Obtuse Archive: Assessing the Curatorial Vision of an Alternative Arts & Culture Archive

The main page for Obtuse Archive 

By LIAM OTERO January 27, 2026

Obtuse Archive Website Link

The digital landscape is a proving ground for new forms of curatorial practice with its spatially-freeing and no holds barred parameters. Unlike museums or galleries, digital curation is a multipronged system that entails everything from virtual exhibitions to online pedagogy. Yet, an important throughline that undergirds any form of digital curation is the concept of the archive. Contemporary visual discourse is now much more attuned to the relevance of digital media. Subsequently, one’s encounters with art & culture in an online format has become a radical juncture in both image absorption and documentation that goes beyond even what the art critic John Berger contemplated with his Ways of Seeing back in 1972. For as much as technology is inculcated in 21st Century visual culture, digital curation remains in a liminal state of development, thus making it ripe for fresh ideas to emerge. 

Beatrice in the RCW22 Collection - pink tights and knitted pink-purple shoes. With @dranaugabriel @trashedarbiee @ioana.rmn @f64studio. Design by Alesia Cida. Image courtesy of Obtuse Archive. 

Launched in 2025, Obtuse Archive was founded by Selin Kir and Yangrung Chen, who are also its main curators, as a platform through which alternative visual culture could occupy a presence at no risk of disappearing into oblivion. Though the platform aesthetically resembles a more refined version of an arts & culture magazine like VICE or Hyperallergic, it is wholeheartedly operative as an archive in preserving contemporary vanguardist culture with an eye toward experimentation free from rigid scheduling and hyper-focused organization. 

An important motivating factor that fomented the inception of Obtuse Archive was Kir and Chen’s shared frustrations over the rapidity at which culture presents itself coupled with its just as swift dissipation, a challenge that is further impinged by the shortness of collective memory and individuals’ limited attention spans. This is more than a mere desire to capture a fad or trend, but an intent to document individualized subcultures and movements of the moment that otherwise may not receive proper attention from mainstream, institutional platforms. These frustrations are similar to how those who have an affinity for sub-cultural aesthetics denoted with the suffixes of “–core” or “–wave”, such as Cottagecore or Vaporwave, failed to attract more widespread attention and especially cohesive documentation. 

The official logo of Obtuse Archive. Image courtesy of Obtuse Archive.

Social media, which is oftentimes the prime disseminator of alternative culture, can turn in on itself by the algorithm which renders such access and exposure obsolete. Obtuse Archive’s mission is to avoid these circumstances by ensuring that combined textual and visual documentation is afforded to truly groundbreaking cultural strides that can be appreciated by a global audience. 

Presently, Obtuse Archive’s articles are divided into two categories - “Visual Essays” and “Conversations” - whose subjects cover a range of topics in the contemporaneity of alternative culture: art, fashion, music, design, etc. 

Header for "Experimentations on Keeping a Sonic Diary" by G. Nazferel. Published on November 19, 2025. Image courtesy of Obtuse Archive. 

There is a fascinating demonstration of the fluidity of what a “Visual Essay” encompasses based on the range of methods incorporated into Obtuse Archive’s published works. G. Nazferel’s “Experimentations on Keeping a Sonic Diary” is a piece which is part-essay and part-sonic record that is on the cusp of sound art, autobiography, and intermedia expression. Conversely, “Environmental: A Visual Essay” by Aleks Faust makes spartan use of text with a pronounced emphasis on harshly lit photographs of detritus untethered from any particular narrative or thematic associations.

Two of Aleks Faust's photos from his Visual Essay, "Environmental". Published on October 1, 2025. Image courtesy of Obtuse Archive.

The Conversation pieces are interview-style articles in which either Kir or Chen speak with a creative that is presented as a back-and-forth Q&A where the interviewer’s question is to the left, while the interviewee’s answer cuts in underneath from the right. The accompanying imagery, too, is also crucial for these interviews as they evince the types of works produced by the subject in question along with the behind-the-scenes process through which they are working. To give a few examples: the multidisciplinary works of the artist CELS (細胞) are balanced out with installation photos taken from the artist’s studio; nail artist SHYN’s surrealistic finger-tip designs as recognized in fashion photoshoots and in close-up, almost still life photography; or, the variability of Hsin Hwang’s painterly installations. 

CELS (細胞), Shovel for Ravefun Taiwan, 2024. Photo: @wangdahow. Art Direction: @majajajalee Shovel @cels_ . Image courtesy of Obtuse Archive. 

A photoshoot of SHYN's nail art designs. Image courtesy of Obtuse Archive. 

The crisp text, oversized images, and rawness of the transcribed conversations renders Obtuse Archive’s approach to interviews with creatives as a worthy spiritual successor to Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine.

But as an archive, Obtuse does not singularly focus on the now, for its articles reveal an active engagement with the past. For example, in Kaptan Ozgan’s essay, “The Strain of Constant Presence”, there is a critical examination of dance marathons and bodily exertion through an expansive range of media, including Great Depression-era photography, Sydney Pollack’s Oscar nominated film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969), the Postmodern artist Robert Longo’s (American, b. 1953) charcoal & graphite drawings, and the collaborative video performance works of twin sibling artists Gabriella & Silvana Mangano (Australian, b. 1972). 

Header for Visual Essay, "The Strain of Constant Presence" featuring Robert Longo's Untitled (White Riot), 1982, charcoal, graphite, and ink on two paper panels. Published on January 12, 2026. Image courtesy of Obtuse Archive.

