Archives as Method: Kaucyila Brooke in conversation with Manuela Ammer

Los Angeles-based artist Kaucyila Brooke's photographic practice addresses the politics of cultural production and sexual representation. In diverse narrativized and serial formats—including large-scale photomontages, photo novellas, and photographic archives—she reevaluates the status of the photograph as object. Often based on archival research, many of Brooke’s projects focus on the recoding of the photographic genres of portraiture, still life, documentary reportage, and landscape.

This conversation will explore the nature of archival methods in her overall body of work, and in particular the works included in two recent and upcoming shows in Vienna:  and Feminist Futures Forever (November 5, 2026–March 8, 2027) at Belvedere 21. Work from her series Vitrinen in Arbeit (2002–2005)—an extensive photographic archive documenting the changing exhibition strategies in the Natural History Museum in Vienna—appears in the solo exhibition Tolia Astakhishvili, Figure of the Child (June 20–November 1, 2026), which Ammer co-curated with Fatima Hellberg. In this exhibition, Astakhishvili engaged with the mumok collection in an immersive installation which included the work of Brooke, Nan Goldin, Yaryna Fedoriv, and Charlotte Posenenske, among others. Consisting of 145 unique photographs from the series, Vitrinen in Arbeit also appears as an artist’s book published with Michael Dawson Gallery, Los Angeles (2004). 

Brooke's investigation of strategies of knowledge production within institutions, urban structures, and the private sphere will also be discussed in past and ongoing projects, including the photographic series Kathy Acker’s Clothes (1999–2004), in which Brooke charts a photographic index of the clothes of experimental punk writer and poet Kathy Acker (1948-1997). Less a simple documentation than a crystallization of postures and attitudes, these photographs illustrate Brooke’s discerning penetration of matter—leather, lace, silk, knits—from sensual designer clothes to cheap sweatshirts and worn cotton jumpers. In The Boy Mechanic (1996–ongoing), she documents a social history of lesbian bars by photographing their present and former locations in cities such as San Diego, Cologne, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
These works, as well as Brooke’s new series of drawings, Tracing Women’s Press (2024)—of excerpts from a monthly feminist newspaper published from 1970-1987 in Eugene, Oregon—will be explored in relation to the modes of collecting and display within institutions, and the role of archival practice in research, art, and curation. Kaucyila Brooke has been a regular faculty member of the Program in Photography and Media at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California since 1992 and served as Program Director (1999–2004) and Program Co-Director (1994–1999, 2013–2015).

Manuela Ammer is curator at mumok - Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, where she co-curated with Fatima Hellberg, Tolia Astakhishvili, Figure of the Child, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition, which explored movement and touch to break with the conventions of museum presentation. Ammer has also organized exhibitions such as Steve Reinke: Butter (2020), Pattern and Decoration: Ornament as Promise (2019), Bruno Gironcoli: Staying Shy at Work (2018), Painting 2.0: Painting in the Information Age (2016, together with Achim Hochdörfer, David Joselit, and Tonio Kröner), and Ulrike Müller: The old expressions are with us always and there are always others (2015). From 2011 to 2014, she was a research associate at the Collaborative Research Center 626, Aesthetic Experience in the Sign of the Dissolution of Artistic Boundaries, at Freie Universität Berlin. Ammer has contributed to journals such as Frieze, Texte zur Kunst, and Parkett, as well as monographic essays on the work of numerous artists.