{archival installation view}
Archival installation: Tuesday-Thursday, 2-4 April 2024
Performances: Thursday, 4 April, 17:00-20:00 BST
Venue: Matthew Gallery South, University of Dundee
Curator: Judit Bodor
Performances: Stewart Home, Roddy Hunter, Laurie MacInally, Karen Strang.
Film screening: Malcolm Dickson
Event production support: Roddy Hunter, Khadea Santi, Hanifa Sogbanmu and Calum Renniew (student interns from MFA Curatorial Practice), Laura McSorley.
Documentation: Robert Page (video), Sarah Smart (photography), Sandor Nagy (photography)
An evening of new performance, participatory re-activations, and a film screening accompanying a three-day archival installation as part of the first research network meeting, 3-5 April 2024.
The event engaged new audiences and explored the archive's relevance to contemporary cultural and social experience. Artists from different generations and with different relationships to The Attic Archive were invited to develop new work either through direct engagement with specific archival material or through themes and subjects relevant to practices within the archive. Alongside these new performances by Roddy Hunter, Karen Strang and Stewart Home, and Laurie MacInally, participatory ‘reactivation' was used as a living archival curatorial method to re-engage audiences with a particular work, considering where the artwork is between action and documentation.
Performances:
Roddy Hunter: 'R E - R E C O R D I N G'. A live performance element of the installation work 'R E - R E C O R D I N G' where artist Roddy Hunter repeated Pete Horobin’s attempt between 12:30-2:22 pm on 29 March 1986 to eat an entire pack of digestive biscuits, dedicating each one to a person who had corresponded with him so far that year.
Stewart Home and Karen Strang: ‘Fae Fife Tae Angus & Back Again - Via Lud's Toun’. Stewart Home and Karen Strang, key collaborators of Pete Horobin and frequent visitors of The DATA Attic in the 1980s, come together for the first time after decades to reactivate, reference, and reimagine two of Horobin’s 1984 works, ‘Exchanges’ and ‘Fifeman’, while also connecting with historical events, such as the 1980s miners’ strike and the 17th Century Women of Fife who came to be known as the Dysart Witches.
Laurie McInally: ‘Mother, Worker, Artist, Other’. This performance is a deeply personal yet relatable exploration of changing identity, particularly reconsidering the boundaries and intersections of the roles women play in society. The artist aims to offer both a critique of societal expectations and a celebration of resilience.
Film screening:
Malcolm Dickson: ‘The Burning’. Super 8 film. 8 minutes 53 seconds. A one-off screening (with introduction by Dickson) of a film documenting The Burning, which took place on Glasgow Green at 8 pm on 8.8.88 during ‘The Festival of Non-Participation’ coordinated by Pete Horobin across Scotland when he was an artist in residence at the Dundee Resource Centre for the Unemployed (D.R.C.U).
The archival installation:
The event accompanied an archival installation curated and produced by Bodor and Hunter, with permission from the artist and the archival collections. It brought together video art, correspondence, drawings, photographs and artefacts from distinct decades of an artist's life from the mid-1970s to emphasise common threads across the four decades, including the exploration of the outside (landscape) and the outsider; the relationship between art and life (constructed histories and lived realities), personal and cultural identity; the material basis of everyday life; and a critique of art-world institutions. The exhibition was accompanied by new writing, ‘A History’, written in February 2024 by the artist signed as ‘haha’.
Participatory reactivation:
‘SMILE (with a) Scone’
Devised by curator Judit Bodor, this was a participatory re-activation of the 1984 ‘SMILE Scone'. The 'smiling scone' was accidentally baked in the DATA (Daily Action Time Archive) Attic at 37 Union Street and used by Pete Horobin for a photo action celebrating his close network in the 1980s, including his family and artist friends in Dundee, London, and Brussels. The artist preserved the scone in a specially made DATA Cell Box, which is now held in the University of Dundee Archives’ Attic Archive collection. To reactivate this work as action, rather than focusing on the material remains, Bodor exhibited the scone as well as the historic photograps and invited audience members to smile with a fresh scone for a new series of portraits. The new series of portraits has been collected into a new document by the artist ha, and deposited in the University of Dundee Archives collection as part of 'Attic Archive Extant'.
The three-day research network meeting:
Apart from the public engagement event and archival installation, the meeting included research network members' visits and introductions to the Attic Archive collections at the University of Dundee and the National Library of Scotland; a meeting with retiored archivist, Sally Harrower, who was responsible for the acquisitioning of the born-digital ae phor archive into NLS collections; and an afternoon oral history event with Malcolm Dickson, Karen Strang and Stewart Home about their relationship to the Attic Archive through sharing material from their private archives; and a meeting with the platform developer discussing ideas for content and structure.
{Research network members' visit to National Library of Scotland, and meeting with Sally Harrower, retired archivist. Photo: Roddy Hunter}
{Oral history event with Malcolm Dickson, Stewart Home and Karen Strang. Photo: Judit Bodor}
{Stewart Home, Karen Strang, Donna Romano, Malcolm Dickson, Judit Bodor, Halasi Dora. Photo: Roddy Hunter}