What is a Living Archive? Curating the Unruly Materiality of Contemporary Art

A research project and evolving network initiated by Dr Judit Bodor (Baxter Fellow Curatorial Practice) and Adam Lockhart (Lecturer in Media Arts, media archivist) at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design at University of Dundee to explore challenges and approaches toward how we can care for the ‘unruly’ archives of contemporary art in academic (rather than museum) environment.
Documentation Alastair MacLennan: Still Tills, 72-hour performance, Glasgow, 1990. The Alastair MacLennan Archive, DJCAD.

About the artist: Holly Davey

This artist commission is part of our Royal Society of Edinburgh-funded workshop project (running until 31 January 2021) and aims to explore archives of ephemeral, processual, networked or multimodal artworks online through another artist's practice.
Performance props. The Alastair MacLennan Archive, DJCAD.

Unruly Archives at DJCAD

When we say ‘unruly archives’, we mean archives of contemporary art that don’t easily fit within existing institutional collections and can’t easily be maintained or curated by conventional means. The unruliness of these archives might be due to either artists’ ambiguous / critical relationship to institutional practices, or the artworks’ multi-modal, networked, processual and changeable nature. REWIND Archive The Demarco Digital Archive The Alastair MacLennan Archive The Attic Archive 
Kevin Atherton Performing 'In Two Minds' REWIND Archive DJCAD