ACTIVE ARCHIVE SLOW INSTITUTION:
QUEER-IN-PROGRESS. TIMELINE.
Between 6 and 21 March (extended to 18th Sept due to COVID-19 restrictions), the gallery space of Project will host 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.
The second chapter QUEER-IN-PROGRESS. TIMELINE explores LGBTQ histories and even more specifically looks into lesbian, female-identified and feminist activism and practices. With a special focus on the 1980s and 1990s and the HIV campaigns the project departs from the ongoing research by Hannah Tiernan (artist, NCAD MFA) on Project’s LGBTQ theatre history with a selection of plays she identified with gay and lesbian issues and her current investigation into the GCN (Gay Community News), IQA (Irish Queer Archive) and 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 suppressed, overlooked or neglected aspects of complex historical events and challenge simplified media representation. The display is meant to change and expand through collaborative editing during the two weeks and invite the wider public to contribute to the forming timeline and its periodical updates, challenge the power structures of canonised perception and readings and present concerns about visibility, measurement, normalisation, temporality, presence and absence, representation of otherness and desire and difference.
During the two weeks, we continue with the Public Viewing events that invite the public to a conversation with guests who moderate close-reading/viewing 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 workshops (both open and closed) and gatherings.
QUEER-IN-PROGRESS. TIMELINE puts forward the importance of temporal, open and inclusive archive 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 absences and silences as results to 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 historicising and memorialising 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 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 (names TBC). For detailed information please visit: https://projectartscentre.ie/
Launching of the project: 5-7pm on 6 March (Friday).
QUEER-IN-PROGRESS. TIMELINE runs until 21 March and is developed in the framework of L’Internationale/ NCAD.
Project Arts Centre is proud to be supported by the Arts Council and Dublin City Council.
For further details, the link below shows a series of short videos explaining the work and touring the gallery space.