The present publication is a reader for the group exhibition “The Creative Act” at Henie Onstad Art Centre. With artists Maryam Jafri, Carlos Motta, Angel Nevarez & Valerie Tevere, and Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas. All artists’ work deal with different archives as content. We used the reader to publish relevant material for each project, often re-archiving the direct sources of the artists’ work. A good example of this was the inclusion of the complete musical scores for The War Song, re-orchestrated and conducted by Øivind Ness for the The Norwegian Radio Orchestra and Jenny Hval, performed at The National Opera, Oslo (project by Nevarez and Tevere).
The exhibition entitled “The Creative Act” brings together several artistic projects which use different methods to create narratives based on historical material. The exhibition has come about as the result of the recognition that many artists look on archives as an actively discursive system that they can utilise to point to phenomena of the times. In this context, “history” is taken to mean the recent past. The “creative act” is the artist’s use of historical material in order to throw light on contemporary phenomena and issues, but also her use of the institution as a workplace for materialising the contents of the archives.