Active Archive - Slow Institution: The Long Goodbye

Active Archive – Slow Institution is an extensive research initiative that delves into Project Arts Centre’s rich 50+ year history, and looks at the imagined futures and proposals for transformation contained within its archives. Over a three-month process, the gallery was used as a workspace where documents contained within the public record as well as privately collected materials were studied and shared. From this emerged the many entangled histories of one of the very first arts centres to be established in Ireland.

The project is organised into three chapters. This first chapter, “The Long Goodbye,” contains new commissions by artists who revisit documentation from their own archives. Included are film and video material of the former Project Arts Centre building at East Essex Street by Brian Hand, and field recordings made in Dublin by Fergus Kelly. Miriam O’Connor has photographed the former addresses where Project Arts Centre operated before moving to East Essex Street and the sites where programming continued while the current building was being constructed. Special display structures have been designed and built by Tanad Williams. Material will be added and updated throughout the run. 

“The Long Goodbye” focuses on the late 1990s as the decade that marked the turning point in Project’s operational model, and the culmination of more than ten years of negotiations to provide Project Arts Centre with its current building. Significant events during that period include: Demolishing Project – 39 East Essex Street is Closed, a two-week festival-like farewell to Project’s old building (February 3-14, 1998), orchestrated by the late Maurice O’Connell, then artist in residence; the visual arts programme that continued with the Off Site projects at various city locations and the theatre and live art programme which took place at project@the mint, both of which continued until late 1999, in the final stages of construction of Project Arts Centre’s new building.

Specially for “The Long Goodbye,” curator of the Off Site visual arts programme 1998-1999 Valerie Connor has selected and prepared photographs that she took during research and production visits for the 10 projects that comprised that programme. She will present these works for the first time, alongside new writing about this experiment that was at the heart of the visual arts programming while Project Arts Centre was between buildings.The timeline includes selections from the thematic archival researches of Dorothy Hunter and Hannah Tiernan.

Interrogating documents and archival artefacts from the perspective of pressing contemporary issues enables us to re-evaluate the status of exhibitions and the role of public institutions in the changing conditions of artistic labour and production. This is the first chapter in a longer conversation in which we critically reflect on: the development of Temple Bar; gender and class representation; the history of Irish feminism; and LGBTQ rights. We invite everyone, groups and individuals, to read and examine our archive materials together.

Initiator and curator of the Active Archive – Slow Institution project: Lívia Páldi

The exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Maurice O’Connell (1966-2018).

Project Arts Centre is generously supported by the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon and Dublin City Council.

Tanad Williams was supported by Bracken Foam.