European Television Archives, Collective Memories, and Contemporary Art

The article discusses three moving image artworks produced since 2009, by Finnish artist Laura Horelli, Serbian artist Bojan Fajfrić, and Slovenian artist Aleksandra Domanović, featuring material from television archives in Finland or the countries of Former Yugoslavia. These artworks include fragments of educational programs, coverage of political meetings and title sequences for evening news programs, broadcast during the 1980s or early 1990s. All three artists focus on familial and national connections to the archived material, and use practices of re-editing, re-enacting and re-mixing to situate television in relation to other technologies of media storage and retrieval. As these three artworks focus on failures, absences and gaps in television memory, they offer a counterpoint to the notions of collectivity often emphasized in theorisations of the media event (Dayan and Katz, 1992). The article also considers the work of Fajfrić, Horelli, and Domanović in relation to a broader interest in television history and archives, evident amongst contemporary artists and curators since the mid-2000s.