an archive and/or a repertoire explores the liminal spaces that emerge between archives and ephemeral new media. Featuring the Mobius, Inc. Records —the administrative archive of the Boston-based Mobius Artists Group—this exhibition serves as a local laboratory, delving into materials from Mobius’ experimental performances, new media projects, sound works, dances, and installations. Currently housed in Tufts Archival Research Center (TARC), the Mobius, Inc. Records contains organizational records, photographs, and video documentation from c. 1968 to 2009, chronicling the early work of individual members and the artist-run organization founded by artist Marilyn Arsem, who also founded the Performance Area at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (SMFA), where she taught for over a quarter century.
an archive and/or a repertoire questions the boundaries and limits of the archive, through what performance studies scholar Diana Taylor understands as its embodied counterpoint, the repertoire. The exhibition is organized in four research threads that activate a potential remapping of the archive in light of the repertoire—Deep Time, Siting Place, Horizontal Collectivity, and Document / Residue—featuring photos, posters, newsletters, and other physical materials from the Mobius, Inc. Records at TARC. Presented alongside are embodied contributions from Mobius Artists Group members, new commissions and works by group artists Lani Asunción and Forbes Graham, as well as work by artists Aki Sasamoto and Takahiro Yamamoto. Responses to the archive also include oral histories from artists, activists, and cultural workers adjacent to Mobius, video documentation of the group’s early performance works, and ongoing public programming. Altogether, the exhibition components pose a challenge to the legacy of the material archive while also activating the collective imaginary of the repertoire—gestures, spoken word, movement, dance, sounds—that might otherwise be lost, erased, or forgotten.
for more information and events associated with the exhibition:
https://artgalleries.tufts.edu/exhibitions/208-an-archive-and-or-a-repertoire