INCCA hosted its first Student and Early Career Research Café on the 14th of March 2024, focusing on the documentation, installation, and collection care of mixed-media artworks.
The first 4 presentations centred around time-based media case studies. Willa Ratz spoke first about Lobe of the Lung by Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist, a multi-channel, immersive video and audio display at Tate, where the artist continually adapted and changed the work for the site. This was followed by Vittoria Gelati (vittoria.gelati@duesseldorf.de, vittoria.gelati@gmail.com) who discussed the difficulty in condition-checking the 3-Channel installation Fish Flies on Sky (1985/1995) by Nam June Paik at the Restauration Center of Düsseldorf which had been stored with equipment that didn’t ‘belong’ to it after a fire in 1993. This linked to Daniella Briceño Villamil and Brian Dunbar's insights on wiring diagrams for documenting time-based media works at MoMA, as well as Anna Mladentseva’s (anna.mladentseva.18@ucl.ac.uk) collaborative PhD project with the Victoria & Albert Museum to investigate how to maintain the infrastructures surrounding software-based art and design, given that the resources required for their conservation are often external to museums.
Loreal Vos veered away from time-based media but continued with the theme by discussing the collection management and preventative conservation strategy for the artists' book collection at the Jack Ginsberg Centre in South Africa. She highlighted the difficulty of dealing with mixed artworks as there is no single, standard method for doing so, touching on some of the fundamental concerns conservators face in the world of contemporary conservation.
Questions following the presentations allowed speakers to discuss their personal challenges with the 56 participants, including how to document complex decision-making and how important sharing case studies like this are for preserving the artworks and aiding their future installation.
Find the speakers' bio here.
Photo: Screenshot of INCCA Café: Student & Early Career Research.