In his exhibition ‘anarchive’ Eamon O’Kane presents several of his art projects which explore the idea of the archive.

Archives are usually a place where things are sorted, described and hierarchized. This is where things are put into order as opposed to the disorder of reality. The French philosopher Michel Foucault described the archive as an underlying structure which intended to control and systematize both things, knowledge and people. Later, the German historian Wolfgang Ernst wrote about the “anarchive” as a new, artistic version of the archive, where artists abuse the archive’s principles of order to create a new kind of order. The Anarchive is thus not an anti-archive, but a different archive with different orders than the institutions’ authoritative archives.