Winner of first Art in the Archive: Living with Make bursary announced

The Women’s Art Library/Make and Feminist Review are pleased to announce that the first ever Art in the Archive: Living with Make bursary has been awarded to artist Oriana Fox.

The Women’s Art Library (WAL), or Make as it is also known, is based at Goldsmiths, University of London. With the aim of collecting image-rich documentation on the work of female artists, Make is part of Goldsmiths Library’s Special Collections. The bursary of £1000 has been set up in conjunction with Feminist Review, to enable three months of research in the Women’s Art Library starting in January 2009 and culminating in a premiere performance in the East Room of the Tate Modern on 27 June 2009, which will launch the award, followed by publication in the Open Space section of Feminist Review in 2009.

The judging panel of Professor Janis Jefferies, Dr Nirmal Puwar and Professor Helen Carr, all based at Goldsmiths, said: “We are very pleased that Oriana Fox is the first recipient of Art in the Archive: Living with Make. We are confident that Oriana’s proposal will bring an important new audience to engage with WAL’s rich resource for research at Goldsmiths.”

Over the last five years, Oriana’s video and performances have been shown at international festivals and exhibitions from Edinburgh to Brisbane. Works such as Our Bodies, Ourselves (2003), The Embodiment Workout (2005), and Excess Baggage (2007) grapple with mass culture experienced through the ambiguous feelings and sharp humour of a second generation feminist.

Oriana describes her plans for Living with Make: “My research into the Women’s Art Library will lead to the creation of an abbreviated history of women’s performance art. I hope to highlight the legacy of the forerunners of live art as well as to comment on how their work has been reinterpreted, subverted or perhaps even ignored by contemporary women’s performance practice.

“I plan to commission artists, some whose work I will discover in WAL and others who I feel would benefit from forging a connection with it. My role will therefore be researcher, writer, performer and curator in that I plan to literally connect contemporary practitioners with bodies of work which can inform new performance hybrids involving re-enactment and/or appropriation.

“I hope this collaborative approach will echo the intentions and aspirations of the Women’s Art Library’s founders and establish new connections between its contributors.”

For more information visit www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/make

Tags: Dr Nirmal Puwar, Feminist Review, goldsmiths, Living with Make, Make, Oriana Fox, Professor Helen Carr, Professor Janis Jefferies, Womens Art Library

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 at 18:13 and is filed under Art Room . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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