Photo-Objects, Cultural Displays, Archival Performance, and Rhetorics of Value

Archival gestures emerge as choreographic practices that reveal the active role of archivists within a supposedly neutral archival space. These performative presentations of photographic objects foster new forms of storytelling and enable imaginative, socially engaged approaches to archival materials.

The Photothek’s artistic collaborations often focus on people interacting with photographs in the archival setting. In his photographs and videos, Armin Linke stages the hands and bodies of Photothek staff performing the serialized “scripts” of archiving (Cook/Schwartz 2002), which, following Isa Wortelkamp (2022), can be read as choreographic notations that challenge the presumed neutrality of the archive by foregrounding archivists’ agency. The display of archival practices – also seen in works by Akram Zaatari – has its counterpart in archivists’ own presentations of photographs within the archive. At the Photothek, such “cultural displays” (Kratz 2011) regularly take place before various audiences and function as re-enactments of archival gestures tied to “rhetorics of value” (Kratz 2025). The spatial setting, arrangement of photo-objects, and movement through ordered rooms form a performance in which the archivist’s gloved hands, body, and voice communicate value and enable shared appreciation of photographic materiality, constructedness, and archival absences. These performances foster storytelling and autoethnographic reflection, enabling an emancipatory reimagining of what records can do (Lee 2021).