La resistencia de las piedras
(2023)
author(s): alejandra reyero, Maia Navas
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
The proposal explores the potential of critical experimental research, turning to medial - material practices of countermemory in the face of historical and contemporary technologies of control. This is an essay on remains of images, sounds and texts that were part of the research process of the short film "Enviado para falsar" (Maia Navas - 2021).
Two spaces: Napalpí (Chaco, Argentina, 1924, where the “Napalpí indigenous massacre” by the National State took place) – Barrio Gran Toba (Resistencia, Chaco, Argentina, 2020, where descendants of qom indigenous communities were monitored by a police drone during the Covid-19 pandemic.). Two temporalities that are abyssed through montage as an aesthetic and epistemic exercise, updating the colonial legacy that operates again under the motto of care, the legality of persecution and the abuse of power.
Against this, we rescue the gesture of the slingshot with which the Qom indigenous community brought down the police drone. We made interventions on the archive material of German anthropologist R. L. Nitsche linked to the 1924 Napalpí massacre and we risked irreverent gestures that operate as a glimpse to evidence its truth as artifice.
We propose exercises with and on visual residues, anachronistic and poetic approaches by superimposing voices and sounds. We fable decolonizing strategies that seek to turn a past into present, by imagining its return as inventive action.
Based on possible temporary deviations from the fall of the drone, operations on the image are detached. A dialogue between objects and intervening actors those who have or have not witnessed the events is traced according to a path of existing letters and publications, which account for the network of relationships between science celebrities, the State and police forces.
Curating as graphic design research
(2022)
author(s): Sara De Bondt
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
In 2019, I curated and designed Off the Grid, an exhibition on post-war Belgian graphic design at Design Museum Gent. The show included public events (Design Museum Gent, 2019–20) and led to a publication (De Bondt, 2022), all of which have been elements of my practice-based doctoral research at KASK School of Arts and Ghent University.
Curating Off the Grid allowed me to define my own research area, namely the investigation of graphic design from a specific country and period. The process also raised broader questions around naming, authorship, and canon-formation, which in turn have enriched my practice as a designer and educator. The curatorial thus became a methodology that allowed me to bring the two sides — my historical research and my graphic design practice — together. In this article, I discuss my engagement with graphic design via the curatorial, and how the latter can be deployed for practice-based graphic design research in and beyond exhibition spaces.
The Creatures Archive
(2022)
author(s): Shana
published in: Research Catalogue
An archive of found images (and sometimes personal observations)
These images are fragments of beings that exist together as several, heaving heaps of genderless sci-fi characters, swimming around in a world.
You will find organisms such as (memes, cryptids, species with Latin names, pop culture toys)
How to Make Performing Arts Survive Time and Become an Accessible Archive: An Attempt to Register Performing Art’s Creation
(2021)
author(s): Greta Pundzaite
published in: Research Catalogue
While the momentariness of performing arts might be one of the most (if not the most) fascinating aspect of the art form allowing to experience the fragility of live events and creatures themselves, the context they depend upon, it is also approached as a great obstacle for a smooth evolution (or rather enriching and intriguing transformation) of the art form. It is believed that not having a medium that allows registering and archiving pieces of creation causes a constant loss. Having in mind that a certain amount of loss of any art form is inevitable, the performing arts situation is understood as quite unbalanced, or rather, problematic from the artist’s point of view. It is believed that not being able to access the history of creation (not from a historical but (more or less) direct contact with the creation point of view), tangles, straitens the potential of an artist, makes him/her feel the gaps of collective memory. By contemplating authenticity, repetition, difference, continuity, context and interconnection, creation is addressed as a collective and complex process. A piece of performing arts itself is approached in the same way (consisting of various interconnected elements), suggesting a similar approach towards the registration process. Work consists of the initial version of performance registration structure/system CYCLE and the essay ‘How to Make Performing Arts Survive Time and Become an Accessible Archive: An Attempt to Register Performing Art’s Creation’.
