Silences

Interventions
Disruptions

Exploring the text art archive

Saturday, 12 August, 11am-3pm

Symposium at Bury Art Museum

Invited artists, writers and researchers respond

to the notion of practice based archives and
the collection of text art held within the archive.
Including papers, performances, readings and
informal discussion. A launch event for the 2019
Text Art Festival, and to mark the close of the
RANDOM Archive exhibition.
10.40 Open for registration Caf 13:15 Introduction to the afternoon session
Laura Brady (Manchester School of Art) will be Three practitioners working with text as a means to
asking visitors to contribute to an audio archive of the highlight hidden lives, protest, dissent, social injustice
exhibition. and overlooked histories.

11:00 Introduction Hannah Allan 13:20 Penny Anderson

11:10 Tony Trehy 13:40 Lauren Velvick

The Text Art Archive and launch of the 2019 Text
Festival. 14:00 Jez Dolan

11:30 Philip Davenport 14:20 Panel Q+A
Objects ventriloquising human concern; practice from
Heart Shape Pornography (2004) onwards.
14:40 Rachel Defay-Liautard
12:00 Helmut Lemke Performance tour within Pav Numrique installation -
Performance The Archive of Failure, an interim (meta;dia)logos
outcome of the residency Listen Backwards to
Advance at Bury Museum. 15:00 Drinks reception in caf
Laura Brady will share the audio archive created
12:30 Lisa Wigham during the day.
The Two AM Press Pop-up Library - including pieces Helmut Lemke to offer tours of his residency space at
from working with Book Works studio, collaborative Bury Museum.
multiples from the mid 90s, fanzines and postal art.
16:00 Building closes
12:45 Lunch in the caf
RANDOM Archive (20/05/2017- 12/08/2017)

Curated by Susan Lord and Hannah Elizabeth Allan, the

exhibition features work of national and international Language
Artists which is part of Bury Art Museums unique Text Art
Archive. RANDOM Archive attempts to push boundaries by
questioning how an archive can be viewed, accessed and
explored. This is a unique opportunity for visitors to get up
close in a gallery setting to a collection which is usually kept
in store, the public will be encouraged to interact with it and
explore it afresh.

Working with Dr. Panayiota Vassilopoulou, the Philosopher

in Residence, and artist Rachel Defay-Liautard the exhibition
takes a look at new ways of thinking about what an archive
could be in the future.

RANDOM Archive has been funded by Arts Council England.

