Archiven

The archive of Kunsthalle Bern is located in the institution’s historical building at Helvetiaplatz 1. It reflects a century of exhibition-making at the heart of the development of contemporary art and may therefore be considered an important source for the study of twentieth-century exhibition history. The documents it holds help in reconstructing the production of exhibitions that took place at Kunsthalle Bern and show the recurring involvement of numerous key actors in the field – artists, curators, collectors, galleries and so forth – as well as the discourse that shaped and reshaped contemporaneity in art. The archive is open to research and, since 2018, accessible online in an ever-growing digital collection.

The digitization of analogue archives has become an integral part of the zeitgeist. Information previously only accessible through the physical perusal of books and archive records has in recent years started to migrate into a new kind of public domain, one that is in digital form. For any individual looking to amass new knowledge through hitherto unavailable sources, and also for institutions wishing to share what until now was available only on request – and required the use of gloves – this development presents completely new possibilities.

But the act of translating a physical archive into digital form is an arduous and costly one. Sometimes the cost-benefit ratio is clearly positive, but more often than not the obscurity of a collection makes this less clear. Posters, catalogues and photographs are easy to justify, but who cares about one hundred years’ worth of customs slips, invoices and personal correspondence of curators and artists? We know that many do; we know, for instance, that the letters preserved in the archive of Kunsthalle Bern are extraordinarily interesting because of the context in which they belong.

The archive of Kunsthalle Bern is located in the institution’s historical building at Helvetiaplatz 1. It reflects a century of exhibition-making at the heart of the development of contemporary art and may therefore be considered an important source for the study of twentieth-century exhibition history. The documents it holds help in reconstructing the production of exhibitions that took place at Kunsthalle Bern and show the recurring involvement of numerous key actors in the field – artists, curators, collectors, galleries and so forth – as well as the discourse that shaped and reshaped contemporaneity in art. The archive is open to research and, since 2018, accessible online in an ever-growing digital collection.