Minuting. Rethinking the Ordinary Through the Ritual of Transversal Listening
(2021)
author(s): Jacek Smolicki
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
This exploratory essay introduces selected sound recordings along with notes and observations from Minuting – a practice of sonic journaling I have performed daily since July 2010 in numerous locations and settings. I weave these observations together in a way that resonates closely with the idea of repetition, in multiple forms: protest, automation, cycle, and ritual, as well as the repetition inherent to my acts of recording. While introducing sounds from the archive of Minuting, I reflect on how this constrained and systematically enacted form of listening, recording, and re-listening leads to a transversal type of sonic reflexivity. It is a form of alertness to sound that stretches beyond the immediate resonance of the 'now' – towards spatially and temporarily distant, yet to some extent intertwined, objects, subjects, events, and environments. The text evolves across three interrelated layers: annotated recordings from the project's archive, a set of thoughts and associations triggered by re-listening to the material, and a discursive analysis that opens up the project to a dialogue with other thematically resonant debates and practices. Drawing on perspectives from media studies, the philosophy of technology, sound studies and durational art, I discuss Minuting as an art work, a creative constraint and a transversal listening practice. Lastly, I propose it as an existential media technique for composing critical and reflective positions towards one's surrounding space, experience of time, and use of sound technologies.
Behind the back of Linnaeus - Bakom ryggen på Linné
(2020)
author(s): Annette Arlander
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
EN
This bilingual exposition presents parts of the artistic research project “Performing with Plants”, video works created through repeated visits to a sycamore in Humlegården and a beech in Djurgården during the year 2017, and discusses the notion ecology of practices introduced by Isabelle Stengers. The exposition consists of an essay, the video works, and some working notes from the process as an appendix.
SVE
Denna tvåspråkiga exposition presenterar delar av det konstnärliga forskningsprojektet ”Att uppträda med växter”, videoarbeten som skapats genom upprepade besök hos en tysklönn i Humlegården och en bok på Djurgården under år 2017, och diskuterar begreppet praktikernas ekologi som introducerats av Isabelle Stengers. Expositionen består av en essä, videoverken, och några arbetsanteckningar från processen som bilaga.
Re-imagining: A Case Study of Exercises and Strategies
(2019)
author(s): Hanna Järvinen
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
Exploring a case of a historian collaborating with dance makers on the contemporaneity evident in a past work, this exposition outlines how the corporeal methods of dance practice can assist a historian in their archival inquiry just as the historian's methods can subvert dominant ways of understanding re-performance of past dance. Interest in how past performances survive and are made to re-signify in the present and what is the role of the archive in a performing art are growing trends in both dance and performance scholarship and in performance practice. Drawing from this scholarship and critical performances, I distinguish between reconstruction (re-creation of dance from the archive) and re-imagining (working from the present practice towards corporeal relationship to past dance) to argue that any performance holds potential to uphold and conserve as well as question and subvert predominant histories of the art form. In contrast to theories of performance that juxtapose performance with history, repertoires with archives, I argue that it is possible to perform the epistemological questions through emphasis on what is not known. The practical exercises used in the studio and the strategies in the performance of Jeux: Re-imagined (2016) offer one example of destabilizing earlier claims to knowledge about a historical work. The seven pages of this exposition follow the structure of the seven events of the performance.
Archive, Collection, Museum: On the History of the Archiving of Voices at the Sound Archive of the Humboldt University
(2017)
author(s): Britta Lange
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Available today under the name of the Berlin Sound Archive (Berliner Lautarchiv) or the Sound Archive of the Humboldt University (Lautarchiv der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) is a collection of now largely digitalized sound storage media begun in 1915 (https://www.lautarchiv.hu-berlin.de/, all internet references retrieved 24th June 2016). The collection includes shellac records with recordings of prisoners of war (1915-1918), sound recordings of the voices of so-called famous personalities (1917-1939), speech samples of German dialects (1921-1943), and recitations of poetry and literature in German (1930s and 1940s) as well as magnetic tapes from the 1960s that have not yet been transferred to a digital format. While, since its inception, the collection has repeatedly been referred to as a sound archive, prior to the digitalization of the shellac holdings in the 1990s this term never found its way into any of its official names. Against this background, this article traces both the Sound Archive’s early institutional history (1915-1947) as well as the use of the term “sound archive.” By considering the archiving of voices in the framework of an emerging history of knowledge, it explores the disciplinary contexts (the academic sciences) and configurations of conservation, research, and presentation (collection, archive, laboratory, library, and museum) in which the preserved human voice operates as an epistemic object. On the basis of a renewed examination of a number of sound recordings of prisoners of war, it should be shown how this historical material can be made productive for current research horizons.
the archive that i imagine to unlearn the archive
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Melina Scheuermann
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This exhibition emerged from my artistic research residency Performing/Archiving ‘Object Lesson’ which I realized in January and February of 2024 in Porto. I departed from the proposal to take up archival documents of my study within the history of education as performative scores and triggers for artistic engagement. In particular, I studied two picture book series of the pedagogical object lesson method (Pt. lições de coisas, Germ. Anschauungsunterricht) that circulated across Europe in the late 19th century and early 20th century. The picture books are traversed by several intersecting discriminations based, amongst others, on gender, race, sex and class.
