Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, curated by Okwui Enwezor, explores a variety of ways in which contemporary artists appropriate, investigate, and reconfigure archival materials and structures. It focuses on photography and film while at the same time conducting, as Enwezor argues in his catalogue essay, “critical transactions” against “the exactitude of the photographic trace” (11). The term “archive” is thus meant to suggest not the literal image of a dusty file cabinet full of old documents but, following Michel Foucault’s influential The Archaeology of Knowledge (Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan, London: Routledge, 1972), a regulatory discursive system, a set of a priori historical rules that determine the conditions of possibility for statements, i.e., what can be said and seen in specific formations of knowledge. The use of the phrase “archive fever” in the exhibition title references Jacques Derrida’s book of the same name in which he analyzes “the science of the archive” as a system of laws through which statements acquire their privileged evidentiary status (Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). In the context of the exhibition, the archive marks an inherent...