In another instance, Zeynep Kerpisci’s visual essay, “The Lost Language of Fashion Shows”, actively ponders the history of fashion shows as not only connotative of contemporaneous tastemaking, but more so of the creative theatrics and unpredictability of what these events would entail, be it the cybernetics of Alexander McQueen’s Spring / Summer 1999 runway show or the dandyish, swashbuckling theme of Vivienne Westwood’s 1981 Fall collection Pirate. This was not treated solely as an historicized reflection on recent fashion history, for it was meant to critically probe how such trademarks of artistic pageantry are not quite up to snuff in today’s digital age. 

Alexander McQueen's Spring / Summer 1999 collection in Pari. Photo: Guy Marineau / Conde Nast via Getty Images. Image courtesy of Obtuse Archive. 

Much like curators working within the physical apparatus of a museum or gallery, Kir and Chen thoughtfully considered the visual presentation of how its contents appear in an online format. Hagen Tanneberger, Obtuse Archive’s graphic designer, conceptualized a cool and edgy aesthetic in which text and imagery are given equally seismic presentations that translate well on both desktop and mobile devices. For the text, creative liberties undoubtedly held sway as there are numerous instances in which boldened, all-capitalized text was utilized as the prime mode of communication over standard 11 or 12-point font, unbolded text. Clearly, the visual potency of fonts are part and parcel of Obtuse Archive’s creative messaging through its experimental curation. 

Image courtesy of Obtuse Archive.

Having branded itself as an online curatorial initiative, Obtuse Archive extended its programming into the physical space through a group exhibition held at Galleria Objets in London titled OBTUSE (°), which was curated by Kir and Chen. In keeping with its focus on vanguardist culture, the exhibition honed in on 13 artists working across painting, sculpture, installation, performance, sound, and food that intentionally disrupted conventional curatorial paradigms through multisensory experiences and temporality. While the show was an in situ, pop-up event that occurred for two days last month, it lives on in perpetuity via a detailed write-up and voluminous photographic and video documentation that can be accessed at any time on Obtuse Archive - literally, an archive within an archive. 

As a very new platform, there are a few shortcomings to its execution that must be remedied or, at least, given further clarification. Visuals are a keystone to Obtuse Archive’s process in documentation, yet there were quite a few moments in which some images or videos had no caption, which made it difficult to recognize either the context in which a work was shown, who photographed the subject, or even the relevance it contributes to the article. 

Obtuse Archive's About page. Image courtesy of Obtuse Archive.

Obtuse Archive’s About page gives a nice, terse breakdown of the platform’s mission, but it still feels too open-ended and vague. This is not to suggest that an overly didactic label is required, but certainly, in the very least, a more succinct curatorial statement. Additionally, the Submit page does not explicate the expectations for what potential contributors are encouraged to pitch in relation to Obtuse Archive’s mission. There also needs to be a brief note as to why “Obtuse” was the chosen name, most likely as an ironic statement given its definition in describing something as “dull” or “slow to understand”, but could that inadvertently implicate the audience would not understand the featured subjects?

Aside from these critiques (which are minor in the grand scheme of this essay), Obtuse Archive is praiseworthy for the discourse it generates on what undercurrents are transpiring in contemporary alternative culture. 

Screenshot of the home page of The Vasulka Archive. 

But where does Obtuse Archive fit into this sea change of digital curation? Though recent, digital curation is not a new concept for it has taken on a multiplicity of forms on the institutional and independent levels. World-class museums like The Metropolitan Museum of Art or the educational charity Art UK strive to make digital reproductions of artworks accessible on a universal scale in tandem with essays, videos, and other complementary tools. Elsewhere, the London-based USEUM.org attempts to fulfill French philosopher Andre Malraux’s postulation of the “Museum without walls” through its active digital archiving of two-dimensional artworks (sans photography). Medium-specific organizations and sites like Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), Collaborative Cataloging Japan, and The Vasulka Archive consider the preservation of technological, moving image, and other forms of time-based media art. 

Obtuse Archive, like the aforementioned examples among a slew of others, is also navigating the digital terrain in cultivating an effective curatorial strategy to preserve, in this case, alternative culture. This is not an archive in the sense of a virtual place or solution like that of a museum or any established institution, but it is more of a tool and experiential platform that grows at its own pace commensurate with what is deserving of that documentation. 

A selection of Obtuse Archive's articles. 

Thus far, Kir and Chen’s curation has been executed with great aplomb according to the deft balance taken as to what they envision as “alternative culture”. Much attention has been focused on fashion and photography (and, in some cases, their intersections with other creative forms), which is noticeable from a brief scroll-through of their listed articles. However, other expressions still appear noticeably - painting being another area covered on multiple occasions. Collectively, the artists that were spotlighted seem to be individuals working on the periphery of established, canonical institutions with a penchant for DIY creativity culled from the immediacy of their environments and who can be found on social media (the Digital Age’s “word-of-mouth”). 

A selection of Obtuse Archive's articles. 

Though still in its infancy of being only a few months in its existence, Obtuse Archive has a cogent methodology of looking beyond the mainstream and taking a deep dive into the much wider world of underground culture, totally unencumbered by any dogmatic strictures. In fact, the nicheness and subculturalness of these artists is such that most do not appear so easily with a few Internet searches. If Obtuse Archive did not exist, there would be a rather monumental lacuna of archived cultural practices occurring thus far in the 2020s. As mentioned earlier in this essay, digital curation is a multipronged system and Obtuse Archive accomplishes much as a platform that is an admixture of the best of virtual & in-person exhibition programming, magazine / scholastic journal writing, and archival thoroughness. WM