ACTIVE ARCHIVE-SLOW INSTITUTION QUEER-IN-PROGRESS. TIMELINE
This ongoing body of research has been collated by artist Hannah Tiernan (MFA ACW, NCAD) and will be presented alongside her current investigation into the GCN, IQA and the Out Magazine archives.
ACTIVE ARCHIVE-SLOW INSTITUTION
QUEER-IN-PROGRESS. TIMELINE
6th – 21st March 2020
Project Launch: 6th March 2020, 5-7pm
Between 6th and 21st March Project Arts Centre hosts the second chapter of the Active Archive – Slow Institution project, an extensive research initiative that delves into Project’s 50+year history, looking at the imagined futures and proposals for transformation recorded in Project Arts Centre’s archives.
QUEER-IN-PROGRESS. TIMELINE maps LGBTQ histories and even more specifically looks into lesbian, female-identified, transgender and feminist activism and practices. With a special focus on the 1980s, 1990s and the HIV campaigns, QUEER-IN-
PROGRESS. TIMELINE begins with an exploration into Project’s LGBTQ theatre history. This ongoing body of research has been collated by artist Hannah Tiernan (MFA, NCAD) and will be presented alongside her current investigation into the GCN (Gay Community News), IQA (The Irish Queer Archive / National Library of Ireland) and the Out Magazine archives.
The timeline is identified as a tool for pooling, revisiting and bringing into conversation various points of views, individuals, groups and communities to unpack less visible and often supressed, overlooked or neglected aspects of complex historical events, challenging simplified media representation. The display will change and expand through collaborative editing during the two weeks. The wider public are invited to contribute to the evolving timeline and its periodical updates. They are invited to challenge the power structures of canonized perception and readings and to present concerns about visibility, measurement, normalisation, temporality, presence and absence, representation of otherness, desire and difference.
During the two weeks we will host ‘Public Viewing’ events that invite the public to participate in a conversation with guests who will moderate the close-reading of a selection of materials (documents, ephemera, music or moving images) relating to LGBTQ history, culture, politics, community relations, and public health. The gallery will also give space to a series of workshops and gatherings.
QUEER-IN-PROGRESS. TIMELINE puts forward the importance of temporal, open and inclusive archives that accommodate changing needs and foster a dialogue about queer archiving within institutional practices. It will highlight events that point at the social, political, economic and medical complexities but also the absences and silences resulting from censorship, limitations to document and preserve as well as lack of space for sexual and gender difference.
Exploring narrative(s) of emerging and changing experience that might manifest through personalised collections of records, community-based archives the project looks into questions of historicizing and memorializing and how queering archival practices can help us transform conventional
approaches to archiving with a strong critical engagement with many of the issues present including misogyny, homo/transphobia, HIV, racism and various forms of discrimination and marginalisation.
QUEER-IN-PROGRESS. TIMELINE is developed in collaboration with GCN and several communities, activists and cultural practitioners. For detailed information please visit: https://projectartscentre.ie/event/queer-in-progress-timeline/
QUEER-IN-PROGRESS. TIMELINE runs until 21 March and is developed in the framework of the L'Internationale Research Network.
Active Archive – Slow Institution is an extensive research initiative that delves into Project’s 50+year history, looking at the imagined futures and proposals for transformation recorded in Project Arts Centre’s archives.
One of the main interests behind developing the project Active Archive – Slow Institution is to look at what future proposal for transformation is inscribed within Project’s manifold history. The studying and interrogation of documents and archival environments not only supports the recovering of the history of one of Ireland’s oldest art centres but approaches that history from the perspective of timely and pressuring contemporary issues and urgencies. It makes us rethink the changing conditions of artistic labor and production, the agency of artistic and curatorial work in relation to economic, social, and political institutions and power, the status of exhibitions and the role of public institutions.
In the gallery various display formats will be employed to generate and host discussions and conversations with professionals and the wider public to read Project’s histories via the wider context of cultural institutional, political, social and intellectual histories that include the building development of Temple Bar, gender representation, the history of Irish feminism, and LGBTQ activism.