Through the artistic engagement I reflected on the epistemological, political and ethical implications of archiving and the writing of history and developed an artistic-archival methodology that includes performative, visual, visual-material and textual modes of research. This methodology aims to promote situated, embodied and affective knowledges and is inscribed into feminist and decolonial struggles.
The archive that i imagine to unlearn the archive is an exhibition of the artistic interventions produced as much as the structure of an archive. The exhibition/archive serves as a platform for upcoming workshops that I will promote to practice the artistic-archival methodology that I developed in a collective setting.
I borrow the concept of unlearning from decolonial and postcolonial theory where it is discussed as a practice that challenges the value-based, hegemonic apparatus of knowledge production from the inside. There is a slight irony, seemingly a paradox in name of this archive: The archive that I imagine to unlearn the archive. Unlearning something while repeating, practicing, constructing it? The idea is not repetition, unless it is always considered repetition in variance and in motion, never settled, never fixed. Its name speaks to my attempt to unlearn archiving and archival research while being implied and meshed within.
Can Philosophy Exist?
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Photography with sound and net art, drawing, found folk sculpture with digital drawing, readymades, 2012, 2020, 2021. Accompanied by archival material.
The exposition exposes the question of what is artistic research. Usurping the essayist format, which is traditionally associated with research in say the area of philosophy, the exposition formally operates on different levels. I selectively included visual art research material from my own artistic archive, as well as anonymous material that's readily available from the internet and in film archives. In this way, I wanted to emphasise the role of archiving and using archives in the artistic process, as an element of artistic research and artistic production that might involve remediation. Taking that we live in a largely theoretic culture, which means that we use external information systems for storage and retrieval of written, visual and other material, the implication is that art is part of this theoretical system.
Moreover, I specifically problematise the notion of value in relation to the visual arts by using the popular media figures of the counterfeit and the impostor, with reference to the so-called "impostor syndrome", correlated with being a minority of some sort in one's field: "A different thought is that two people may be answerable to the very same standard of success or competence, yet be subject to different epistemic standards for reasonable belief in their respective success or competence. This would be an example of pragmatic encroachment." (Katherine Hawley, "What is Impostor Syndrome?", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 93, 2019).
I suggest that some artworks operate as philosophical provocations of the archive. "The artwork just exists", as Frank Stella argued.
CCFT
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Johan Sandborg, Duncan Higgins, Bente Irminger, Linda H. Lien, andy lock, Ana Souto Galvan, Susan Brind, Shauna McMullan, Yiorgos Hadjichristou, Jim Harold, DÁNIEL PÉTER BIRÓ
connected to: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
As we move towards the first quarter of the third millennium, the impermanent and shifting influence of globalisation, economic division, migratory encounters, social media, historic narrative and tourism is having a major impact in our understanding of the making, belonging and occupying of place. It is widely documented that these conditions are contributing to a growing sense of displacement and alienation in what constitutes as place making, occupying, and belonging.
CCFT is asking how interdisciplinary artistic research practices contribute and share new critical understandings to aid this evolving understanding of place making, belonging and occupying?
Resurrecting Dead Darlings Exposition
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Ryan Mason, Annamari Keskinen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Situated within the broader discourse of artistic research, Resurrecting Dead Darlings- A Palindromic Process of Artistic Rebirth amplifies the project's commitment to reinvigorating the dialogue between artists and spectators through the process of engaging with dead darlings. It introduces a multimedia archive tailored to enhance performances by allowing deeper insight into the artistic process—highlighting the evolution from initial concept to performance and the subsequent reinvention. This synthesis encapsulates the project's approach to fostering a dynamic interplay between viewing and creating, where spectators are invited into the intimate spheres of artistic reimagining, and creators are offered reflective distance to view their work through the audience's eyes.
