Unplugged/Replugged

Section 1: Performed with 35mm transparency slides, no projector

In 2018 I donated over four hundred photographic slides to the Pitt Rivers Museum. They document my art interventions in museums between 1986 and 2003, the point at which I started using digital equipment. These projects began in the Pitt Rivers and were shaped by both the physical and intellectual challenges of placing contemporary artworks within this collection. As momentum gathered I moved the idea to other museums, eventually diversifying my approach to heritage sites and various fieldwork locations. In 2024, the art historian Irene Quarantini began researching the slides. For her they were historical documents. For me the donation was still a working instrument. Thus the content of this ‘unplugged’ section is prompted by our archival conversations and I hope to demonstrate the material force of what could be known, and what remained unknowable, about the slides once they were relocated to the store room of a museum.

Section 2: Performed with digital projections and a Kodak Carousel projector

Each step in the interventionist journey I described to Irene had involved a slide talk. I engaged with host museums and recruited new arts collaborators using a carousel projector full of slides. My method was the same mode of presentation developed by ‘visiting artists’ in art schools. As a student, these impromptu sessions, often unfolding non-chronologically, radicalised my engagement with the world-building potential of ‘art’. Consequently, the ‘replugged’ section of my presentation will employ analogue and digital projectors to explore different mechanisations of not-knowing and knowing as it effects both speaker and audience. As each 35mm slide falls through shadow into illumination, each intervention in my archive is animated by alternative narratives and questions of linearity. As momentum gathers, viewing my unfolding pursuit of multiple interventions is an opportunity to discuss the purposeful unpredictability that has been such a feature of interventionism and expanded field thinking in contemporary art practice.

Pitt Rivers Museum Research Seminar in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology, Michaelmas Term 2026

Fridays, 12pm-1.30pm (Weeks 1-8)

In person at the Pitt Rivers Museum Lecture Theatre (entry via Robinson Close) except for Week 5, which will be online only.

Convened by Professor Elizabeth Hallam and Dr Charlotte Linton.