aemi & IMMA
Archives LIVE
aemi is delighted to partner with IMMA to present Archives LIVE, a series of live streamed public dialogues that reflect on the significant role played by the archive and museum collection in artist moving image culture, both in generating new work and as an overarching structure that supports the conservation of existing moving image practice.
The first session of Archives LIVE, Artists’ Working with Archives (Wed 07 Oct, 6.30pm), examines the archive as a resource, an enduring subject of interest and site of research for film artists. The second session of Archives LIVE, Conservation in Motion (Wed 21 Oct, 6.30pm) focuses on the conservation process that a moving image work goes through when it is acquired by an archive or a collection.
Session 1
Archives LIVE: Artists Working with Archives – Wed 07 Oct / 18:30 – 20:00 (GMT+1)
Online
Registration: To attend using zoom platform, register here.
Tune In: Tune in to the IMMA YouTube Channel at the time of live broadcast here.
To coincide with the IMMA Collection initiatives of IMMA Screen and the ongoing Archive Digitisation Project, aemi has partnered with IMMA to devise two online discussions with artists and conservators on the subject of the archive.
Session 1 examines the archive as a resource, an enduring subject of interest and site of research for film artists. This event offers fresh insight and new perspectives on the experience of working with personal, colonial, televisual and collection-based archives to develop an artwork through discussion with special guests Helen Cammock, Onyeka Igwe and Frank Sweeney. The event will comprise presentations from the artists, screenings of work or extracts and a group discussion moderated by aemi co-directors Alice Butler and Daniel Fitzpatrick.
Online Details: You can attend by registering in advance to receive a zoom link directly to your inbox or you can tune in during the live broadcast on the IMMA You Tube Channel, see links above.
Further info on Session 1:
This first session explores how film artists are continuing to find new ways to make use of or problematise the role and function of the archive. aemi co-directors Alice Butler and Daniel Fitzpatrick will lead a discussion with acclaimed artists Helen Cammock, Onyeka Igwe and Frank Sweeney to consider the creative and critical ways in which they activate and mediate the archive and archive material in their work. This discussion will reflect on distinct research processes and methodologies with each artist speaking personally about their work and how they have drawn on the archive or archive material in order to destabilise mainstream or received understandings of social, cultural and political events, reveal lesser known histories and give voice to marginalised communities or experiences that are overlooked, buried, misunderstood or misrepresented in wider public spheres.
This public discussion will explore the multiplicity of narratives amassed and reserved in the archive as well as the methods artists employ in order to upend or disrupt normative processes of access, research and authorship. This discussion will also consider the recent proliferation of online platforms and the potential these provide both to access and activate archive material particularly at a time when physical encounters with the archive and archive material is severely restricted.
Presented in collaboration with IMMA on the occasion of The Long Note (2018) by Helen Cammock as the fifth film work from the IMMA Collection to be showcased as part of IMMA Screen. Available to view now until 12 Oct 2020 see here
About Speakers
Helen Cammock was born in Staffordshire, UK in 1970. She studied at the University of Brighton, and the Royal College of Art, London. An interest in histories, authorship, storytelling and the excavation of lost, unheard and buried voices lead Cammock to map her own creative processes on to social and political situations. Cammock’s work draws on material from Nina Simone, Philip Larkin, James Baldwin, The Housemartins, Walter Benjamin, Franz Fanon and others to reveal the way in which we construct our own personal collage of influences and reference points to establish a sense of self, context and history. She works across moving image, photography, writing, poetry, spoken word, song, performance, printmaking and installation.
Cammock was shortlisted for the 2019 Turner Prize and was awarded the prize along with the other three nominees. Recent screenings include the Serpentine Cinema Series and Tate Artists Moving Image Screening Programme. Cammock has exhibited at Cubitt, London; Galerie Futura Alpha Nova, Berlin; The Tetley, Leeds; Open Source Contemporary Arts Festival; Hollybush Gardens, London; 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, London; and Void, Derry, Northern Ireland. Her written work has been published in several journals and magazines. Cammock is currently working on a project with Serpentine Galleries; Novel, Reading International and a new commission with Film and Video Umbrella, Touchstones Gallery and The Photographers Gallery. In 2018 Cammock was awarded the Max Mara Prize for Women which includes a forthcoming exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery, London and Maramotti Collection, Italy.
Onyeka Igwe is an artist and researcher working between cinema and installation. She was born and is based in London, UK. In her non-fiction video work, Onyeka uses dance, voice, archive and text to expose a multiplicity of narratives. The work explores the physical body and geographical place as sites of cultural and political meaning.Onyeka’s video works have been screened at Artists’ Film Club: Black Radical Imagination, ICA, London, 2017; Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh, 2020, and at film festivals internationally including the London Film Festival, 2015; Rotterdam International, Netherlands, 2018, 2019 and 2020; Edinburgh Artist Moving Image, 2016; Images Festival, Canada, 2019, and the Smithsonian African American film festival, USA, 2018.
Solo projects include Corrections, with Aliya Pabani, Trinity Square Video, Toronto, Canada, 2018, and There Were Two Brothers, Jerwood Arts London, 2019.Recent group projects include [POST] Colonial Bodies 2, CC Matienzo, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2019, there’s something in the conversation that is more interesting than the finality of (a title), The Showroom, London, UK, 2018; World Cup!, articule, Montreal, Canada, 2018; Arguments, Cordova, Vienna, Austria, 2017; and Multiplex, Nuit Blanche, Toronto, Canada, 2016. She was awarded 2020 Arts Foundation Futures Award for Experimental Short Film and was the recipient of the Berwick New Cinema Award in 2019. Onyeka’s work is distributed by LUX. See more details here.
Frank Sweeney is a filmmaker with a research based arts practice, he uses found material to approach contemporary questions of collective memory, experience and identity. Recent films include All I believe happened there was vision (2020), created during a research partnership with the National Folklore Collection UCD and supported by St.Patrick’s Festival. The film launched on ‘aemi online’ (aemi.ie 22 July – 1 September) accompanied by a responsive text from Rebecca O’Dwyer. In 2018, Frank collaborated with artist Eva Richardson McCrea and the Dublin Dockworkers Preservation Society to create the film Made Ground, funded by the Artist in the Community scheme. This film explores the effects of changing architecture & labour forms in Dublin’s Docklands and was exhibited at Green on Red Gallery (2019), SoftSpot Manchester (2020) and Agitation Co-op, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios (forthcoming December 2020).
Event update
Listen again to the two Archives LIVE events: Artists Working with Archives (7 Oct), and Conservation in Motion (21 Oct)
More info here
