Friday 7th November
10.30am in Media Research Building, Screen 3, Goldsmiths
My research on the visual archive of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP) asks how colonial archives can be reconfigured to construct new and productive critical histories.
My approach to reworking archival fragments focuses on the intersection of imperial history and personal history, mixing photographic documents from an official, corporate archive with those from a personal one. But the research also generates and incorporates new photographic and textual documentation in the process, as part of its narrative. I use the moving image not only as a container but as an activator of colonial photographs. I show how the artist’s reflection on, and narration of a process that reconfigures archival fragments, can elicit an active, engaged history of the post-colonial present.
The practical research sheds light on a cluster of theoretical issues around the nature of our engagement with archival documents, with still and moving images, and with the temporal category we call 'the past'.On Friday I will talk about some questions that I am currently grappling with - about problems to do with the writing of history, the writing of a PhD thesis and the place of the researcher/artist in this process.
Suggested Reading: Jaimie Baron (2014) 'The Archive Effect' in Projections Volume 6, Issue 2, Winter 2012: 102–120
10.30am in Media Research Building, Screen 3, Goldsmiths
My research on the visual archive of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP) asks how colonial archives can be reconfigured to construct new and productive critical histories.
My approach to reworking archival fragments focuses on the intersection of imperial history and personal history, mixing photographic documents from an official, corporate archive with those from a personal one. But the research also generates and incorporates new photographic and textual documentation in the process, as part of its narrative. I use the moving image not only as a container but as an activator of colonial photographs. I show how the artist’s reflection on, and narration of a process that reconfigures archival fragments, can elicit an active, engaged history of the post-colonial present.
The practical research sheds light on a cluster of theoretical issues around the nature of our engagement with archival documents, with still and moving images, and with the temporal category we call 'the past'.On Friday I will talk about some questions that I am currently grappling with - about problems to do with the writing of history, the writing of a PhD thesis and the place of the researcher/artist in this process.
Suggested Reading: Jaimie Baron (2014) 'The Archive Effect' in Projections Volume 6, Issue 2, Winter 2012: 102–120
