Imponderable: The Archives of Tony Oursler

Since the late 1990s, Tony Oursler (born 1957) has amassed a sprawling personal archive of objects and ephemera relating to magic, the paranormal, film, television, phantasmagoria, pseudoscience and technology. The project doubles as a family history and a historical inquiry into belief itself.

This English-only edition, published for two parallel exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and Bard College, presents highlights from the collection: photographs, prints, historic manuscripts, rare books, letters and objects tracing threads from stage magic and spirit photography to the friendship between Oursler's grandfather, the author and publisher Charles Fulton Oursler, and Harry Houdini, along with a documented encounter with Arthur Conan Doyle. Essays by Jordan Bear, Karen Beckman, Branden Joseph and others situate the archive within histories of belief, technology and image-making.

Oursler, best known for his video and sculptural installations projecting distorted faces onto soft forms, has long treated the archive as an open resource for his own practice; Imponderable makes that private research collection public for the first time.