This is the script performed and recorded live on Zoom as part of the artwork’s launch on 31st January 2021.
It is a live reading of the script by two actors. The work is the personification of Archive and Process as two women, having a conversation about women in archival spaces, why we are missing and what could an archive of the future be? The work was made over Zoom to a live audience in one take and incorporates the limitations of the technology and making work via the internet.
CREDITS:
‘A Script for an Archive: Women’ was commissioned for online display at www.curatinglivingarchives.network as part of ‘What Is A Living Archive. Curating the ‘unruly’ materiality of Contemporary Art’, a research project led by Dr Judit Bodor with Adam Lockhart, 2021.
ARCHIVE resources: REWIND Artist’s Video Archive, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee.
ARTISTS’ WORKS REFERENCED: Catherine Elwes, Judith Goddard, Katherine Meynell, Rose Garrard, Tina Keane.
CURATOR: Dr. Judit Bodor, Baxter Fellow, Curatorial Practice, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee.
ARCHIVIST: Adam Lockhart, Media Art Archivist and Lecturer, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee.
WRITING MENTOR: Professor Maria Fusco, Chair of Interdisplinary Writing at University of Dundee.
ACTORS: Polly Kilpatrick & Rebecca Knowles.
TECHNICAL SUPPORT: Naomi Van Dijck, Mark Gubb, Anthony Shapland, g39, Cardiff.
SPECIAL THANKS: Rich Robinson, Emily Speed, Nick Thornton.
Holly Davey, Sketch no.5 (for stage flat), digital collage, 2021
Sketch no. 2 (for stage flat), was inspired by the work of Judith Goddard, Lyrical Doubt(Accessible in the REWIND Artists’ Video Archive at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee, by appointment). Goddard’s process of layering video images, with the silhouette of one image underneath another, echoed ideas Davey had been exploring in the studio with postcard cutouts of women by male artists. This digital collage is made in photoshop from an image of Renior’s, La Parisienne and an image of women protesting during 2021 about political and social events.
Holly Davey, Sketch no.4. (for stage flat), digital collage, 2021.
Sketch no.4 (for stage flat) was inspired by the work of Judith Goddard, Lyrical Doubt[accessible in the REWIND Artists’ Video Archive at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee, by appointment]. Goddard’s process of layering video images, with the silhouette of one image underneath another, echoed ideas Davey had been exploring in the studio with postcard cutouts of women by male artists. This digital collage is made in photoshop from an image of Edgar Degas’s, Dancerlooking at the sole of her right foot, and an image of women protesting during 2021 about political and social events.
Holly Davey, Sketch no.2. (for stage flat), digital collage, 2021.
Sketch no. 2 (for stage flat), was inspired by the work of Judith Goddard, Lyrical Doubt(Accessible in the REWIND Artists’ Video Archive at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee, by appointment). Goddard’s process of layering video images, with the silhouette of one image underneath another, echoed ideas Davey had been exploring in the studio with postcard cutouts of women by male artists. This digital collage is made in photoshop from an image of Renior’s, La Parisienne and an image of women protesting during 2021 about political and social events.
The ‘Script for an Archive: Women’ was typed between October-December 2021 and only exist as a digital document. It includes an imagined conversation between two female characters ‘Archive’ and ‘Process’ and directorial instructions by the ‘Narrator’. The Script was performed live on Zoom on the 31st January, 2022.
Image credit: Stills from Rose Garrard: Tumbled Frame, 1984, Catherine Elwes: The Critics Informed Viewing, 1982, and Katharine Meynell: Medusa, 1988. Courtesy of the REWIND Archive, DJCAD, University of Dundee, and the artists.
A Script for an Archive by Holly Davey is a recent body of work that the artist developed since 2019 mainly through large-scale installations including photography, sculpture, text, video and performance in exhibitions at The British School of Rome and the Danielle Arnaud Gallery in London and Chapter Art Centre gallery in Cardiff. Through this body of work, the artist explores – often marginalised – female voices within archival spaces.
Holly often explores ideas surrounding absence, place, and the body within her practice. She works predominately with archives and collections to explore the heritage of lost, marginalised or forgotten social histories embedded in these collections, especially around women’s lives.