This initiative recognizes the evolving nature of artistic research, emphasizing the move towards integrating research-focused methodologies and embracing diverse forms of creation. Doing so enriches the artist/spectator relationship, positioning it as a foundational element that drives the creative cycle forward. The exposition is a tangible interface for this engagement, offering a conduit for transdisciplinary exploration and a deeper mutual appreciation of the artistic journey. It reaffirms the project's role as a vibrant platform for collaboration, discovery, and the continual reshaping of the artistic experience, echoing Thar Be Dragons’ vision for a participatory and reflective artistic culture.
The exposition is a platform for the artists to document their work, acting as a supportive tool and a gentle invitation to convert embodied thinking into words, which can often prove challenging. It embraces a variety of approaches, including texts, sound recordings, and videos, all designed to exist in an adaptive format that accommodates constant evolution and development. The material within doesn’t necessarily explicate the contents of the exposition but rather works as a collaborative interlocutor. While the primary working language is English, Finnish is also occasionally used.
* Dead Darlings are ideas that, for one reason or another, have been set aside, abandoned, or otherwise not realized. They can be scenes, psychophysical movement spaces, modes of performance, or sets of actions based on fictional situations and settings.
Meetings with Remarkable and Unremarkable Trees
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Annette Arlander
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This exposition serves as an archive for the project "Meetings with Remarkable and Unremarkable Trees", where Annette Arlander spends time with specific trees and poses for camera together with them. The exposition is under construction
Cursed Archive
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Dreadfulbiscuit
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This research project serves as a exposition into the discourse of the internet phenomenon: Cursed Images.
Cursed images are a type of internet meme that have gained great popularity in the digital culture in recent years. These unsettling and eerie images often feature bizarre, creepy or inexplicable content that is intended to evoke a sense of unease and discomfort in viewers. While cursed images have become a popular fixture of internet culture, their origins, participators, situations and meanings remain largely mysterious and unknownable. This work is an opening into the exploration of the phenomenon and aesthetics of cursed images, examining their significance in digital culture, psychological impact to the viewer and the ways in which they challenge our assumptions about reality, perception of images and the medium of photography.
Herbal Practice: A Symbolic Approach to Artistic Medicine (or, The Artistic Practice as Regurgitating Findings)
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Maria Ilieva
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023, BA Fine Arts
This paper aims to research and study how traditional Bulgarian herbal healing and theoretical matter can influence artistic research and wheth- er they can be applied as methods to the artistic practice, guiding it to take a more self-sustainable form. Herbal medicinal plants have been applied to the daily lives of generations upon generations of humans, as tools to aid and better one’s health, as well as symbols in ritual practices across the globe. In this paper I am contextualizing herbal medicine within the scope of the contemporary artistic prac- tice, through decomposing the process of using herbal medicine into three key steps: gathering, combining and ingesting. I apply art theory based on these topics, to compare the herbal and artistic worlds, using the symbolic, metaphorical aspect
of herbal healing while keeping the logic behind it. Through this process, I aim at making a connection that strengthens the notion of the artistic practice both as a medicinal, as well as a deeply self-centric and self-sufficient practice.
Why does she cry salty tears while he touches the sea
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Jenný Mikaelsdóttir
This exposition is in review and its share status is: visible to all.
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023
BA Photography
Summary:
"Why does she cry salty tears while he touches the sea". Follows a search for understanding how being in cold water has a relationship with humans. More specifically if the sea is for people to be in or not - the upbringing stories from Iceland and a Nordic background is noticeable in how the author approaches the subject of the sea. From the perspective of being cautious towards it, yet fearful and therefore the quest is giving contrast on how the sea shapes people. On an emotional level yet spiritually as well. Questions regarding people’s place within the social context and, with others. The personal writings is intertwined with challenges people face and how it’s displayed in the art world. Research into how artist have dealt with overcoming bigger forces than themselves. The social element of a sea swimming community is discussed where recent acknowledgment in a modern society to be in cold water is ever present. This is done by interviewing people who have been tuned in with the sea, a former sailor and a sea swimmer.
The paper is divided into four chapters. Their titles serves the focus points. In Salt water, a look into the unknown, how artists deal with the sea as a natural force, admiration towards the sea with a connection to the emotional state. Community, is where the unknown offer a place to belong to, observing from a distance as well inside a sea swimming community. In Rituals, sea swim is investigated as a social act binding the community. Tales brings storytelling with focus on sailors and sea creatures.
