Not on View: Re/Activating the Archive and its A/Effects is a group exhibition featuring nine artists, as well as selected texts and ephemera from the newly established REINSTITUTE Research Library & Archive, in an exploration of the critical, social, and artistic implications of re-activating the archive as intervention. This is Dylan Otterbein’s debut curatorial exhibition with Guest Spot @ THE REINSTITUTE. Not on View runs from November 11th, 2017 to January 12th, 2018.

When the excluded are made visible, when they demand visibility, it is always ultimately a matter of politics and a rethinking of history. This is often the case with artists collectives…The archive is consuming its host, brandishing all the malicious resentment of the profaned, the philistine, the exile…A materialising dark matter now confronts this so-called future as a grinning archive and antagonistic corpse…[Dark matter] directs our attention towards an ellipsis within the historical record where none is supposed to exist…The archive has split open. –Gregory Sholette

Not on View re-positions the archive—much like the self-organized practice itself—as a site for counter-narratives of resistance and solidarity. In offering a collection of a/effects and artifacts typically excluded from the institutional archive, Not on View asks its audience to question who decides what is worth keeping and what histories are worth preserving, and to critically consider how we engage with both the archive and its objects as a site of knowledge, truth, power, and protest.

Not on View features the work of Conrad Bakker, Eric Doeringer, Noah Fischer, Kang Seung Lee, Antoine Lefebvre, Press Press, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Paul Soulellis, with selected materials from THE REINSTITUTE Research Archive & Library, including books, texts, and ephemera by John Cage, Juan Caloca, Sylvia Federici, Coco Fusco, the Guerrilla Girls, Martin Herbert, David Horvitz, the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, Miranda July, Sister Corita Kent, Zoe Leonard, Mess Hall, Occupy Museums, John O’Connor, Public Collectors, The Reinstitute Press, Gregory Sholette, Temporary Services, W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy), Kara Walker, Caroline Woolard, and more.