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28 June 2011
Academics collaborate with artists to explore archive and exile
An exhibition marking the culmination of a two year interdisciplinary project between academics at the University of Sheffield and artists will open to the public on Wednesday July 6 2011 at Bank Street Arts in Sheffield.
Archive of Exile will showcase the collaborative work of three academics and artists around the juxtaposition of archive and exile. It explores the contrasting ideas of the institution of the archive, which is usually sedentary and stationary, and the concept of exile, which is associated with dislocation, mobility and placelessness. As those in exile must learn to carry their personal history and identity with them wherever they go, the project is interested to see whether every exile has an archive of their past within them.
The exhibition consists of visual and sound works, taking up themes including nomadism, travel, memory, loss, spaces, acts and voices.
Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Archive of Exile forms part of a larger project based in the University's Department of Geography and the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, which explores the potential of exile to contribute to radical thought and mobile practice.
The exhibition spans three different rooms at Bank Street Arts in Sheffield and will run until 29 July 2011. Visitors can take in music and sounds based on a journey down the length of the Mississippi River, a caravan built as part of an exploration of nomadism, and an extended work of video art which tell us a story about the twentieth century European experience of exile.
The exhibition aims to interest participants in novel ways of conducting and presenting research. In addition to three art installations, there will be a room containing documentation related to the overall project and the work of the researchers involved in it. Dr Jessica Dubow, a cultural geographer from the University´s Department of Geography, led the project alongside Dr Richard Steadman-Jones and Dr Frances Babbage from the School of English.
Dr Dubow said: "Academics often talk about the importance of interdisciplinary research and often gesture towards a dialogue with creative practitioners. In this project we've taken such boundary-crossings very literally and very seriously.
"Not only has the inter-faculty academic team found rich common ground – and often unsettled each other's assumptions – but working with artists across a range of media has opened up a new world of methodological possibilities. The contradictory idea of an Archive of Exile, and the questions it asks, is precisely about such alternatives and provocations."
The three artists involved are Pam Skelton, Eve Beglarian and Hannah Fox
Pam Skelton is a visual artist and a Reader at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. Her practice has explored ideas of space in relation to memory, history and place. Pam´s contribution to the Archive of Exile project is Hotel Minerva, an interrogation of Eastern European history through video, photographs and her own archives gathered over the past twenty years, which evokes multiple pasts and the curious qualities of the ruined object.
Pam Skelton commented: "I've worked with specialists from other areas before and it can be difficult to find common ground. But here, there is an affinity between the artists and academics because our subject areas are closely aligned making it a very productive, creative and exciting experience. What I've enjoyed most are the discussions and the sharing of insights across disciplines."
Eve Beglarian is a composer and sound artist whose music is "an eclectic and wide-open series of enticements" (Josef Woodard, the Los Angeles Times). For the project, Eve completed a four-and-a-half month journey down the Mississippi River by kayak and bicycle. Eve's installation, The Plaquemine Sirens Spinning on the Knees of Necessity, represents fragments of the journey and the music it inspired.
Hannah Fox works across several forms of art, employing construction, sculpture, animation, performance, and many other techniques and disciplines to create fascinating and original site specific works. As part of the Archive of Exile project, Hannah has devised the installation Makeshift, on the theme of nomadism, which splices together motifs including landscape, childhood and caravans into a mix of visual and constructed art.
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