Altered Yesterdays: An afternoon of talks about archives

About

Altered Yesterdays (in association with Flatpack Festival)
To complement Grand Union’s current Mat Jenner exhibition, this series of talks and discussions explores archival projects from photography and film to music and sound art.

14:00: The Photography of Janet Mendelsohn
In the process of researching Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies last year, Kieran Connell (Queens University, Belfast) discovered a large collection of Birmingham photographs taken by CCCS student Janet Mendelsohn in the late 60s, principally around Balsall Heath and Highgate. Kieran will show a selection of these amazing images, and talk about a new AHRC project that will culminate in an exhibition at Ikon Gallery in 2016.

14:45: Mat Jenner
Mat Jenner will talk about his exhibition Dreams Time Free, currently showing at Grand Union. The exhibition includes Foam, a mass collection of one- off 12” dub plate records by 115 contemporary artists, which visitors are invited to listen to in the gallery. Mat will discuss some of the ideas behind this archive and how it links with other works in the show.

15:30: Richard Dawson: The Glass Trunk
Rejecting the folk label in favour of ‘ritual community music’, Richard Dawson’s songwriting forges personal memory, mythology and other people’s stories into exhilarating new shapes. Album-before-last ‘The Glass Trunk’ was written after a period immersed in the Tyne and Wear archives, and before his performance tonight Richard will be talking about how the past finds its way into his songs.

16:30: A New Lease of Life
Digital technology is bringing to light a wealth of films that were previously hidden away, and offering new ways to share them with people. At the same time, it’s posing difficult questions around fidelity of restoration and sustainability of data. Representatives from some of Europe’s most significant film collections will join us to talk about this brave new world and describe some of the ways in which archives are becoming more accessible.