In Response: Dialogues with RealTime was an exhibition marking the closure of RealTime art magazine and the launch of its archive. RealTime was Australia’s critical guide to national and international contemporary arts 1994-2018 and has played a crucial role in documenting and providing critical commentary on work in dance, performance, sound, music, film, digital media and visual art that carved out new terrain in those fields. Academics at UNSW have been working with the editors of RealTime Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter, UNSW Library and the National Library of Australia since 2017 to secure the RealTime archive in both its physical and digital form. The collaboration between UNSW and RealTime is celebrated through this exhibition that contributes to innovations at the interface between performance, the archive and the gallery.
The exhibition featured the oeuvres of Martin del Amo, Branch Nebula (Lee Wilson and Mirabelle Wouters) and Vicki Van Hout, Sydney-based artists working across performance, choreography, site-specific work, video art, visual arts and writing. Coverage of the artists’ work in RealTime was presented in the exhibition space through printed and spoken word alongside artefacts from relevant performances, documentation (photographic and audiovisual), and related texts (programs, other media coverage). Throughout the life of the exhibition there were three public presentations, one each month, where the artists guided visitors through their gallery room and provide insights into their practice and their relationship with the critical commentary surrounding their work. The exhibition closed with the launch of the RealTime archive and a brief recount of the three presentations.
This Online Exhibition presents documentation from the exhibition held at UNSW Library from 25 February to 25 April 2019.
– Erin Brannigan, Co-Curator
LAUNCH OF THE REALTIME ARCHIVE
The exhibition concluded with the official launch of the RealTime Archive. The event featured excerpts of the lecture-performances delivered by the artists over the course of the exhibition, a dialogue by RealTime’s Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter, and speeches by Martin Borchert, Tony MacGregor, Jeremy Smith and Professor Sarah Miller AM.
A transcript of the speeches is available on the RealTime website.
Audio-visual collection
This exhibition is accompanied by a Digital Collection which showcases documentation of past performances by the artists featured in the exhibition, and includes interviews that provide background and context for their work and its critical reception in RealTime and elsewhere. The full audio-visual collection is available on UNSW Library Digital Collections.
The RealTime Archive
In Response: Dialogues with RealTime marked the launch of the RealTime Archive – an online collection of digitised print editions of RealTime hosted in TROVE.
COVERAGE OF THE EXHIBITION IN REALTIME
Throughout the exhibition and public lecture-performances, Keith Gallasch and Virginia Baxter provided editorial coverage on the RealTime website:
Martin del Amo: In Response… – 15 April 2019
In Response… Artists in Action – 15 April 2019
In Response: Dialogues with RealTime, the exhibition – 16 April 2019
Archive alive: launching RealTime on TROVE – 17 July 2019
catalogue
UNSW Library published a catalogue alongside the exhibition with contributions written by Erin Brannigan, Keith Gallasch & Virginia Baxter, John Baylis, Lizzie Thomson and Amanda Card.
Installation View
In Response: Dialogues with RealTime is presented as part of UNSW Library’s Exhibitions Program. The exhibition is co-curated by Dr. Erin Brannigan (Senior Lecturer SAM) and the artists in consultation with Jackson Mann, (Curator, Special Collections and Exhibitions, UNSW Library), RealTime founders and editors, Virginia Baxter and Keith Gallasch, and fellow RealTime Guardians, Dr. Caroline Wake and Gail Priest. The curators thank the RealTime team for their practical support of the project.
The RealTime Archive is a collaboration between Open City Inc., National Library of Australia, the School of the Arts and Media, UNSW and UNSW Library.
The artists involved took part in pilot archival projects at Critical Path, Australia’s centre for choreographic research and dance development, as part of Dancing Sydney: Mapping Movements: Performing Histories. This research project is lead by Dr. Erin Brannigan, Dr. Amanda Card (University of Sydney) and Dr. Julie-Anne Long (Macquarie University) and is supported by Critical Path and the NSW State Library.
Open City, the publisher of RealTime, has been supported by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding body, and by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy (VACS), an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments.
CO-CURATOR: Erin Brannigan was the founding Director of ReelDance (1999-2008), a dance screen festival and organization that presented programs at the Sydney Opera House, ACMI, Arts House, Carriageworks, Powerhouse Brisbane, PICA Perth. She has curated dance screen programs and exhibitions for dance screen festivals in Italy, Argentina, Monaco, Israel, Brazil, New Zealand, UK, Spain and Indonesia, 2000-2007, as well as Sydney Festival 2008 and Melbourne International Arts Festival 2003. She programmed and commissioned work for a series of installation exhibitions including the first visual arts exhibition at Carriageworks, Choreographics (2007) featuring the work of Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker, Thierry de Mey and Simon Ellis/David Corbet. She presented Gesture :: Performance | Film | Dance on the public screens and performance venues of UNSW in 2010, and lead Choreography and the Gallery: A One-Day Salon (Biennale of Sydney 2016, Art Gallery of NSW and UNSW). One of her earliest curatorial projects was Scrapbook ‘Live’: As Remembered by the Artist, Performance Space, September 2001, co-curated with artists Julie-Anne Long and Matthew Bergan. Erin has written on dance for RealTime since 1997 and is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at UNSW. Erin’s curatorial work is documented at: http://cargocollective.com/erinbrannigan
All artworks © the artist. Online exhibition, photos and videos © The University of New South Wales.
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the copyright holder, unless the use falls within an exception of the Copyright Act (such as research or study).