A Script for an Archive: Women is an attempt to unlock REWIND’s potential as a feminist archive and at the same time address issues around the representation of gender in archival spaces in general. The work connects the experience of women and women artists past and present to confront us with the question ‘How would you like the future to be?’
Part of the curatorial brief to the artist was to consider our project’s website, curatinglivingarchives.network, as the platform through which the new artwork will be primarily experienced. Using the website as such was not only practical given COVID-19 related restrictions on physical spaces, but also strategic to engage wider audiences with our media art collections at DJCAD which are only accessible by appointment.
We worked with Holly to develop her new work to be presented and experienced fully and only online. The artwork’s launch event (31 January 2022) was the only time the work was performed live. The recorded performance, the script and the digital collages have been accessioned into our collection and will remain accessible through this website as a multi-component digital artwork, including a script, the recorded performance, and a series of digital collages [follow the links on this page].
/excerpts from Judit Bodor’s introduction to the artwork as part of the artwork launch, 31 January 2022, Zoom/.
Holly Davey: Scene no. 7. 2020. 31.5 cm x 20.5 cm. Original photograph from the Bulwer Collection, The British School of Rome, red lighting gel, bulldog clip.
“I will use this opportunity to radically think about how we can approach working with archival material, changing the assumed narrative into something more real, truthful and complete. Most archives only tell half the story of their content, often marginalising women’s voices, even if they are there. I approached this commission by inverting/reimaging the already existing female narrative, readdressing the gender balance with the archive and revealing something currently unseen.”
Tina Keane In Our Hands Greenham 1984 at NEoN 2019: REACT, Dundee. Courtesy of NEoN Digital Arts.
How do collections, curators, conservators and artists attempt to deal with the unruly aspects of re-exhibiting and collecting media artworks? The challenges faced are diverse, from understanding the parameters for displaying a work, to transferring media from analog to digital formats, to sustaining or sensitively replacing obsolete technology. The key aspects, or work-defining properties, of the works must be identified, although this is not always clear cut – artists may provide detailed instructions, some may provide sparse information or even none at all and they may now no longer be with us. The job of the conservator and curator is to tease out these issues and make reasonable judgments on how the work is to be displayed, in conjunction with the artist if this is possible. Video and audio works may have been produced in analogue formats, is it possible to display them digitally from either a technical or artistic perspective? Is the original display equipment available or is an alternative required? Does the operation of the ‘backend’ of a media artwork matter if the viewer experience is the same?
Beyond the questions presented by physically displaying a work, there are further issues that affect the ability to do so. Subjects such as copyright, intellectual property and other legal agreements related to the artwork itself and the content of any media used within it need to be considered. Furthermore, the issues concerning preservation of the works, including the skills and infrastructure needed to ensure media, hardware and documentation are cared for in the long-term are very important.
In this workshop we considered and discussed these issues through case studies breaking down the different elements that compose media installations, highlighting the risks and strategies for preservation, comparing the differences between gallery collections, university collections and artists’ collections.
Co-convened with Patricia Falcao (Tate) Adam Lockhart (DJCAD University of Dundee), Julie Ann-Delaney (University of Edinburgh) and Luke Fowler (Artist).
Patricia is a Portuguese time-based media conservator working at Tate, where she researches and develops strategies for the preservation of software-based artworks. More recently, in the context of the Reshaping the Collectible project, this has broadened to include the acquisition and preservation of web-based artworks. In the past eight years, she has consistently published on the theme of preservation of time-based media, digital and software-based art, in the conservation and digital preservation communities. She is also currently undertaking a PhD entitled Artists, Conservators and Game Developers: A Comparative Study of Software Preservation in Three Domains at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Julie-Ann Delaney
Julie-Ann Delaney is Art Collections Curator at the University of Edinburgh, a post she took up in early 2019. Prior to joining the University, Julie-Ann was Senior Curator (Modern and Contemporary Art) at the National Galleries of Scotland. She has also held roles at Dundee Contemporary Arts, and at the Artist-Run initiative Generator Projects. She is currently working on a programme of joint performance art acquisitions with the National Galleries of Scotland, funded through a New Collecting Award from the Art Fund. Julie-Ann is also part of the Curatorial Leadership in Collections (CLiC) group, an action research and advocacy project aimed at highlighting and quantifying the wide-ranging impact of contemporary collecting and programming in Scotland.