Het Urban Future-project
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Hans Scholten
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Central to this research of Hans Scholten is the Urban Future-project, which consists of a large archive of artworks made from 2002 until now. The original question underpinning this project was: what influence do chaos, entropy and fragmentation have on the viability of the rapidly developing urbanizing world?
In the course of the research project, the (literature and field) explorations led to the assumption that there is a demonstrable and necessary link between the quality of life in the city and vital social cohesion on the one hand and chaos, entropy and fragmentation on the other. In the artistic part of the research focuses on the question: is it possible to make the supposed connection between quality of urban life and chaos, entropy and fragmentation visible in artwork and, if so, how? In the written dissertation, working methods and strategies are contextualized and analyzed. The visual part derives from an artist's position which uses non-verbal, sensorial strategies to reach new insights. It mainly focuses on the visual and aesthetic possibilities of aspects of fragmentation, chaos and entropy because Scholten considers these aspects, as productive forces, to be the core of the experience of urbanization.
The Bibliographer
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Marc Johnson
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
A Time-capsule of my bibliographic labour.
Performing with Plants - Att uppträda/ samarbeta med växter
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Annette Arlander
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
EN
This exposition documents and archives the artistic research project performing with plants.
SVE
Denna exposition dokumenterar och arkiverar det konstnärliga forskningsprojektet att uppträda/samarbeta med växter.
Assuming Asymmetries. Extra Research Time 2020/21
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Joanna Warsza
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Assuming Asymmetries. Conversations on Curating Public Art Projects of the 1980s and 1990s is a volume based on the dialogues between the curators and participants from some of the most complex and yet underresearched European and US public art exhibitions of the 1980s and 1990s. The discussions include and unpack such influential projects as “Culture in Action” curated by Mary Jane Jacob in 1993; “Sonsbeek 93” curated by Valerie Smith; “Endlichkeit der Freiheit,” an exhibition initiated by Heiner Müller and Rebecca Horn, on both sides of the former Berlin wall in 1990; “Construction in Process,” an artist-initiated site-specific exhibition in early 1980s Łódz, Poland; “Five Gardens” curated by Carlos Capelán in 1996 in Simrishamn and Ystad, Sweden, and “U-media” in 1987 Umeå, Sweden. The dialogues focus on such questions as: How does one ethically and culturally deal with asymmetries? How have the notions of situated or embedded knowledge changed over the last decades? How can artworks actually create meaning from the place where they're produced? What were the early attempts of de-monumentalizing art outside of the museums; and, finally, what actually is non-extractive curating.
Both books are edited by CuratorLab at Konstfack University of Arts 2020/2021: Anna Mikaela Ekstrand, Giulia Floris, Vasco Forconi, Edy Fung, Julius Lehmann, Maria Lind, Marc Navarro, Simina Neagu, Hanna Nordell, Tomek Pawłowski Jarmołajew, Marja Rautaharju, Erik Sandberg, Joanna Warsza
The process was led by Joanna Warsza and Maria Lind
How to Do Things with Performance? Miten tehdä asioita esityksellä?
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Annette Arlander, Tero Nauha, Hanna Järvinen, Pilvi Porkola
connected to: University of the Arts Helsinki
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This is the website and the open archive of the four-year research project HOW TO DO THINGS WITH PERFORMANCE? funded by the Finnish Academy.
Nämä ovat nelivuotisen Suomen Akatemian rahoittaman tutkimushankkeen MITEN TEHDÄ ASIOITA ESITYKSELLÄ? verkkosivut ja avoin arkisto.
ArsbioArctica Residency 2014
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Annette Arlander
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This exposition archives, documents and hopefully also exposes the work created during two one-week ArsBioarctica residencies at the biological station in Kilpisjärvi, in April and June 2014. It serves as an appendix to a text "Data, material, remains" to be published in Koro-Ljungberg, Loytonen & Tear (eds.) Data Encounters.
RECONNAISSANCE
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Hélène MUTTER
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This project represents more than 10 years of research about military and personal archives from the first Gulf War (1991). "RECONNAISSANCE" was the exhibition for my PhD thesis defense in 2020, both an artistic and a theoretical reflexion about images produced in conflict situation.
