Archive Image History
2 December 2009, 05:00PM - 07:00PM
Walid Raad's visit to CityArts, November 15th to December 7th will serve as the hub for a public forum:
CityArts and the Heritage Council in association with the Graduate
School of Creative Arts and Media and the School of Media, DIT
present
Archive | Image | History
December 3rd 5.00 - 7.00pm
The Oval Room, The Rotunda, Parnell Sq. W. Dublin 1
Whilst archives and archival practices have been a consistent feature of the historian's work,
visual artists and cultural practitioners have also engaged the archive as site, form and source to
appropriate, reconfigure and interrogate it. This forum brings together a number of practitioners
and researchers to focus on notions of memory-building and archiving in the context of
historical representation, exploring ideas of experience, memory and community, authenticity and
authorship, notions of the public and public-ness, and the politics of the archival imagination.
Participants
Walid Raad - The Loudest Muttering is Over: Documents from The Atlas Group Archive. Raad uses
photographic slides, notebook pages, and videotape excerpts as historical artifacts attributed to
various sources or characters such as Dr. Fadl Fakhouri, a leading historian of Lebanese history,
or Souheil Bachar, an ex-hostage. The findings and claims of these figures are inspired by
historical circumstances and objects such as the role of the car bomb in the Lebanese wars, and
existing captivity narratives.
Anthony Haughey - Remembering to Forget the Past: The Destruction and Recovery of Archives. Haughey
has been working on post-conflict situations over the last decade specifically in relation to
Northern Ireland and the Balkans where the destruction and recovery of archives has been one
of the features and legacies of conflict. A starting point for some of this work is the description
by Dr. Kemal Bakarsic, librarian of Bosnia's National Museum, of the firebombing of the
National and University Library during the bombardment of Sarajevo when 'fragile pages of gray
ashes, floated down like a dirty black snow. Catching a page you could feel its heat, and for a
moment read a fragment of text in a strange kind of black and gray negative, until, as the heat
dissipated, the page melted to dust in your hand'.
Catherine Morris - The praxis of community remembrancing: projections from lost Irish archives The
cultural practices of the Irish Cultural Revival breathed new life into the dying body of the
nation. The Revivalists called the past into being through street parades, collecting of folklore,
staging and publishing Irish legends and histories, initiating art and museum exhibitions, and by
travelling with theatre productions and magic lantern shows. Using archival sources, Morris will
investigate how this emergent nationalist culture depicted itself in public space drawing
connections between the politics of commemoration and repressed histories.
Chair: Martin McCabe, DIT Fellow, Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media
Walid Raad is an Associate Professor of Art at The Cooper Union College, New York. He has a
doctorate in Cultural and Visual Studies from the University of Rochester, NY. His works have
been shown at Documenta 11 (Kassel, Germany), The Venice Biennale (Venice, Italy), The
Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin, Germany), The Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA),
Homeworks (Beirut, Lebanon) and numerous other museums and venues in Europe, the Middle
East and North America. Raad is also the recipient of the Alpert Award in Visual Arts (2007), the
Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (2007) and the Camera Austria Award (2005). In June 2009,
"The Atlas Group (1989-2004)" exhibition opened at the Reina Sofia in Madrid and a solo show
entitled Scratching on Things I Could Disavow, 25 September - 31 October 2009 at Anthony
Reynolds Gallery, London. Raad's the ongoing project is titled the ongoing project titled
Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Arab
World. His publications include The Truth Will Be Known When The Last Witness Is Dead, 2005, My
Neck Is Thinner Than A Hair, 2006 and Let's Be Honest, The Weather Helped, 2007 all published by
Verlag Der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, Cologne
Anthony Haughey is an artist and lecturer in the School of Media at the Dublin Institute of
Technology and at the Centre for Transcultural Research and Media Practice. He recently
completed a three-year research fellowship at the Interface Centre for Research in Art,
Technologies and Design at the University of Ulster, where he just completed a PhD. Recent
exhibitions include Class of '73 at Les Rencontres d' Arles 09, a video installation, Prospect, at ISEA
09 and a dialogical artwork, part of Prehistory of the Crisis ll at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, 2009.
Chapter contributions include, 'Imaging the Unimaginable' in Projecting Migrations, Transcultural
Documentary Practice (2007) eds. Grossman & O'Brien, pub. Wallflower Press and 'Dislocations:
Participatory Media with Refugees in Ireland and Malta' in eds. Skartveit & Goodnow, Changes in
Museum Practice, New Media, Refugees and Participation (2009). pub. Berghahn. He is an editorial
advisor for the photographic journal Photographies published by Routledge.
Dr. Catherine Morris is a postdoctoral research fellow at UCD; guest curator at the National
Library of Ireland and Writer in Residence at the Writer's Centre, Parnell Square Dublin.
Her first degree was in English and Spanish literature at the University if Cambridge. She was
awarded the first Scottish Irish Initiative scholarship to undertake her doctorial research at
Trinity College Dublin. Her book Alice Milligan and the Irish Cultural Revival will be published by
Lilliput Press next year and her exhibition "Discover: the life and times of Alice Milligan" will
open at the National Library in May 2010. Last year, she co-edited the James Connolly Special
Issue of Interventions, an international postcolonial journal which included the first ever publication of
the lost manuscript of James Connolly's 1916 play Under Which Flag.
Venue
The Oval Room, Rotunda Hospital, Parnell Street, Dublin 1
