Tender Secrets: The Powerful Archive Of Resistance
What do you feel when you come across an archive? Not the cold, clinical kind sealed in cardboard boxes, but the living sort: Made of notebooks stuffed with scribbled thoughts, of Polaroids faded by the sun, of shaky family videos capturing unplanned moments. These personal fragments don’t just document lives, they make your heart throb. In a world that prefers polished narratives and airbrushed legacies, some artists choose instead to leave traces: raw, messy, unfinished, and entirely human. It is not just that their life is their work, it’s the use of emotions to expose and document. Read more in Tender Secrets: The Powerful Archive Of Resistance
Image on the left-hand side is from ‘Derek Jarman: The Authorised Biography’ by Tony Peake. Image courtesy of Allison & Busby.
An artist will always be their work, and when we understand the work, we may well get a sense of them. But then there are artists who use memory of their own or others to document and explore; this is core to their work. This is the lens through which we can approach not only the newly released biography of Derek Jarman but also a broader conversation.
A conversation about artists who treat memory, documentation, and archive not as afterthoughts, but as central to their work. To archive, in this sense, is not to preserve but to create. It is to recognise that the act of collecting and curating one’s own life, or the lives of others, is itself an artwork; personal, political, and often both.
Take Laia Abril, a Spanish visual artist and photographer based in Barcelona. You might know her from her haunting project ‘A History of Misogyny’, a powerful body of work that spans photography, video, audio, and text. It’s not just visual storytelling, it’s investigative journalism in artistic form.
With her series ‘On Abortion’ and ‘On Rape’, Abril doesn’t merely illustrate injustice, she compiles it, layer by layer, forcing us to look at things most of us would rather ignore. Her work isn’t interested in shock; it’s interested in systems, how pain is perpetuated through law, silence, and culture.
Image courtesy of the artist, Laia Abril
You don’t just view Abril’s work, you feel your way through it. Her installations feel like walking through a constructed memory, one that belongs to many people at once. Visualise stepping into her archive; not as a viewer, but as a witness. She invites you to pause, to feel the quiet gravity of layered testimonies and histories once left unheard. Imagine paging through someone’s diary, except this diary tells the story of a society. In her hands, the archive becomes emotional terrain; an exploration of all our humanness.
Then there’s Arthur Jafa, an American filmmaker and visual artist born in Mississippi. Jafa’s work explores Black identity, power, and cultural history through found footage and experimental film. ‘View, Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death’, a seven-minute collage of found footage. The film captures the vast and complex spectrum of Black life in America.
Jafa’s mastery lies in how he arranges all the fragments; a protest, a dance, a smile, a police siren. His films make you feel as if you’re right there. His archive is visual jazz; pain and joy held in tension, in rhythm, in resistance.
Courtesy Arthur Jafa and Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York/ Rome
Jafa doesn’t present an archive to be studied from a distance; as the viewer, you feel thrown into it. The pacing, the cuts, the grain; demand your presence. His work reclaims narrative power from traditional histories that have excluded or erased Black voices. Instead of offering a tidy account, Jafa gives us an emotional map, an ever-shifting constellation of what it means to live while Black and to carry the visceral memory in your body.
Christian Boltanski, the late French conceptual artist, was known for installations that blurred the lines between memory, mourning and material presence. His work feels like museum-like setups: dim lights, old photographs and piles of used clothing, you feel yourself wandering between.
At first glance, it seems like evidence of something, a disaster, perhaps, or a life lived and gone. But look again and you realise Boltanski is presenting not facts, but feelings. He recreates memory; its blurriness, its echoes, its weight.
In works like ‘Les Archives de C.B.’, Boltanski even archives himself. He turns his own life into an exhibit, poking at the absurdity of trying to be remembered, of hoping to leave something behind. His art asks: What will remain of us? And will it ever capture who we truly were? There’s something deeply moving in that uncertainty; the fragility of legacy, the tenderness of trying anyway.
And so to Derek Jarman. A British filmmaker, painter, gardener, diarist, and activist, he never saw his life as something to be stored neatly in drawers. His archive was always in motion: In the diaries he published during his battle with HIV, in the scratchy intimacy of his Super 8 films, in the carefully tended chaos of his garden at Prospect Cottage, Dungerness, where he lived for the last few years of his life. He made art out of fragments; not in spite of their brokenness, but because of it.
Jarman’s work lives in the overlap between the deeply personal and the defiantly political. In ‘Blue’, his final film, we watch nothing but a screen of the artist Yves Klein Blue (YKB) while listening to a soundscape of memories, reflections and pain. It is perhaps the most powerful example of the living archive. A man recording his decline, not for pity, but for truth. He was losing his sight to AIDS-related complications. He chose to make that loss visible.
Image courtesy of Allison & Busby
His earlier films, like ‘The Last of England’, a haunting vision of post-Thatcher Britain and ‘Jubilee’, a punk-fuelled time-travel odyssey through anarchy and identity, are also steeped in archival sensibility. They collage history, fantasy, anger, queerness, and punk into something both chaotic and coherent. Even his more narrative works, such as ‘Caravaggio’, a sensual reimagining of the artist’s life steeped in queerness and contradiction, use painterly compositions and historical layers to question how we construct memory and identity.
The newly released biography, Derek Jarman: The Authorised Biography by Tony Peake, is the first major portrait of the artist in years. What makes this biography especially vital is not just its exhaustive detail but its tone; tender, inquisitive, and completely uninterested in oversimplifying the complexities of Jarman’s life.
Peake’s approach lets Jarman’s contradictions breathe; his boundless creativity, his passionate activism and the intimate struggles he faced are presented without gloss, embracing the fullness of his humanity.
Through interviews, letters, and meticulous research, the biography itself becomes an archive of sorts, not a closing chapter but a continuation of Jarman’s lifelong practice of self-documentation. The book invites readers not just to understand the artist but to engage with the cultural and political worlds he was constantly challenging.
‘Peake has given Derek Jarman the biography he deserves’
In its pages, Jarman’s spirit, as defiant as it is vulnerable, is preserved, not for nostalgia’s sake, but as a testament to an artist who reshaped what art could be in a time of great social and personal upheaval.
The Japanese concept of wabi-sabi holds that brokenness can be beautiful; that imperfection is not a flaw, but a form of truth. These artists, in their various mediums, show us just that. They remind us that sometimes what’s most meaningful isn’t the polished final piece, but the act of keeping, of noticing, of saying: This mattered.
Isn’t that what art really is? Not a grand statement, but a gesture. A keeping. A sharing. A way of saying: I was here. Will you remember it too?
Find ‘Derek Jarman: The Authorised Biography’ by Tony Peake here
If you liked reading Tender Secrets: The Powerful Archive Of Resistance then why not try David Hockney’s Astonishing Gaze: What Happens When You Really Look
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