'Thinking Through’ the Artist’s Archive. Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, a complex case study

Years after the time when her photographs were made, German artist and photographer Ursula Schulz-Dornburg (b. 1938) continues to rearrange, repurpose and recontextualise her images. Her archive is a mass of material which cannot be easily understood through a simple chronology of events. Exhibitions and publications become a method for ‘thinking through’ the material, bringing together new and familiar works into new combinations and sequences. Reflecting the complex histories of the lands in which she travelled, her archive transforms into various constellations, which extend beyond the scope of individual images, showing an entanglement of narratives which shift in response to and anticipation of ‘historic’ events.

Though principally a photographer, the strategies Schulz-Dornburg employs are not confined to the creation of photographic images. Instead, she takes on multiple, simultaneous roles, as artist, archivist, researcher and curator. In this paper, I use Schulz-Dornburg’s archive as a complex case study to explore the challenges and possibilities of researching, curating and keeping for future posterity an artist’s archive which is continually in flux.