Luke Fowler
A prominent figure in Glasgow’s contemporary art scene, Luke Fowler’s work explores the limits and conventions of biographical and documentary film-making. This has resulted in comparisons with British Free Cinema of the 1950s, which represented a new attitude to film-making that embraced the reality of everyday, contemporary British society. In adopting the roles of artist, curator, historian, film-maker and musician, Fowler creates impressionistic portraits of intriguing figures. As montages of archival footage alongside new recordings, interviews, photography and sound, Fowler’s films offer a unique and compelling insight into his subject. An important and essential part of his practice is the materiality and medium specificity of the work. Fowler studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee, from 1996-2000. He received the inaugural Jarman Award in 2008 and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2012. Recents exhibitions/works include Index Cards and Letters at The Modern Institute, Glasgow 2021 and Patrick, 2020 a portrait of pioneering musician Patrick Cowley.
This workshop explored how can open-source peer-to-peer archival and curatorial practices articulate the unruly politics of artists’ archives?
With much focus on conservation challenges of the so-called ‘dematerialisation’ of contemporary art practice, there is arguably less consideration of how archiving and curating can articulate, through practice, artists’ critical and radical politics in circumventing and critiquing institutional discourses and structures.
Taking The Attic Archive (1980-2010) as a starting point the workshop speculated upon experimental and generative curatorial approaches to articulating pre-internet, peer-to-peer networked art practice in a post-digital context. Participants heard presentations and were guided through practical activities and discussion by Curating Living Archives Principal Investigator, Dr Judit Bodor, workshop co-convenor Dr Roddy Hunter, and guest experts Theresa Kneppers and Artemis Gryllaki (The Borough Road Collection Archive), Ruth Catlow (Furtherfield) sharing first-hand insights of post-custodial and open-source models as alternatives to hegemonic systems of contemporary art. Participants then worked in groups directly with material from The Attic Archive to discuss possible collaborative and open-source curatorial approaches to a networked archive that is currently dispersed across collections in Scotland, Hungary and Ireland.
Presentations of case-studies on open-source curatorial models
Ruth Catlow
Ruth introduced Furtherfield’s work in participatory online collaboration and co-creation with a focus on Do It With Others (DIWO) and the Blockchain Art History Timeline. The former drew on the Mail Art tradition proposing to bypass curatorial restrictions to promote imaginative exchange between artists and audiences on their own terms, the latter is the world’s first timeline to chart the rise and influence of Blockchain Art and Crypto Art using blockchain’s new decentralised curation tools.
Theresa Kneppers & Artemis Gryllaki
Theresa and Artemis presented their online multi-vocal curatorial approach to the Borough Road Collection Archive, an online wiki-based platform for research exploring A David Bomberg Legacy – The Sarah Rose Collection through collaborative writing, annotating and recording, in response to archival material and digital artworks.
Dr Roddy Hunter is an artist, curator, educator and writer. Known for performance art interventions in wide-ranging sites and spaces internationally over 30 years, he has shown work across Europe, North America and Asia. He was included in Phaidon’s 2007 ‘Ice Cream: Contemporary Art in Culture’, a survey of significant emerging artists selected by world-leading curators. He became involved with curatorial practice while a member of Hull Time Based Arts in the mid-1990s. His writing on histories, theories and practices of contemporary art has been published internationally, and he regularly speaks at conferences, symposia and workshops. His most recent practice engages with art, curating, networks and performance after the internet, such as the research project ‘Networked Art Practice After Digital Preservation‘. He has an MA in Contemporary Arts from Nottingham Trent University and a PhD from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee. A senior academic with over 20 years of experience in art and design higher education, he will take up a new post as Head of Sculpture and Environmental Art at the Glasgow School of Art in October 2021.