In late 2018 the Project gallery was transformed into a workspace where documents relating to Project Arts Centre's archives were studied and shared, and the many histories that are entangled in one of the earliest arts centres established in Ireland began to emerge through documents that are part public record and part privately collected materials.
Organised into three chapters, the first, an exhibition The Long Goodbye featured both archival documents and new commissions by artists that revisited documentation from their own archives. It focused on the late 1990s with special attention to the OFF Site projects (1998-1999), the Demolishing Project – 39 East Essex Street is Closed (1998) and activities at Project@the Mint while the development of the current Project Arts Centre building was in progress. This chapter was prepared with curator, writer Valerie Connor and included artists Brian Hand, Dorothy Hunter, Fergus Kelly, Miriam O’Connor, Hannah Tiernan and Tanad Williams.
Concept: Lívia Páldi, Curator of Visual Arts
NCAD and PAC are partners in on-going project to explore the recent histories of performance, politics and sexuality since the 1990s. PAC will host performances, conversations and talks in spring 2020 supported by L'Internationale Research Network.
LISTINGS INFORMATION:
Exhibition: ACTIVE ARCHIVE SLOW INSTITUTION: QUEER-IN-PROGRESS. TIMELINE
Venue: Gallery, Project Arts Centre, Temple Bar, Dublin 2
Dates: 6th – 21st March 2020
Exhibition Opening Hours: 11:00-18:00 (additional hours dependant on the wider programme)
Opening Reception: 6th March 5-7pm
Admission: Admission to the visuals arts at Project Arts Centre is always free
Site Listing: https://projectartscentre.ie/event/queer-in-progress-timeline/
NOTES FOR EDITORS:
LÍVIA PÁLDI (Curator of Visual Arts at Project Arts Centre) – Was born in Budapest and worked as director of BAC – Baltic Art Center, Visby, Sweden between 2012 and 2015 and previously chief curator of the Műcsarnok / Kunsthalle Budapest between 2007 and 2011 where she has organised talks, discussions, workshops and numerous exhibitions. Páldi was the co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Dunaújváros (Hungary) and its co-director between 1997 and 1999. She has also edited several books and exhibition catalogues and was a contributing editor of the East Art Map magazine and book organised by the artist collaborative IRWIN in Ljubljana (2002–2005). Páldi has participated in the Curatorial Training Programme at De Appel in Amsterdam and was one of the curatorial agents of dOCUMENTA (13). During 2016 she was a member of the OFF-Biennale Budapest curatorial board.
HANNAH TIERNAN is a visual artist/researcher with a background in photography and sculpture. Her 2016 photographic project, EQUAL, won the Inspirational Arts Award. She holds an MFA in Art in the Contemporary World through NCAD. Her work primarily focuses on queer issues. Her thesis research focused on the LGBTQ+ theatre of Project Arts Centre from 1976 to 2000, investigating how it has influenced contemporary theatre practice and how it has reflected social issues of the time. Her talk and related event “Foul, Filthy, Stinking Muck”: an Archival Study into the LGBT Theatre of Project Arts Centre 1967-2000 was presented in Project Arts Centre in 2019.
PROJECT ARTS CENTRE is Ireland’s leading centre for the development and presentation of contemporary art, dedicated to protecting and nurturing the next generation of Irish artists across all forms of the performing and visual arts. Annually the centre presents over 620 events and exhibitions, as well as supporting the presentation and touring of the work of independent artists as part of our Project Artist initiative.
Project Arts Centre is proud to be supported by the Arts Council and Dublin City Council.
FOR MEDIA INFORMATION, INTERVIEWS AND PICTURES, CONTACT:
Astrid Newman
E: comms@projectartscentre.ie
T: 01 8819 625
Image caption: Poster board for Acts and Reacts. A Festival of Drama and Dialogue, March 1993. Design by Margaret Lonergan. Courtesy of Project Arts Centre, Dublin. Photo: Nat Schastneva.
