Curating Archive of Dreams: Reflections on the Opening Exhibition at the Archiv der Avantgarden in Dresden (May–August 2024)

• Przemysław Strożek

This article profiles the Archiv der Avantgarden (ADA) as an active archive of knowledge. It was established in 2016 when Egidio Marzona donated 1.5 million objects previously housed in his private residence to the Dresden State Art Collections, which designated the Blockhaus – a baroque Guard House – to be a special place to house the new collection. The article describes the process of curating the Archive of Dreams, the first exhibition of ADA that took place in 2024. It covers the process of selecting an exhibition topic that would introduce audiences to the collection’s different avant-garde ‘isms’ and its transdisciplinary contents, incorporating everything from literary artifacts to those relating to theatre music, philosophy, and photography. The article links the idea of dreams to the utopian visions of avant-garde artists and explores questions of audience, works that function as archives in their own right, and situates Archive of Dreams as an exhibition that shows how archives mediate a complex shift from archive-as-source to archive-as-subject.