Independent Archive: Spirits Out of Time Bruce Quek In 2012, the late artist Lee Wen founded the Independent Archive (IA) with the mission of documenting contemporary visual art, focusing on performance and other ephemeral practices in Singapore. For seven years, IA’s shophouse space on Aliwal Street served not just as a library and repository, but also as a site of continuous encounter, and a space for experimentation and collaboration. In 2019, as we grieved his passing, a number of us had another question to face: what would become of IA, to which he had devoted so much of the last years of his life?
The IA extended family discussing the future at 67 Aliwal Street. Image courtesy of Bruce Quek.
To simplify the tangled events of those first few weeks, I took charge of a portion of the Archive’s memory, in the form of boxes filled with hard drives, optical discs and tape cassettes of various types, alongside documents, posters and other printed matter, photographs, negatives, slides, and so on. Transporting these materials to the offices of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art (NTU CCA) was an inflection point in a tendency that had been growing gradually over the past few years. For much of my time at IA, digitisation was but one amongst many of my responsibilities. From this point onward, it grew to become my overriding concern.
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