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.”
Dr Judit Bodor is a curator specialising in performance art and artist archives. She currently works as at the University of Dundee as Programme Director of MFA Fine Art and MFA Curatorial Practice (Art&Design). With a background in art history (MA 2002) and arts management (MA 2005) and a PhD in contemporary curating from Theatre, Film and Television Studies at Aberystwyth University (2017), she has been working independently as well as part of artist-led organisations, including Artpool Art Research Center, Budapest, East Street Arts, Leeds and WAVEparticle, Glasgow, since 2000. Alongside these she has worked part-time as an academic since 2005 including at Dartington College of Arts, York St John University, Cardiff College of Art & Design, The Glasgow School of Art. Judit’s work iand research focuses on the underrepresented histories of counter-cultural, time-based and pre-Internet networked art practices. Judit’s curatorial projects growing out of her wider research on Curating Living Archives include Curating the Digital Attic Archive, a two-year multi-institutional international research project supported by a Royal Society of Edinburgh to explore open-source approaches to a dispersed artist archive 2024-2026), and Alastair MacLennan: LIM(I)NAL (online, 2020). Prior to joining Dundee Judit co-curated No such permanence, only becoming, the 10th edition of the Festival of Ephemeral Art (Sokołowsko, Poland, 2019), was part of the team behind The Happenstance, Scotland’s collateral event at the 16th Architectural Biennale, 2018, and the curatorial team of Left Performance Histories (NGbK, Berlin 2018). She has been co-founder (with artists Emma Bolland and Tom Rodgers) of the small press Gordian Projects. Her writing appeared in Brill, Taylor&Francis, Routledge, Occassional Papers publications.
Adam Lockhart (co-investigator)
Adam Lockhart
Adam Lockhart is a Lecturer in Media Art & Archives at DJCAD, University of Dundee, Media Artist and Musician. He is responsible for the archives and collections at DJCAD as well as the Media Preservation Lab, which he established in 2004 to digitise and preserve obsolete Media formats. He is a leading specialist in the conservation, restoration and re-exhibition of artists’ video. Lockhart has worked on a number of AHRC research projects including REWIND| Artists’ Video in the 70s & 80s, Narrative Exploration in Expanded Cinema with Central St Martins College of Art & Design, REWIND Italia, European Women’s Video Art & Richard Demarco: The Italian Connection. He has acted as curator and consultant for a number of screenings and exhibitions both nationally and internationally and he has written for a number of publications on media art. His current area of research is using VR/AR as a tool to preserve obsolete media artworks.
Miriam Mallalieu (commissioned artist researcher)
Miriam Mallalieu
Miriam Mallalieu is an artist and doctoral candidate at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee, whose practice balances sculpture and storytelling, but also includes film, print and publication. Her doctoral research Taxonomies of Knowledge: a practice-led investigation into the organising, structuring and archiving of information focuses on ideas of ‘making sense.’ Through a methodology that she describes as ‘provocation through disruptive taxonomy’ she uses processes of reorganisation, repetition and deconstruction to draw attention to the structures by which things are understood. Her current project explores how objects in museum collections are changed through their context. Key issues include implications of active and passive objects, questions of significance, value and narrative, subjectivity and politics of collection, and how all of these contribute to form a structure that holds claim to universal or encyclopaedic representation.
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.
