GALLERY 881
881 East Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 3Y1
gallery881.com
@gallery881_
BECOMING ANARCHIVAL
Exhibition with works by
Kate Hennessy & Trudi Lynn Smith
Exhibition
November 2 - November 30, 2024
Opening Reception
Saturday, November 2, 2024 from 2 - 5pm
Artist Talk
Saturday, November 30, 2024 from 2 - 3pm
EXHIBITION STATEMENT
Becoming Anarchival is a collaboration between artist-ethnographers Trudi Lynn Smith and Kate Hennessy that activates instability and impermanence as generative forces in museums and archives. Over the past decade, they have oriented their writing and art practice toward the anarchival, both as transformative disruption and as a methodology for engaging time-based media and the material politics of place. Where the archival is the imagined truth and stability of museums, collections, and geographies, the anarchival is the unpredictable, the impermanent, and the speculative. The anarchival signals new instances of becoming.
Emerging from their fieldwork around a defunded paleontology research centre in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia’s most recently established municipality (built around the Quintette metallurgical coal mine), the exhibition uses documentary photographs, anthotype contact prints, and video works to foreground the anarchival as a condition that erodes widely held belief in archives, scientific knowledge, and civic structures as stable and enduring. Hennessy and Smith explore relationships between media and mining practices, settler-colonial exploitation, and their entanglements in paleontology and archives. The works highlight the fugitive materiality of collections and the image-making technologies used to document them, amplified in our current climate crisis fuelled by the extraction of petrochemical dinosaurs archived in the earth. Fossils, what Hiroshi Sugimoto has called “the first photographs”, are a way into an understanding of the entangled politics and practices of becoming anarchival.
ARTIST BIOS
Trudi Lynn Smith is Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria (Canada). Trudi specializes in interdisciplinary research-creation and collaboration, working with human and more-than-human communities at the intersection of experimental art, ethnography, and political ecology. Her practice is grounded in a concern with the embodiments, relationships, techniques, and ethics of image-making and explorations of impermanence and uncertainty in photography.
www.trudilynnsmith.com
Kate Hennessy is Associate Professor specializing in Media at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology (Canada). As an anthropologist of media and the director of the Making Culture Lab, an interdisciplinary research-creation and production studio, her work uses collaborative, feminist, and decolonial methodologies to explore the impacts of new memory infrastructures and cultural practices of media, museums, and archives. She values working across disciplinary boundaries in her practice, including expression in video, photography, digital fabrication, and virtual exhibition.