Concept

Work with documents is usually analysed through the lens of law and accounting. These disciplines, however, cannot look at documentation from the outside: they belong to the same paradigm that produced today’s rules of record-keeping — that society and all its elements must be arranged rationally. This paradigm therefore stays blind to the irrational, ritual component that largely underlies documentation. The more complex the formal act a person seeks to perform, the more rituals it usually requires.

But what is a document? Our definition draws on the analysis of its nature proposed by Suzanne Briet, the eminent scholar of documentation, and on Ukrainian law. A document rests on three key features:

1. a document conveys information;
2. a document is an indexical sign: it points to the documentary network it belongs to and to its context within it;
3. a document serves as proof or a representation of a phenomenon.

An official document is a kind of document whose main feature is legal force and its creation under clear rules regulated by a state institution.

Official documents are instruments of power. And just like power itself, official documentation can play a negative as well as a positive role.

On the one hand, documentation limits and frames the individual. Official documents are not merely a means of recording reality but a mechanism of constructing it, defining who can be represented in social space and how. Standardised forms simplify and unify information, excluding individual dimensions. A document sets the boundaries of belonging, fixing social differences and separating “us” from “them”.

On the other hand, documentation makes the modern rule-of-law state with all its guarantees possible. The institutions of such a state, on which the lives of all its citizens depend, are made of documents just as the human body is made of cells. The very capacity of documents to certify phenomena is a social construct built on the social contract. In a society governed by law, the rituals of documentation take on the role of social control. Unlike uncodified customary law, modern laws are documents. The rise of the modern judicial system brings consistency to punishment for crimes and reduces the need for the traditional rituals that societies once used to channel tension.

Keeping official documentation is a ritual that replaces the rituals of traditional society. If traditional rituals may symbolically re-enact mythology, modern rituals of documentation symbolically re-enact the worldview of modern society — a view of the world and of society as rationally arranged. The rituals of documentation are thus an attempt to convey symbolically the rationality of the social contract of the rule-of-law state. At the same time, their concrete requirements (taking an oath, witnesses at a wedding, margins on a page and so on) are artificial and conventional, often justified by nothing but a fairly recent documentary tradition. Rituals of documentation also often merge with traditional rituals into a syncretic form. A modern wedding, for instance, combines a marriage certificate with a traditional ceremony. The priest, representing the higher power of God that unites two people, is replaced by an authorised official representing the higher power of the state (though in some countries one person can hold both roles).

The role of rituals in a society governed by law remains the same as in traditional society; only the rituals themselves change and adapt to reflect the values of their society.

The static element of a document changes in interaction with a person who modifies it, integrating it into personal experience. Every intervention in a standardised system turns it into a point where new meaning is formed and manifests the person, the author.

A person’s individuality is born in action. It shows itself through action, large or small, conscious or spontaneous. It is through actions that the self is created. Any decision about how to interact with the documentary structure — following or breaking the rules, editing, layering new elements, deconstruction or transformation — is a process of self-definition. Selfhood shows through normativity; through the standardised form, the unstandardised chaos of a person.

The exhibition «May I See Your Documents…» explores the document as an artistic phenomenon that goes beyond its functional role. Here the document is not only a mechanism of bureaucratic control but an aesthetic, ritual and social artefact that becomes art. The participants work with photography, text, painting, collage and performative practices, revealing the non-obvious place of documentation in society.

Although official documents have often appeared in art, most such projects leaned towards institutional critique, exposing corruption or administrative abuse. The aesthetic and ritual aspects of documentation were rarely explored. Works by conceptual artists such as Haacke use documents to attest to facts without going into their inner nature. Meanwhile, documentation as a practice remains an underrated artistic tool. The primary function of a document is to attest, to reflect a phenomenon, to be a mirror of reality. But what happens when the mirror itself is at the centre of the frame?

The artists examine the points of rupture and convergence between rigid bureaucratic logic and the flexibility of the human personality. This happens through two vectors of movement between them. Bringing the personal into the bureaucratic, the material objects that accompany documents — passport photos, certificates, seals, stamps — become carriers of individuality, while normative forms blur through printing defects, palimpsests, visual “sandwiches”, collages and irony about paperwork. Bringing the bureaucratic into the personal, things and phenomena of everyday life and culture — friendship, love, mythology, folklore — appear in the cold spotlight of documentation. Yet just as the structured rhythm of a poem can give it beauty, looking at life through the structure of documentation can be a powerful artistic gesture.

Intervening in a standardised system creates new meaning, turning the document into living material of cultural production. It ceases to be a static form and appears as fabric, dates, photographs, moving objects, performances and collages.