Edmund de Waal - an Archive
Edmund de Waal (author), Elena Foster (publisher) and Bill Sherman (Warburg Institute Director) in conversation to mark the publication of Edmund de Waal's an Archive (Ivorypress, June 2025).
- Archives are purposeful and they are random. They record the personal and the institutional, plural and singular histories. They are passed on, inherited, stolen, plundered, and lost. They are destroyed by accident and by design. They record rewritings, rethinking, retellings. They hold stories so they don’t disappear. They preserve information in the hope of a future - Edmund de Waal, an Archive
This event took place on 17 June 2025.
Edmund de Waal is an artist who writes. Much of his work is about the contingency of memory: bringing particular histories of loss and exile into renewed life. Both his artistic and written practice have broken new ground through their critical engagement with the history and potential of ceramics, as well as with architecture, music, dance and poetry. De Waal continually investigates themes of diaspora, memorial and materiality with his interventions and artworks made for diverse spaces and museums worldwide including The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire; the Musée Nissim de Camondo, Paris; The British Museum, London; The Frick Collection, New York; Museo Ebraico, Venice; Schindler House, Los Angeles; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna and V&A Museum, London.
De Waal is also renowned for his bestselling family memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), and The White Road (2015). His most recent book, Letters to Camondo was published in April 2021.
He was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction by Yale University in 2015. In 2021 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and awarded a CBE for his services to art. In 2023 he received the Isamu Noguchi Award. In 2024 he was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Elena Ochoa Foster is a Spanish publisher and art curator, and formerly a professor of psychopathology. She is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Ivorypress, a publishing house that undertakes both publishing and curatorial activities.
She has curated international exhibitions in close collaboration with the Ivorypress team, including C on Cities (10th Venice Architecture Biennale, Venice, 2006), Blood on Paper (Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 2008), ‘Real Venice’ (54th Venice Art Biennale, Venice, 2011), Real Venice (Somerset House, London, 2012) and ToledoContemporánea (Fundación El Greco, Toledo, 2014).
Elena Ochoa Foster is Vice President and Trustee of the Norman Foster Foundation and Chair of the Serpentine Gallery’s International Council. She has served on the boards of institutions such as Tate, MoMA and the Isamu Noguchi Foundation, and was a jury member for the Princess of Asturias Awards.
