revisiting of Mohamedi’s work helps to establish a critical distinction for me in what sometimes looks like a reflex archivism. To be on the right side of that line involves an archiving of the future, not merely a restoring of the [unwritten/unrecognised] past. It's about ongoing and future influence, the articulation of which is a necessity. This archivism, 30 years after Said’s masterwork, obviously retains legitimacy but can very easily slip into a seductive, well funded nostalgia -a peculiarly vitiating force culturally let alone politically.

The arts of making require condensation and a certain form of incompletion. Poetry is defined by its caesuras, its sense freed by rhythm from completedness. Otherwise it’s prose. A similar construction might usefully be made with visual art [even in a post-medium world!]. Any potency in making derives from the elementary gesture of non-completion in opposition to the literalism/‘durational realism’ that infects archivism [as art]. This latter is the opposite of the potency art requires. Instead of an Impotential proper, marked by degrees of absence, archivism is all too often defined by  excessive presence. The danger is one of impotence.

Perhaps necessity is a guide because it’s notable that much of the work of artists with links to Palestine here either undermines the drive-to-archive to potent effect or takes it and runs similarly. Khalil Rabah’s ‘Art Exhibition’ is the obvious example of the former, Rosalind Nashashibi’s ‘Shelter for a New Youth’ of the latter [more on both to come].

Somewhere inbetween is Morrocan artist Bouchra Khalili’s installation; ‘The Mapping Journey Project’ 2008-2011’, which archives routes taken [from North and North East Africa through Afghanistan] by what Europe calls ‘illegal immigrants’ as well as by Palestinians with Green ID who want/need to travel between Ramallah to Jerusalem/al Quds.