Dorothea Schlegel Artist in Residence

Research Area 2: "Travelling Matters"

November – Dezember 2022

Welcome to the Dirty Archive

‘Welcome to the Dirty Archive’ is embedded in Julia Lübbecke’s ongoing research into enabling new ways of dealing with knowledge using the concept of ephemerality. Her current project focuses on the potential of decay and dirt in Western archives. These images or texts have been disqualified for so-called ‘representative moments’ due to material damage that occurred during storage or supposedly faulty processing. Lübbecke’s aim is to examine the practice of dissolution, of depriving oneself of a clear legibility as another access point for unlearning systems of Western knowledge production.

Julia Lübbecke (*1989 in Giessen) studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, UMPRUM – Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague and the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. She completed the Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt postgraduate programme in 2020. Lübbecke’s transdisciplinary practice includes sculptural installations, photography, text, video and performative elements. Her works deal with the relationship between body and institution, exploring this connection to examine dominant structures of order and create processes to make them fragile. She is particularly interested in the potential of effects such as desire or discomfort, which are key themes in her subjective archive. She uses this term to describe her own practice of collecting and constructing, which aims to develop an ephemeral method of sharing and remembering knowledge, abandoning classifications and categorizations.

Julia Lübbecke’s works have been shown internationally: at Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos in Santiago de Chile, Galerie im Turm in Berlin, VUNU Gallery in Košice (SK) and IKOB – Museum of Contemporary Art in Eupen (BE). She was one of the recipients of the IKOB – Art Prize for feminist art in 2019 and has received grants from the Stiftung Kunstfonds (2021, 2022) and the Berlin Senate (2022), among others. In 2022 her first monograph was published by Sandstein Verlag.

Julia Lübbecke is part of the collective Yours truly, LoL.