Adorned Afterlife Network
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Stephen Edward Bottomley
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The Adorned Afterlife network was established by Bottomley in 2015 with a University of Edinburgh’s Challenge Investment Award. Bottomley brought together a network of international researchers from Design, Archaeology, Forensic Anthropology, History and Museology to examine hidden objects of adornment and share discourse and analysis through high-quality speculative multidisciplinary research.
Museums contain many intangible artefacts from our past that relate to the body as adornment. These objects may be represented in paintings and carvings, or literally buried in sarcophaguses or beneath layers of funereal wrappings. The interdisciplinary nature of the network enabled the examination of these items through each others specialist expert lens, leading to the insight that although we saw the same item, we used different terms and language to describe it’s attributed use and meaning. Collectively we speculated on their purpose (why were they made), significance (both then and now) and how they were made (and by whom).
The methodology followed practice-based research, comparing craft makers primary knowledge with curators secondary and tertiary sources via filmed interviews and presentations through each other’s lens of enquiry, to “learn by active experience and reflection on that experience” ( Gray & Malins, 2004).
The network’s 2016 symposium co-ordinated by the researcher explored existing precedents and new technologies for the non-invasive examining of artefacts and paintings in museums by computerised tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanning. A focus was the funereal adornments, carefully sited personal objects, placed beneath the wrapped and sealed bandages of Rhind Mummy at the Granton archives, the National Museum of Scotland.
The findings of the research were further presented in the paper ‘The Quick and the Dead: the Changing Meaning and Significance of Jewellery Beyond the Grave’ (Bottomley) at the Canadian Craft Biennale (2017) and published as a ‘Visual-Textual Paper’in the Journal for Jewellery Research (2018).
Performance as Research in Hyderabad - Proceedings of the Performance as Research Working Group meeting at the IFTR conference in Hyderabad 6-10th July 2015
(last edited: 2018)
author(s): Annette Arlander, Manola Gayatri Kumarswamy
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This exposition consists of material presented at the Performance as Research Working Group meeting in Hyderabad as well as material documenting the work undertaken during the meeting. The meeting took place as part of the IFTR (international Federation for Theatre Research) conference "Theatre and Democracy" in Hyderabad, India 6th to 11th July 2015. These proceedings are compiled by Annette Arlander and Manola K. Gayatri on behalf of the working group.
The Collective Archive
(last edited: 2017)
author(s): Ana de Almeida
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The Collective Archive project starts from the personal photo collection of José Alberto Vidal de Almeida, my father, a Portuguese stipend student in former Czechoslovakia between 1978 and 1987 – an archive originally stored inside a shoe box.
Whilst this photo collection contents extensive documentation of a mix of both personal and historical events, the research conducted around this archive allows a parallel following of the final years of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia, before the 1989 Velvet Revolution, and the first years after the left wing Carnation Revolution in Portugal that allowed the end of 48 years of fascist regime, as well as the end of the Portuguese Colonial War in April 1974.
Forming a network of complex and indelible relations between personal and national histories as well as between local and global history, my father's photographs are the substrate upon which I seek to research about what meant the group of happenings for both countries and at the same time to investigate how the individual awareness of the witnessed events was formed, hence aiming to address the question of how are actually defined and transmitted important historical marks.
One cannot dispose of the collocation of the individual understanding in the building of an historical narrative, emphasizing the individual position clarifies history’s arbitrary character. Each individual act of image production is an act of significance.
What follows is the transformation of the shoe box as a depository of photos into an archive and the articulation of the lived and of the transmitted (inscribed) experience with the macro-political and historical processes.
Opening the box will necessarily means, in a first instance, to give a voice to my father, which means the transformation of the essay into a gradual quest for finding more voices within the archive.
The theoretical and the artistic thought must be problematized, made distinct and at the same time entangled, and importantly they must be taken to their limits in order to re-establish them. The future becomes the issue of the archive and the voice that should be finally found is the one of a collective practice.
Curious Arts – No. 5
(last edited: 2017)
author(s): Jim Harold, Susan Brind
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
'Curious Arts – No. 5'
CCA, Glasgow, 2011
Sculptural and sound installation
In December 2011 the CCA dedicated its major gallery spaces to a two-week programme that developed its support for writing and publishing within contemporary art practice: "This programme will review the progress of 2HB in the form of an exhibition, ... an events programme and place this activity in the broader context of an international book fair where we can consider how books travel and how we travel through books. ... It has felt like the quality and diversity of artistic practice in Glasgow has been accelerated by art writing and journal publishing, as if the intelligence and sensibility of artistic practice in the city has been harnessed to a new force. ... So, we are wondering: what kind of cultural motor is independent publishing in Glasgow, and how does writing act as a motor within the artist's own practice?"
