The Mutable Archive (Shimon Attie)

video still, 27" x 52".

The Mutable Archive is a multi-layered series of photographs and performance videosthat speak to renewed nationalistic obsessions with Othering and difference. A unique artistic strategy of this project involves interrogating the mechanics of storytelling and who speaks for those who are lost, particularly in the absence of verifiable archival material. Rather than follow conventional archival theory, the project prioritizes the relationship between each author/performer and their chosen subject while exposing how various narrative strategies can reveal the social and political challenges of the present.

Each photograph from the 19thcentury collection of Viennese anatomist, Josef Hyrtl portrays a single specimen and post-mortem skull tattoo with an accompanying archive card, which details only partial information about each subject.

Nineteen commissioned writers –artists, musicians, scholars, historians, a medical ethicist, a philosopher, an opera singer, and a spiritual medium –each create a speculative biography for the subject of their choosing from a collection of photographs from The Mutable Archive.Invited collaborators write speculative narratives about nineteen subjects from the Mütter Museum’s collection. Each script and recorded monologue, a 4K cinematic video, exposes the roles of assumption and subjectivity in science.