Ruth Catlow
Ruth Catlow is co-founding artistic director of Furtherfield and networked cultures expert. Furtherfield is London’s longest-running (de)centre for art and technology whose mission is to disrupt and democratise through deep exploration, open tools and free-thinking. Catlow has spent 20 years exploring games as a way of engaging people’s imaginations and expertise across silos, around emerging technologies and the wicked social and political problems they give rise to or intensify. Her artistic practice and curatorial work at Furtherfield has focused on critical investigations of digital and networked technologies and their emancipatory potential. Catlow is the founder of DECAL Decentralised Arts Lab crowdsourcing R&D by leading artists, using blockchain and web 3.0 technologies for fairer, more dynamic and connected cultural ecologies and economies. She is also PI at the Blockchain Lab at the Serpentine Galleries R&D Platform.
Theresa Kneppers
Theresa Kneppers is the curator of the Borough Road Collection Archive (A David Bomberg Legacy – The Sarah Rose Collection) at London South Bank University. She is currently a PhD researcher with the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image. Her research focuses on the online curation of digital collections and archives, exploring playful, speculative modes of co-production and co-interpretation. In addition to her work at LSBU she was the curator of a recent show of new work by contemporary artist Benjamin Deakin at the William Morris Society. She was selected as the international guest curator at the HOW Museum in Shanghai in 2019 and presented a talk on “Creative Collaboration: From Artist Collectives to Co-Curation ”. Themes of public engagement with digital archives and collections run through her practice.
Artemis Gryllaki
Artemis Gryllaki is a media artist and researcher based in Rotterdam. She holds a Master of Arts from the Experimental Publishing course of the Piet Zwart Institute and has professional experience in web development. She is a member of Varia, Center of everyday technology, and is co-initiator of the Feminist Hack Meetings in Rotterdam. Her current work explores the potentials of feminist technological practices and the development of playful digital archives, using mainly FLOSS tools.
A workshop co-convened by Dr Judit Bodor and Dr Hanna B. Hölling, and with contribution from artist/curator Prof André Stitt and Benjamin Sebastian and Joseph Morgan Schofield from ]performance s p a c e[. The presentations examined how the intersection of curation and conservation might contribute to the way we engage with and conceptualize ephemeral practices. Following the presentations participants worked with an artwork from The Alastair MacLennan Archive discussing how might curatorial work support an artwork’s preservation, and vice versa?
Presentations
Hanna Hölling: What does the work want? On the intersection of curatorial and conservation cultures.
This was a presentation about a canonical and yet surprisingly understudied work of art: Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film, or Fluxfilm No. 1, which was created during the early 1960s. One of the most evocative works, Zen for Film consists of a several-minute-long screening of a blank film; as the film ages and wears in the projector, the viewer is confronted with a constantly evolving work. Because of this mutability and the rich history of its display, the work undermines any assumption that art can be subject to a single interpretation. Taking this work as a single subject of an exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery (2015-16) and its accompanying book Revisions (2015), Hanna discussed how critical thinking about the work’s presentation not only contributes to the extended notion of its preservation but also allows us to better understand what an artwork is and what it might become.
Andre Stitt: Trace, Spectral Arc & Vanishing Point
In his presentation artist Andre Stitt discussed the relationship between preservation and presentation by considering how performance artists seek to embody physical action and memory as ‘live’ archives through the use of materials identified in their performance practice. He talked about how performance work is produced to include the constant process of accumulation and erasure, creating a layering of material and memory through curating ‘traces’, which he identifies as the practice of ‘act-archiving’, a term first used by artist Julie Bacon and is concerned with the relationship between live presence in the artwork (that of the artists and others) and the processes of historicisation. Throught the concept of act-archiving Andre explored his approach to curating the programme of trace: installaction artspace in Cardiff, Wales, over a ten-year period (2000-2010) and talk about Spectral arc & vanishing point, a durational performance by him and artist Alastair MacLennan at St. Paul St. Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand (2011).
]performance s p a c e[: PSX – A Decade of Performance Art in the UK.
