Year: 2017
Exhibition type: Group Exhibition
Venue:IMMA, Dublin, Ireland
Description of the exhibition:
ROSC: Fiction of the Contemporary is a publication and performance by year one MA in Art and Research Collaboration researchers (ARC in IADT) in response to the ROSC archives.The performance will include readings and interpretations of archival texts.
1. Rosc: Fiction of the Contemporary (publication)
Rosc;Fiction of the Contemporary is a publication by year one MA in Art and Research Collaboration (ARC in IADT) researchers in response to the material relating to Rosc in the National Irish Visual Arts Library (NIVAL). The publication was unveiled in the Irish Museum of Modern Art on March 23 2017 as part of the seminar ‘Exhibition Histories’
2. Rosc: Fiction of the Contemporary (performance)
Rosc: Fiction of the Contemporary is an archive of the planning and research process for a never-realised 1992 edition of Rosc. The archival files show the efforts of three committee members to mount a retrospective Rosc exhibition, that would select the best and most prestigious works in the preceding six Roscs. The contents include: letters, in-office memorandums, budgets, press releases, speeches, lists of works, and catalogues. These assembled documents oscillate between three points: art’s relationship with temporality, the discourse surrounding failure and the appearance of contemporary art through its negation. Collected, these documents question whether the archive can have an individuality that an exhibition cannot. This postulation is inspired by Foucault when he wrote:
The examination leaves behind it a whole meticulous archive constituted in terms of bodies and days. The examination that places individuals in a field of surveillance also situates them in a network of writing; it engages them in a whole mass of documents that capture and fix them. The procedures of examination were accompanied at the same time by a system of intense registration and of documentary accumulation.
The Rosc 92 committee’s search for the Contemporary, and their inevitable failure to capture it, contribute to the archive’s importance. This “fidelity to failure” is absent from their discourse surrounding the contemporary. The project ultimately was cancelled while still in the planning process, due to internal disagreements and a shifting external landscape. The archive speaks to the researcher’s often conflicting concerns surrounding methodologies of research and wider trends in contemporary art. The archive was found and restored by MA in Art and Research Collaboration researchers, in cooperation with the National Irish Visual Arts Library.
ARC One 2016/17 are:
Sophie Behal
Petra Bernsson
Isadora Epstein
Yvanna Greene
Jung-A Han
Yvonne Higgins
Maeve Lynch
Eoghan McIntyre
Rosie O’Reilly
Sarah O’Toole
Julia Ptak
Benjamin Stafford