‘Archiving Place & Time: Contemporary Art Practice in Northern Ireland’

Design of the catalogue for the 'Archiving Place & Time: Contemporary Art Practice in Northern Ireland' exhibition. The engagement of visual culture and art practice in Northern Ireland with the socio-political and economic development of a post-conflict society is at the forefront of the concerns of this exhibition and publication. This includes engagements with history, memory and archival material, in addition to issues around urban regeneration in a post-industrial city or the reconstruction of post-conflict identity.The title Archiving Space and Time is also significant in this context. It implies a response to the changing definitions of space and questions of the inevitability of history raised by the Agreement. Over ten years on, there is a need to register, to record the investigations impelling artists working in this changed situation. Yet an archive is never a static body of knowledge, a repository of the past – it has another life as a resource for the future, as an active agent in the processes it seeks to record. This timeframe has been deliberately selected as one that marks the most significant period of political change in Northern Ireland in recent years. However these recognitions only emerge over a period of time. The curators of this exhibition believe that this is now a moment at which an assessment is not only possible but necessary.This catalogue, ‘Archiving Place & Time: Contemporary Art Practice in Northern Ireland since the Belfast Agreement’, has been published as part of an exhibition of the same name. The exhibition and catalogue were commissioned by the Millennium Court Arts Centre, Manchester Metropolitan University and Wolverhampton Art Gallery and presented in November – December 2009 (Manchester), April – May 2010 (Craigavon) and June – December 2010 (Wolverhampton). The initial showing of the exhibition at Manchester Metropolitan University in November 2009 was accompanied by a symposium in conjunction with the British Association of Irish Studies.