KollActiv is a platform for co-authored projects by founding curatorial practitioners Ann Harezlak and Dr. Kirsten Cooke.

Collectively they investigate the cross over between the treatment of archival objects and curatorial practice; deploying the productive friction between their diverse approaches towards the nature and display of objects.

In 2011, KollActiv began developing the project Concrete Plastic as an alternative methodology that challenges the usual models or hierarchies within contemporary curatorial practices. Interrupting and enveloping normative procedures, the curators are primary producers that have created the platform and restrictions for the project, archives and ephemera are the primary objects and stimuli for the artist’s responses.

From Fall 2014, Concrete Plastic has explored the divisions of material (artwork and archival) through reconsidered and hybridized methodologies. Concrete Plastic incorporates discussion and production, artistic practice based in the USA and UK, with local host archives and histories: intervening in the historical and contemporary curatorial discourse surrounding the ontology of the art object and archival practice.

Harezlak and Cooke have collaborated on elements of the following projects: The Promise of Something and Nothing (2015, LA); After Living in the Room of Réalités Nouvelles (2015, LA); Arrive and Likewise Depart (2014, LA, Sonce Alexander Gallery); Project Biennale (2008) a publication that was launched during the Venice Biennale and toured to different sites throughout UK; and One Night Stand (2008) at WIMBLEDON Gallery, UK.

Ann Harezlak

A Curator and Art Historian (MA Critical Writing and Curation UAL), who is lives and works between Los Angeles and London. Harezlak has assisted in the development of major archival projects at Special Collections, Chelsea College of Arts Library, University of the Arts London, Tate Archive, the Henry Moore Foundation and the Ian Hamilton Finlay & Michael Harvey Archive. Her research practice explores Henry Moore’s collaboration with photographers in the 1970’s and 80’s through its associated archives. Recent research has focused on Brazilian Poesia Concreta and European Konkrete Poesie (Concrete Poetry), emphasizing the roles played by Latin American poets in establishing an international movement and its influence on the methodologies of European poets. Harezlak is also a founding member of the collective FSP.

Dr. Kirsten Cooke

A Curator and Art Practitioner (MA Critical Writing and Curation UAL), who lives and works in London, UK. Cooke is interested
 in 
locating 
curatorial 
strategies
 that 
resist
 the impoverishing practice
 of
 exhibitions,
which
 reiterate 
neoliberal 
values 
through predetermining 
the 
images
 affect. Her
 curatorial
 practice
 employs
 an 
act
 of
 co‐authoring
 and
 editing
 to 
construct 
frameworks,
 stage
 events,

 present
 statements/papers 
and
 film
 screenings.
 Cooke
 is
 also 
part 
of 
the 
collective
 Material
 Conjectures,

 which is 
a 
co‐authored
 project
 between
 artist
 Dr.
 Dale
 Holmes
 and
 herself. Cooke
’s PhD
 at
 the
 University
 of 
Reading was titled ‘Art Ontology Value: staging art’s ontology within systems of value‘.