Selective Memory: Artists in the archive
Until 15 March 2015
Lewis Glucksman Gallery
University College Cork
Ireland
Artists:Zbyněk Baladrán, Paulien Barbas, David Raymond Conroy, Dani Gal, Ruth Maclennan, Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan, Lucy McKenzie, Marge Monko, Gavin Murphy, Alan Phelan, Anne Ramsden, Jasper Rigole, Valerie Snobeck, Sean Snyder, and Miek Zwamborn
Curated by Chris Clarke and Orla Murphy in association with Digital Arts & Humanities, University College Cork
The archive preserves the past, its remnants and records, within a repository of human knowledge. However, it also offers a space for critical engagement and creative invention, for challenging the archive’s supposed objectivity with unorthodox histories, subversive interpretations and speculative ideas. Drawing on photographs, documents, film footage and texts, Selective Memory explores the ways in which Irish and international artists continually return to the archive, in order to imbue it with a new sense of subjectivity and individuality.
The specific materials associated with the archive are revealed in the work of several artists. Miek Zwamborn‘s sculptural installation is inspired by her research into a 19th-century herbarium or plant album found in the archives in which she works, while Lucy McKenzie‘s Quodlibet paintings resemble billboards pinned with photographs, leaflets and writings around given subjects. Anne Ramsden finds material in the photographs that the artist collects on her online flickr archive, re-framing banal, everyday images as posters for imagined collections and exhibitions. Jasper Rigole explores and re-contextualizes archival film footage drawn from home movies, travel videos and anthropological documentaries.
This re-editing of the archive is also represented in video works by Zbyněk Baladrán and Marge Monko. In Baladrán’s piece, he overlays grainy film sequences from Soviet Czechoslovakia with segments of text, while Monko’s work sets still photographs of Estonian factory workers to an excerpt from a play by the Austrian Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek. Dani Gal re-enacts the first Israeli television broadcast in 1966 through his research into newspaper articles and testimonials while, in Ruth Maclennan‘s filmed interviews with professional archivists, she disruptively edits their responses. Gavin Murphy‘s film also takes place in the archive, following a researcher who delves into the history of Dublin’s iconic, and now demolished, IMCO building.
Speculation towards the original context of archival materials and the decisions that warranted their inclusion in a collection is addressed in a number of works. Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan‘s Evidence series of photographic images found in public and private American institutions was one of the first conceptual artworks to demonstrate that the meaning of an image is conditioned by the context and sequence in which it is seen. Paulien Barbas photographs objects from the archives of the Bauhaus, emphasizing their staging and display, while Alan Phelan has collected and compiled images, materials and paraphernalia that relates to representations of the human hand.
Valerie Snobeck‘s images are mined from the 1970s Documerica project, a government initiative to document the state of the American environment. However, by encasing the photographs in layers of mesh, plastic, netting and burlap, she renders the original images indecipherable. David Raymond Conroy displays partially erased pages from found books alongside a video of overlapping online screen grabs, sound-tracked with an enigmatic monologue on accessibility and the internet, while Sean Snyder‘s practice involves the transference of his extensive archive of photographs and videos into digital files, destroying the originals in the process.
Developed in partnership with Digital Arts & Humanities, University College Cork, Selective Memory features a programme of public talks by artists Alan Phelan (19 February) and Gavin Murphy (26 February) and new media art historian Dr. Sarah Cook (11 February).
An exhibition catalogue accompanies Selective Memory. For further information and advance orders, please email exhibitions [at] glucksman.org.
Selective Memory is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland, University College Cork and private philanthropy through Cork University Foundation.
