In 2020, recognising that our legacy material needed to be honoured and safe-guarded for the future, Runway Journal embarked on a process of collating the digital archive on our new website. Every piece of work ever published needed to be reformatted to live a new digital life on the new platform, and it is with much gratitude that I acknowledge Alex Tanazefti for accelerating this content migration. Archives are important; they hold our collective memory, history and stories. This was a project that Runway Journal launched seeking to honour all of the above.
But then the unexpected curveball. Through this process, it was brought to our attention that there were instances of racist, culturally offensive and non-inclusive material preserved within past issues. This revelation brought to light the other, often overlooked side of archives.
Archives are curated spaces. It’s always someone’s responsibility to select what stories or perspectives are collected and represented and these selections can be exclusionary and harmful to different groups of people. Runway Journal has been responsible for producing and preserving critical and visual works for almost two decades, and through the archiving process we realised that our archive is a historical timeline of how cultural dialogues have evolved over this time within the Australian arts community. What the Runway Journal archive suggests is that the artist-run community is not exempt from the same slow cultural movement we criticise in major arts institutions.
As a collective, we had to answer the simple question: What are we going to do?
In July, the board of Runway Journal began to review the entire archive. In pairs we absorbed every single work ever published by our organisation, flagging works that were deemed awkward, insensitive or offensive, but also bookmarking past works that spoke to themes still relevant today (which we shared over Instagram in the following months). Meeting online to discuss our findings, it was evident that there were many preserved instances of what we considered to be ‘offensive content’, but it also revealed an encouraging evolution toward inclusivity in recent years.
Initial conversations started with the idea of placing sensitive content filters over any highlighted content, similar to those found on Instagram, in a way that would give audiences access choice. But the idea of covering all offensive content with digital filters soon became inconceivable as we realised it would be impossible for us – the 2020 board of Runway Journal – to rate what content is ‘more offensive’ considering we had no idea what contexts were for publishing past works and we have no idea where editorial standards will be at in future. In the end, we felt that to editorialise our archive would be the wrong move for a number of major reasons:
The fact is, we will never be able to truly prevent audiences from accessing any of our previously published content (offensive or not), and this heavily swayed our decision to not delete any content, except at the request of its author. However, what we could do was ensure audience safety for those accessing content via our online platform. Our digital archive now features a permanent statement and content warning for audiences – visible before you dive into our archival content, and any redactions by request are noticeably public and timestamped within the archive.
It was important to us to share this entire archive review process with our community and ensure that our conversations and discoveries did not purely exist in a vacuum. We wanted to involve everyone in this discourse and give past contributors or board members the opportunity to respond to past work in a new context. Ultimately, in order for us to really face up to our past we needed to produce this Issue. Issue 42: Archive is the first in Runway Journal’s history to commission content that critically responds to specific articles, artworks or themes from our own archive. The issue also responds to the theme of ‘archive’ more broadly, and has presented past contributors and board members an opportunity to reflect on works previously published.
All in all, Issue 42: Archive is an amalgamation of personal and familial archives, reflections of one’s own work in the archive, thoughtful responses to past artworks, varied considerations on archival practices, and a critical examination of past issue themes.
Drawing from a personal archive of captured visual moments to curate a digital zine Wet transfer, Mark Mailler pairs past and future lives together, contextualising the transience of human perspective. Also reflecting upon the archive as personal practice, Ying-Di Yin presents a diaristic presentation of her own family’s migratory history to Australia, questioning the responsibility one has to preserve these stories when unrepresented in a national historical context.
Colonial monuments have steadily been toppling around the world with a culmination taking effect during the Black Lives Matter movement this year. Mediating on the possibility of such removals in Australia, Matt Chun’s visual piece extends upon his previously published essay A Short Dispatch from the Garden of Generalissimos in Issue 35: Space. The fact that a theme such as ‘space’ would elicit responses to the theme of ‘archive’ is unsurprising – it’s important to recognise here that communities are still trying to carve out space within past histories for voices that have been excluded outside of the dominant narrative.
Cracks in the Archive by Andrew Brooks was published in Issue 35: Space and prompts us to consider destabilising established narratives. By referring to this relevant piece as a point of departure, Huni Mancini’s Recentring the Moana advocates for the reorienting of Indigenous knowledge systems as a way to undo colonial power structures at play within archives and collective national memories. Munira Tabassum Ahmed’s poetic response to काला पानी Kala Pani by Shivanjani Lal, also part of Issue 35: Space, acknowledges that while both artists speak different parental languages, they share the ancient common root of Sanskrit. GHOST WATER explores how language operates as an evolving archive for culture in the same way bodies do.