Quoted from CCA, Glasgow - "2HB: What we make with words. Writing and publishing as motors within contemporary art practice", October 2011 (undated). Exhibition curators: Sarah Tripp and Jamie Kenyon.
Exhibiting Artists: Susan Brind & Jim Harold, Ruth Buchanan, Alex Impey, Paul Elliman, Kathryn Elkin, Hannah Ellul, Kate Morrell, Charlotte Prodger, Thom Walker, and Rebecca Wilcox.
Drawing upon research undertaken in the library at Hospitalfield House, Arbroath (an historic house on the east coast of Scotland), and by means of a sculptural sound installation, 'Curious Arts – No. 5 took the viewer on a journey from the private world of the writing desk to the landscape and a place of images, texts and the history of ideas.
Curious Arts – No. 5
(last edited: 2017)
author(s): Susan Brind, Jim Harold
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
'Curious Arts – No. 5'
CCA, Glasgow, 2011
Sculptural and sound installation
In December 2011 the CCA dedicated its major gallery spaces to a two-week programme that developed its support for writing and publishing within contemporary art practice: "This programme will review the progress of 2HB in the form of an exhibition, ... an events programme and place this activity in the broader context of an international book fair where we can consider how books travel and how we travel through books. ... It has felt like the quality and diversity of artistic practice in Glasgow has been accelerated by art writing and journal publishing, as if the intelligence and sensibility of artistic practice in the city has been harnessed to a new force. ... So, we are wondering: what kind of cultural motor is independent publishing in Glasgow, and how does writing act as a motor within the artist's own practice?"
Quoted from CCA, Glasgow - "2HB: What we make with words. Writing and publishing as motors within contemporary art practice", October 2011 (undated). Exhibition curators: Sarah Tripp and Jamie Kenyon.
Exhibiting Artists: Susan Brind & Jim Harold, Ruth Buchanan, Alex Impey, Paul Elliman, Kathryn Elkin, Hannah Ellul, Kate Morrell, Charlotte Prodger, Thom Walker, and Rebecca Wilcox.
Drawing upon research undertaken in the library at Hospitalfield House, Arbroath (an historic house on the east coast of Scotland), and by means of a sculptural sound installation, 'Curious Arts – No. 5 took the viewer on a journey from the private world of the writing desk to the landscape and a place of images, texts and the history of ideas.
'Curious Arts No. 6'
(last edited: 2017)
author(s): Jim Harold, Susan Brind
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
'Curious Arts No. 6' (a collaborative artist book work) Published by CCA, Glasgow, 2013.
ISBN: 978-0-9576732-1-2
The book work, 'Curious Arts – No. 6', results from a period of residency and research in the private library at Hospitalfield House in Arbroath on the North-East coast of Scotland. The original owners of the house, Patrick and Elizabeth Allan-Fraser, were both dedicated to the ideals of art and nature and, following their deaths in the late nineteenth century, the House has been run as a trust dedicated to developments in the visual arts, literature and music in Scotland and internationally.
Given the owners’ original ideals, the House, its library and the ensuing years of residencies hosted by the Trust, have secured Hospitalfield as a part of Scotland and the UK’s cultural heritage: it is a hidden gem. Brind & Harold engaged with the House and its collections over a 6-year period. While the intention of this book is, in part, focused by the ethos of the Allan-Fraser’s, the House, its library and collections, 'Curious Arts – No. 6' is a visual and textual analysis of the qualities of the place, particularly those of the eclectic holdings of the library, that focuses on the ideals associated with nature and landscape. The archive comes alive as soon as one asks the question: how might this historical knowledge inform our contemporary understandings of the natural world? To help answer this Brind & Harold commissioned a human geographer, Dr. Nina Morris (Edinburgh University), and the academic and curator, Dr. Francis McKee (CCA, Glasgow) to join their researches into the House and its holdings. The resulting 52 page publication includes their responses as texts, as well as a visual essay by the artists, and includes an introduction by Lucy Byatt, Director of Hospitalfield House.
