Rethinking Art's Histories

Rethinking Art's Histories opens with Photographic afterlives, a scholarly study of the photographs taken during the Algerian War of Independence (1954 to 1962) and of how they reappear in contemporary art and modern photobooks. Katarzyna Falecka places these practices within the wider archival turn in the humanities and the ongoing debates about archives in Algeria and North Africa. The volume is the first in the series and sets out its interest in how art and history relate to one another.

Rather than treating a historical photograph as a fixed record, the book follows how images move across different spaces and collect new layers of meaning over time. It focuses on artists and photographers who excavate sidelined histories of the war, reworking familiar narratives and imagining histories that cannot be recovered from archives. The publisher's blurb argues that archival contemporary art tells us as much about the present as about the past, and that it shows the potential of archives of decolonisation.