Hana Pera Aoake boldly examines an entire issue theme from the Runway Journal archive. Ko au te moana, ko te moana ko au. I am the ocean and the ocean is me: A response and extension to Issue 24: Islands discusses the framing of islands in this past issue by engaging with a number of previously published works. From etymological history, the disastrous effects of colonial island literature to the urgent reality of rising sea levels, Aoake unpacks our understanding of islands and attempts to think through the relationship between water and bodies.
Ben Macintosh’s on the weight of paper and land art critically examines the way in which we have been creating and consuming information in an era of the algorithm. By proposing a world where no information is ever lost – the archive-world – Macintosh contemplates the effects mass data storage will have on society. The irreducible document, the radical archive by past board member David Greenhalgh is a visual reflection of artist-run archives and the role they play in recording ‘evidence of us’ in the documentary form of artworks. During his term as Runway board member, Greenhalgh was instrumental in the digital relocation of archival content in 2017.
Runway Journal’s archive holds racist, culturally offensive and non-inclusive material within it and to be frank – how could it not? When the arts community prioritises a very singular demographic as its dominant narrative, of course the breadth of voices and identities that make up society are silenced or othered. None of us can hide away from a long history where awareness of critical issues, such as intersectionality, racism or inclusivity, were not shaping cultural dialogues to the degree in which they are today. But we must look for it, own it and respond to it.
Artist-run initiatives and volunteer arts organisations are just as responsible for looking back at their own histories as major institutions. While this reflection is laborious, time consuming and emotionally draining, we should all be routinely evaluating, critiquing, discussing and reimagining these histories. We also need to acknowledge that cultural and editorial protocols implemented today – much like this archive review – will shift and evolve in the future, in ways we cannot foresee.
In the meantime, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Aarna Fitzgerald Hanley, Sebastian Henry-Jones, Georgia Hobbs, Katie Milton, Emma O’Neill, Sophie Penkethman-Young, Audrey Pfister, April Phillips, Rebekah Raymond and Isabella Sanasi, as the current board of Runway Journal. This dedicated team of artists, writers and curators are the only iteration of board members to have read and reviewed every piece of previously published Runway Journal content (18 years worth!) and I am incredibly proud of this team for taking on such an immense task with criticality, consideration and care – all the while contributing their time to our organisation in a voluntary capacity.
We hope you enjoy Issue 42: Archive.
Nanette Orly
Chairperson
Runway Journal
December, 2020
In 2020, recognising that our legacy material needed to be honoured and safe-guarded for the future, Runway Journal embarked on a process of collating the digital archive on our new website. Every piece of work ever published needed to be reformatted to live a new digital life on the new platform, and it is with much gratitude that I acknowledge Alex Tanazefti for accelerating this content migration. Archives are important; they hold our collective memory, history and stories. This was a project that Runway Journal launched seeking to honour all of the above.
But then the unexpected curveball. Through this process, it was brought to our attention that there were instances of racist, culturally offensive and non-inclusive material preserved within past issues. This revelation brought to light the other, often overlooked side of archives.
Archives are curated spaces. It’s always someone’s responsibility to select what stories or perspectives are collected and represented and these selections can be exclusionary and harmful to different groups of people. Runway Journal has been responsible for producing and preserving critical and visual works for almost two decades, and through the archiving process we realised that our archive is a historical timeline of how cultural dialogues have evolved over this time within the Australian arts community. What the Runway Journal archive suggests is that the artist-run community is not exempt from the same slow cultural movement we criticise in major arts institutions.
As a collective, we had to answer the simple question: What are we going to do?
In July, the board of Runway Journal began to review the entire archive. In pairs we absorbed every single work ever published by our organisation, flagging works that were deemed awkward, insensitive or offensive, but also bookmarking past works that spoke to themes still relevant today (which we shared over Instagram in the following months). Meeting online to discuss our findings, it was evident that there were many preserved instances of what we considered to be ‘offensive content’, but it also revealed an encouraging evolution toward inclusivity in recent years.
Initial conversations started with the idea of placing sensitive content filters over any highlighted content, similar to those found on Instagram, in a way that would give audiences access choice. But the idea of covering all offensive content with digital filters soon became inconceivable as we realised it would be impossible for us – the 2020 board of Runway Journal – to rate what content is ‘more offensive’ considering we had no idea what contexts were for publishing past works and we have no idea where editorial standards will be at in future. In the end, we felt that to editorialise our archive would be the wrong move for a number of major reasons:
The fact is, we will never be able to truly prevent audiences from accessing any of our previously published content (offensive or not), and this heavily swayed our decision to not delete any content, except at the request of its author. However, what we could do was ensure audience safety for those accessing content via our online platform. Our digital archive now features a permanent statement and content warning for audiences – visible before you dive into our archival content, and any redactions by request are noticeably public and timestamped within the archive.
