The Archive of Exile exhibition brings together three artists, in collaboration with three academics, around the juxtaposition of “archive” and “exile”. The exhibition consists of visual and sound works, taking up themes including nomadism, travel, memory, loss, acts and voices. It forms part of a larger project based in the Department of Geography and the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at the University of Sheffield, which explored the potential of exile to contribute to radical thought and practice.
The exhibition spans three different rooms, where you can take in music and sounds based on a human-powered journey down the length of the Mississippi River, a caravan built as part of an exploration of nomadism, and an extended work of video art which tell us a story about the twentieth century European experience of exile.
The three artists:
Pam Skelton is a visual artist and a Reader at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. Her work has included pieces on memory, difference, censorship, surveillance and the Holocaust. Pam’s contribution to the Archive of Exile project is Hotel Minerva, an exploration of photographs and videos from the Ukraine, Poland, England and France taken over the past twenty years, which evoke multiple pasts and the curious qualities of the ruined object.
Eve Beglarian is a composer and sound artist whose music is “an eclectic and wide-open series of enticements” (Josef Woodard, the Los Angeles Times). For the project, Eve completed a four-and-a-half month journey down the Mississippi River by kayak and bicycle. Eve’s installation, The Plaquemine Sirens Spinning on the Knees of Necessity, re-presents fragments of the journey and the music it inspired.
Hannah Fox (Welfare State International, Dogtroep) works across several forms of art, employing construction, sculpture, animation, performance, and many other techniques and disciplines to create fascinating and original site specific works. As part of the Archive of Exile project, Hannah has devised the installation Makeshift, on the theme of nomadism, which splices together motifs including landscape, childhood and caravans into a mix of visual and constructed art.
The academic project team comprises Dr Jessica Dubow (Department of Geography), Dr Richard Steadman-Jones (School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics) and Dr Frances Babbage (School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics). The Archive of Exile project was funded by the AHRC.
Further details of the project can be found on the TUOS website here, the