The Ken. To be destroyed Project Archive (exhibition)

In 2011, Sara Davidmann inherited a family archive of letters, photographs and papers from her mother, Audrey Davidmann. This archive tells the story of Ken and Hazel, Sara's uncle and aunt, and how it emerged early on in their marriage, in 1958, that Ken was transgender.

During the making of the ‘Ken to be Destroyed’ book Sara Davidmann and editor and curator Val Williams created an archive which preserves and describes the process of creating the book (published in 2016 by Schilt, Amsterdam) and the exhibition, which was shown in 2016 at the Schwules Museum in Berlin in 2016.

While the exhibition and publication were based on the Davidmann family archive, this new repository illustrates the ways in which Davidmann and Williams, as author and editor respectively, navigated the contents of the archive, wrote narrative and biographical texts and managed relationships with external organizations and individuals. The archive has been proactively collected and assembled from the beginning of the project. It is envisaged that it will be relevant to researchers/students in curatorship, photography, family archives, photobook production and gender and sexuality studies.

The exhibition included new works by Alex Cooper which were made in response to the archive.