It was important to us to share this entire archive review process with our community and ensure that our conversations and discoveries did not purely exist in a vacuum. We wanted to involve everyone in this discourse and give past contributors or board members the opportunity to respond to past work in a new context. Ultimately, in order for us to really face up to our past we needed to produce this Issue. Issue 42: Archive is the first in Runway Journal’s history to commission content that critically responds to specific articles, artworks or themes from our own archive. The issue also responds to the theme of ‘archive’ more broadly, and has presented past contributors and board members an opportunity to reflect on works previously published.
All in all, Issue 42: Archive is an amalgamation of personal and familial archives, reflections of one’s own work in the archive, thoughtful responses to past artworks, varied considerations on archival practices, and a critical examination of past issue themes.
Drawing from a personal archive of captured visual moments to curate a digital zine Wet transfer, Mark Mailler pairs past and future lives together, contextualising the transience of human perspective. Also reflecting upon the archive as personal practice, Ying-Di Yin presents a diaristic presentation of her own family’s migratory history to Australia, questioning the responsibility one has to preserve these stories when unrepresented in a national historical context.
Colonial monuments have steadily been toppling around the world with a culmination taking effect during the Black Lives Matter movement this year. Mediating on the possibility of such removals in Australia, Matt Chun’s visual piece extends upon his previously published essay A Short Dispatch from the Garden of Generalissimos in Issue 35: Space. The fact that a theme such as ‘space’ would elicit responses to the theme of ‘archive’ is unsurprising – it’s important to recognise here that communities are still trying to carve out space within past histories for voices that have been excluded outside of the dominant narrative.
Cracks in the Archive by Andrew Brooks was published in Issue 35: Space and prompts us to consider destabilising established narratives. By referring to this relevant piece as a point of departure, Huni Mancini’s Recentring the Moana advocates for the reorienting of Indigenous knowledge systems as a way to undo colonial power structures at play within archives and collective national memories. Munira Tabassum Ahmed’s poetic response to काला पानी Kala Pani by Shivanjani Lal, also part of Issue 35: Space, acknowledges that while both artists speak different parental languages, they share the ancient common root of Sanskrit. GHOST WATER explores how language operates as an evolving archive for culture in the same way bodies do.
Hana Pera Aoake boldly examines an entire issue theme from the Runway Journal archive. Ko au te moana, ko te moana ko au. I am the ocean and the ocean is me: A response and extension to Issue 24: Islands discusses the framing of islands in this past issue by engaging with a number of previously published works. From etymological history, the disastrous effects of colonial island literature to the urgent reality of rising sea levels, Aoake unpacks our understanding of islands and attempts to think through the relationship between water and bodies.
Ben Macintosh’s on the weight of paper and land art critically examines the way in which we have been creating and consuming information in an era of the algorithm. By proposing a world where no information is ever lost – the archive-world – Macintosh contemplates the effects mass data storage will have on society. The irreducible document, the radical archive by past board member David Greenhalgh is a visual reflection of artist-run archives and the role they play in recording ‘evidence of us’ in the documentary form of artworks. During his term as Runway board member, Greenhalgh was instrumental in the digital relocation of archival content in 2017.
Runway Journal’s archive holds racist, culturally offensive and non-inclusive material within it and to be frank – how could it not? When the arts community prioritises a very singular demographic as its dominant narrative, of course the breadth of voices and identities that make up society are silenced or othered. None of us can hide away from a long history where awareness of critical issues, such as intersectionality, racism or inclusivity, were not shaping cultural dialogues to the degree in which they are today. But we must look for it, own it and respond to it.
Artist-run initiatives and volunteer arts organisations are just as responsible for looking back at their own histories as major institutions. While this reflection is laborious, time consuming and emotionally draining, we should all be routinely evaluating, critiquing, discussing and reimagining these histories. We also need to acknowledge that cultural and editorial protocols implemented today – much like this archive review – will shift and evolve in the future, in ways we cannot foresee.
In the meantime, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Aarna Fitzgerald Hanley, Sebastian Henry-Jones, Georgia Hobbs, Katie Milton, Emma O’Neill, Sophie Penkethman-Young, Audrey Pfister, April Phillips, Rebekah Raymond and Isabella Sanasi, as the current board of Runway Journal. This dedicated team of artists, writers and curators are the only iteration of board members to have read and reviewed every piece of previously published Runway Journal content (18 years worth!) and I am incredibly proud of this team for taking on such an immense task with criticality, consideration and care – all the while contributing their time to our organisation in a voluntary capacity.
We hope you enjoy Issue 42: Archive.
Nanette Orly
Chairperson
Runway Journal
December, 2020
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Runway Journal receives project support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Runway Journal receives project support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.