Published by CCA, Glasgow, 'Curious Arts No. 6' has been produced with substantial financial support from The Royal Society of Edinburgh, along with funding from the Glasgow School of Art’s Research Development Fund, with the intention that it be freely gifted to Scottish public libraries and libraries within institutions of higher education in the UK, and selected art libraries internationally. Whilst we live in an age where the internet is proliferating as one means of knowledge storage and dissemination, private and public libraries remain invaluable as models of knowledge-gathering systems and as archives vital to our deeper understanding of the world. By gifting copies of 'Curious Arts No. 6' to libraries, Brind & Harold hope to symbolically connect the knowledge held in a small private library in Arbroath with libraries and readers elsewhere.
Curious Arts – No. 6
(last edited: 2017)
author(s): Susan Brind, Jim Harold
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
'Curious Arts No. 6' (a collaborative artist book work) Published by CCA, Glasgow, 2013.
ISBN: 978-0-9576732-1-2
The book work, 'Curious Arts – No. 6', results from a period of residency and research in the private library at Hospitalfield House in Arbroath on the North-East coast of Scotland. The original owners of the house, Patrick and Elizabeth Allan-Fraser, were both dedicated to the ideals of art and nature and, following their deaths in the late nineteenth century, the House has been run as a trust dedicated to developments in the visual arts, literature and music in Scotland and internationally.
Given the owners’ original ideals, the House, its library and the ensuing years of residencies hosted by the Trust, have secured Hospitalfield as a part of Scotland and the UK’s cultural heritage: it is a hidden gem. Brind & Harold engaged with the House and its collections over a 6-year period. While the intention of this book is, in part, focused by the ethos of the Allan-Fraser’s, the House, its library and collections, 'Curious Arts – No. 6' is a visual and textual analysis of the qualities of the place, particularly those of the eclectic holdings of the library, that focuses on the ideals associated with nature and landscape. The archive comes alive as soon as one asks the question: how might this historical knowledge inform our contemporary understandings of the natural world? To help answer this Brind & Harold commissioned a human geographer, Dr. Nina Morris (Edinburgh University), and the academic and curator, Dr. Francis McKee (CCA, Glasgow) to join their researches into the House and its holdings. The resulting 52 page publication includes their responses as texts, as well as a visual essay by the artists, and includes an introduction by Lucy Byatt, Director of Hospitalfield House.
Published by CCA, Glasgow, 'Curious Arts No. 6' has been produced with substantial financial support from The Royal Society of Edinburgh, along with funding from the Glasgow School of Art’s Research Development Fund, with the intention that it be freely gifted to Scottish public libraries and libraries within institutions of higher education in the UK, and selected art libraries internationally. Whilst we live in an age where the internet is proliferating as one means of knowledge storage and dissemination, private and public libraries remain invaluable as models of knowledge-gathering systems and as archives vital to our deeper understanding of the world. By gifting copies of 'Curious Arts No. 6' to libraries, Brind & Harold hope to symbolically connect the knowledge held in a small private library in Arbroath with libraries and readers elsewhere.
TALKING TREES
(last edited: 2017)
author(s): Annette Arlander
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This exposition is presenting (and archiving) a work in progress consisting of site-specific sound installations or audio plays created for particular trees. The work is inspired by the ancient Celtic beth-luis-nion tree alphabet.
Nets Between the Tides
(last edited: 2017)
author(s): Clair Le Couteur
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Nets Between the Tides (NBtT) is a projection into the RC space of a larger diagrammatic structure, an ongoing research residency / collaboration between Warrington Museum and the John Affey Museum called Roots Between the Tides (RBtT). RBtT has previously manifested as a large-scale image installation in Warrington's Ethnology gallery, as a printed catalogue, as a blog, as a database, as a series of vocal performances and lectures, and as workshops for local schools. NBtT re-projects the structure into this new space as cognitive sculpture in order to examine aspects of its form not made visible in previous manifestations.
Bridge
(last edited: 2015)
author(s): Johan Sandborg
connected to: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Through a dialogue with an historical archive the project seeks to construct a fluid story of a confined landscape on the point of transformation. Through the negotiation of a multitude of images the project constructs a narrative that transcends the photographic vision as evidence, and questions whether vision can be more than comparable to the ground of an archaeological excavation. Through the use of the photographic essay as a method the intention is to try and interpret the changeability of the urban landscape.