Irregular Archive

“Irregular Archive” Text and installation by Natalia Gurova Irregular Archive began as a self-published magazine compiling contributions from individuals connected through shared experiences of migration, displacement, restriction, or structural violence. The artist invited them to contribute what felt urgent, unfinished, or unspoken, in any form they chose. The resulting multilingual publication is accompanied by the artist’s own watercolours — soft, ambiguous images that hover between botanical illustration and private reflection. The sculptural installation that followed does not illustrate the texts directly but emerges as a spatial response. Modular wooden frameworks, echoing the grid of the room’s windows, draw from modernist logic while remaining purposefully open and unresolved. These structures act as carriers: they host the printed publication, sculptural fragments, drawings, and plants. One recurring figure is the giant hogweed — an invasive plant once gifted to Europe and later banned. Within this installation, it serves as an allegory for migration, exoticization, and shifting borders, exposing how dominant systems frame the “other” as both decorative and dangerous. Scattered throughout are ceramic micro-monuments — small, grotesque, and comically abstract figures that recall bureaucratic or political types. Rather than depicting specific individuals, they question the idea of monumentality itself, offering critique through destabilization rather than grandeur. Irregular Archive resists fixity. It is a constellation of materials and voices, a porous structure for stories that don’t fit into fixed categories. The archive remains “irregular” not through incompleteness, but because it stays open — alive in its multiplicity. Authors who contributed to the publication: Ruthie Jenrbekova Maria Vilkovisky Ania Zorh Natalia Gurova Ekaterina Shapiro-Obermair Ivana Lazić Denise Parizek Iva Marković Masimba Hwati Alexander Slaughterhouse Leila Samari Finn Cristina Messnik Phoenix Sandoval Jelena Micić