Radical [vs?] Institution: Revisiting Archives to Form the Future

Image: Bernadette Corporation, Get Rid of Yourself, 2003, digital video, color, 60 minutes.

The current Design Archives project at the Whitechapel Art Gallery Black Eyes & Lemonade: Curating Popular Art will be discussed at an ICA seminar on 5 June. Asking if the relationship between radical collectives and institutional structures in the arts is paradoxical, the event looks at how, through the use of archive materials, institutions have habitually probed or re-staged radical pasts to construct present institutional identities.

Guest speakers, including Curatorial Director, Catherine Moriarty, will each consider exhibitions from the last 50 years that have been considered radical, yet have had an intrinsic relationship to established galleries and institutions. Anne Massey, art historian and co-curator of the current ICA Reading Room archival exhibition will be discussing Parallel of Art and Life (ICA, 1953), and Janna Graham, Education Projects Curator at Serpentine Gallery and curator of the Edgware Road Project and Skills Exchange will discuss Art for Whom? (Serpentine Gallery, 1978).