Running alongside the exhibition are a series of workshops
and a symposium funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. These
include exploring how to care for community archives, how to
establish a DIY/Feminist archive, and catalogue poetics.
Hannah Elizabeth Allan is an artist and writer based in
North West England, currently working as a lecturer in critical
theory at the Manchester School of Art and as assistant
to a Leverhulme funded International Network exploring
interdisciplinary aesthetics. Practice is inter-disciplinary,
investigations into absent or misrepresented histories a central
concern. Pieces are often connected through a focus on the
archival document, and the distance or dis-location between
the original event and its interpretation. Work exists as an
artefact, the remains of a process describing an absence,
which will often move from live interventions or performance to
documentation as publication.
Penny Anderson is a writer, artist, and researcher, making
text art in Glasgow. Anderson is a published writer of fiction
and also social issues for inter allia The Guardian and The
Pool. Artwork often takes the form of sewn embroidery, either
as traditional style samplers or as labels attached to ready-
mades such as dolls house furniture or mass-produced
domestic crockery. Text is painted onto surfaces such as
sandpaper and tracing paper. Together this is placed into larger
installations, intended to encourage conversations. Much of
this is gleaned from the hypothesis of Speechbubbles. People
say amazing things in public, and unless heard, conserved
and recontextualised, their thoughts, beliefs and memories will
disappear.
Philip Davenport has a longstanding connection with the
Text Festival, since its inception, as poet-in-residence at the
first festival, and a contributor and curator during subsequent
festivals. Davenports poems appear in art galleries, recordings,
posters, publications, performances, streets and
shop windows, inscribed on objects, and in books. His has
exhibited works at The Southbank, The Houses of Parliament,
Whitechapel Gallery, Walker Art Gallery, Henry Moore Institute,
tea houses in China, streets in Paris, Berlin, Bilbao, Reykjavik
and many more. His work often questions social inequality and
emotional dis/engagement. Many of the projects are in the
form of collaboration (as arthur+martha) with marginalised
communities, especially people with dementia and homeless
people. Several of these projects have intertwined with various
Text Festivals.
Rachel Defay-Liautard is a French poet born 1973. Her
work which consists of concrete, vispo, e-poetry/net-art,
installation, street and mail-art, performance and videopoetry
has appeared in the following publications - nokturno,
GAMMM, zswound, InternaPwoWriMo, new post-literate, REM,
coupremine, PE#64, batterie faible (LP), She has performed/
exhibited in the 2014 Bury Text Festival, The Other Room (UK)
as well as, Klebnikov carnaval (Holland), and Overwriting, Le
placard (live + streaming performance, 4ninabis (radio).
Jez Dolan is an artist based in Manchester. His work examines
queer identity and the codification of language, secrecy and
hiddenness. He works with a range of media according to
the needs of each project and his work is research driven,
often utilising archival material in the creation of new work.
He is currently exhibiting in the major show, Coming Out at
The Walker Art Gallery Liverpool, which subsequently tours to
Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery later this year. His work is
also currently exhibited at The Peoples History Museum, The
Britten-Pears Library at Aldeburgh, and The House of Lords.
Helmut Lemke specialises in sound and installation art and
he has developed site-specific concerts, performances and
installations in a whole variety of sites and settings since he
began his work in the 1970s. Lemke works with a variety of
sounds, some ordinary, some unusual and combines them
with other media and art-forms in his exhibitions. Venues that
he has explored and used in his performances include: concert
halls, outdoor markets, galleries, museums, the frozen sea off
Greenland, function rooms of pubs and international festivals.
His latest project examines European sound art practice
through rigorous investigations of past work. This project
unpacks one persons creative practice and collaborations
across Europe. Lemke has moved everything associated with
his art practice throughout his life into the Fusilier Museum,
opposite Bury Art Museum & Sculpture Centre. He will create a
public archive over the course of the project, investigating a 40
year career in sound art as a durational public performance.
Susan Lord is a curator of the Bury Art Museum & Sculpture
Centre. She has worked in the museum and gallery sector in
the UK since 2001, primarily within collections and curation.
Collaborating with artists, universities and other arts
organisations both regionally and
internationally has been a prominent part of her career. Susan
has worked on projects in Finland, Spain, China, USA and
Japan on behalf of Bury Art Museum. This has allowed her
to bring back new ways of working and to establish strong
relationships with international partners.
Tony Trehy is the Director of Bury Art Museum & Sculpture
Centre in Greater Manchester. He is an international art curator,
with a specialism in text art leading to his creation of the
international Text Festival in 2005 the worlds only language
art festival. In 2019 the fifth Text Festival will take place. Since
the 1990s he has also managed and commissioned more than
30 public art works on the Irwell Sculpture Trail - one of the
UKs largest public art schemes. As a poet, hes published in
various international literary journals and has published 4 books
of poetry-texts.
Lauren Velvick is a writer, artist and curator based in the
North of England. She is currently Programme Co-ordinator at
Bluecoat, Liverpool and is a Liverpool Biennial Associate Artist.
As Co-Director of The Exhibition Centre for the Life and Use of
Books Lauren has produced exhibitions, events, performances
and screenings including Butterworth: the Use and Abuse of
Books, WE (Pil & Galia Kollectiv) & Onion Widow performances,
Simon Bookish & Jennet Thomas performances, and in 2015
was featured in Modern History Vol.I, curated by Lynda Morris.
Lauren has recently co-ordinated a six-person residency and
commissioning project based around the work of Christopher
Joseph Holme, an unknown Preston artist whose prolific
oeuvre she is custodian of, and is writer-in-residence for
In Certain Places during their ongoing Expanded City
project. She is a regular contributor to national and local arts
publications including Art Monthly, The Skinny, The Double
Negative and This Is Tomorrow and is a Contributing Editor of
Corridor8.
Lisa Wigham began working under the name The Two a.m.
Press in 1997 when she graduated from a BA in Fine Art at
Kent Institute of Art and Design, Canterbury. This venture was
initiated to make and disseminate artists books and multiples
as conversation starters with democratic intent-
outside traditional gallery spaces. Lisa curated happenings
and exhibitions through collaborations in parks, bookshops,
cinemas, public houses and homes around London until
2007 when she relocated to the north west. Since then her
practice has extended through teaching workshops and public
art commissions; one of which is visible on the windows of
Preston Train Station Waiting Room as flickering gold type
visible from moving trains.
twoampress.com / @Two_am_Press

For documentation of the exhibition and further

information on the archive visit: textartarchive.com

RANDOM Archive exhibition and events made possible

through funding and support from our partners