Symposium: Living Archives

6th October

With: Anne Bean, Rose English, Hannah Hurtzig, Janez Janša and Heike Roms

Gripped by a kind of ‘archive fever’, contemporary art and culture is driven by the desire to document, store and preserve. The archive is now a vast global edifice, crossing cultures and forms and reaching further and further into the past. Fleeting exchanges and moments are everywhere evidenced in contemporary art’s multiple but unstable papers, artefacts and traces. But what happens to the life of art in its archival forms? What is the archive doing with performance, performers with the archive? Speakers addressed the relation between artists and the archival drive, the artist’s experiences and body as a kind of living archive.

Video extracts

Heike Roms introducing 'Living Archives'

Anne Bean

Rose English

Janez Janša

Hanna Hurtzig in conversation with Lois Keidan

Note: complete video documentation of all performance lecture events can be accessed through the Study Room at Live Art Development Agency and at the British Library.