What is a Living Archive?:Curating the 'unruly' materiality of contemporary art

A Royal Society of Edinburgh-funded Arts and Humanities Research Workshop Award delivered between December 2020 and March 2021 with Bodor as PI (RSE Awardee ID: 69936) with multiple outputs. The interdisciplinary research project used curatorial practice methods (workshop and online commissioning) to gain new insight into the challenges of working with archives of time-based art and broaden access to DJCAD unique media art collections developed in the past 16 years [REWIND early video art collection, the Alastair MacLennan Archive and the Attic Archive]. Four workshops – co-convened with world-leading scholars and practitioners including Prof. Heike Roms (Exeter University), Patricia Falcao (Tate), Hanna B. Hoelling (UCL and University of Bern), and Ruth Catlow (Furtherfield) - were curated around specific themes to identify the challenges around maintaining and displaying these archives through oral history, new media curation and open-source curatorial strategies. The new multi-modal digital artwork [digital collages, a performance and a script], Holly Davey: A Script for an Archive: Women, was selected from proposals responding to an open call curatorial brief, developed in response to the REWIND early video art collection and acquisitioned into the University’s collection in 2021. The project generated a cross-sector dialogue between archivists, conservators, curators, artists with a total of 51 participants from 6 countries (UK, New Zealand, Philippines, Brazil, Ireland and Hungary). Outputs included: four thematic workshops; a new commissioned multi-modal digital artwork [Holly Davey: A Script for an Archive: Women]; a website that extended to a curatorial platform [curatinglivingarchives.net]; a conference presentation [Shaking the Archive, Edinburgh Napier], a keynote presentation at a national consultancy project [Because It’s Not There: Curating The Gaps in Artists’ Archives, Sumerhall, Edinburgh], a board appointment [The Alasdair Gray Archive, Glasgow]. The project led to a new RSE-funded international cross-institutional collaborative project [with Bodor as PI] commencing in December 2023 (CURATING THE DIGITAL ATTIC ARCHIVE A Case Study for Open Source Approaches to Artists’ Archive)