Benjamin co-founded ]ps[ in 2011, and invited Joseph to join as co-director in 2020. In 2021 they curated PSX: a decade of performance art in the UK, a celebratory archival programme marking the 10th anniversary of ]ps[. The ]ps[ archive is an expanded archive. It is alive. In working with artists, ]ps[ begins from a place of attending to the needs – artistic, emotional and pragmatic – of the bodies which pass through it. As ]ps[ transitions into a new reality, with new leadership and looking towards new geographies, Joseph and Benjamin’s presentation was a dialogue and reflection on ]ps[‘ mission statement and manifesto, questioning what holds true and what needs to be reimagined.
A performance-for-camera work comprising of four versions (a,b,c,d) of 7:36-minute edited footage of one performance shot in the artist’s garden in Greenisland, Belfast on May 2, 2020. The video footage was edited with photographer Jordan Hutchings’ assistance and the versions were exhibited in four different festivals (never together) during the lockdown. The performance itself has emerged from MacLennan’s daily performative studio drawing practice from March 2020 onwards, which produced hundreds of drawings on A2 paper, each signed on the back with the same title ‘LIM(I)NAL’. Selections from the drawings were sent to curators of the festivals to be exhibited [if they wish] alongside the videos as part of festivals. The drawings (without the videos) were also used in an online performative exhibition curated by Judit Bodor and Adam Lockhart on the artist’s archive website. The work has now also been preserved on the archive website as the simultaneous display of the four versions of the video, video stills and digital images of a selection of drawings. The drawings themselves are not yet in the physical collection.
Andre Stitt & Alastair MacLennan: Spectral Arc/Vanishing Point, St. Paul St. Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2011.
Andre Stitt was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1958. He studied at Ulster Polytechnic and Belfast College of Art & Design, Ulster University 1976-1980. From 1980-1999 he lived and worked in London increasingly travelling and making work internationally throughout the eighties and nineties. In 1999 he moved to Wales to take up a position as Director of Time Based Art at Cardiff School of Art & Design. He is currently Professor of Performance & Interdisciplinary Art at Cardiff School of Art & Design, Cardiff Metropolitan University and programme leader of the MFA. Working almost exclusively as a performance and interdisciplinary artist Stitt gained an international reputation for cutting edge, provocative and politically challenging work. A predominant theme in his artistic output is that of communities and their dissolution often relating to trauma, conflict and art as a redemptive proposition. His ‘live’ performance and installation works have been presented at major museums, galleries and specific sites throughout the world. He was director of trace: Installaction Artspace in Cardiff from 2000-2010 initiating a robust programme of international installation and performance work. Stitt’s performance art curatorial work includes Span2 International Project, London 2001, Flashes From The Archives of Oblivion (Chapter Art Centre, Cardiff 2007-8), RHWNT (Quebec 2003-4), Of Contradiction (Beijing 2005,) and Trace Displaced (Tramway, Glasgow 2008), the National Eisteddfod of Wales 2008 & Artspace, Sydney 2009.
]performance s p a c e[
Martin O’Brien and Rubiane Maia: PSX: 10 hours, 2021 ]performance s p a c e[ at The Ugly Duck, Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou.
]performance s p a c e [ is the UK’s only studio and exhibition space dedicated to performance art. Our mission is to facilitate the prime conditions for the production of performance art in the UK (and beyond). Currently based in Folkestone’s Creative Quarter (Kent), our organisation continues to cultivate time-based work that critically and physically pushes the boundaries of the body, time and space. ]ps[ remains an artist-led initiative, committed to our identity as a DIY, anti-institutional space supporting challenging and difficult work that embraces performance art as an ever-evolving medium. In 2021, ]ps[ marked our 10th anniversary with a special programme: PSX – a decade of performance art in the UK. After ten journeys around the sun – our bodies soaked in blood, sweat, tears, eco-glitter – we celebrated ]ps[‘ resilience, and the remarkable constellation of artists involved in ]ps[, by looking to the past, present & future(s) of performance art in the UK. We hosted screenings, talks, performances, exhibitions, bursaries, workshops and residencies, and the programme culminated in a 10-hour durational live work by 9 of the UK’s leading performance artists. PSX is a proudly intergenerational programme, marking both our international and local constellations and foregrounding the contributions of queer, Trans*, POC & womxn artists.
