Melbourne Conversations: addendum (archiving the ephemeral)

Featuring:

Leisa Shelton – Performance Artist and Curator

Leisa is the 2019, Artist in Residence with the Abbotsford Convent Melbourne, a two-year partnership housing and presenting her current project ‘Addendum: Archiving the Ephemeral’, for which she will collate, publicly display and then over time burn her full performance archive in a series of hosted public events and cultural conversations across 2019. The documents will be transformed into an archive of ash, with the exhibited installation of ash as the centrepiece for a major exhibition in 2020, alongside a series of other Australian artists responding to the notion of ephemeral archives.

Hannah Bertram – Artist

Hannah’s artistic research investigates the ambiguity of permanence and impermanence using the medium of dust. This is achieved by: considering the relationship between ephemeral art and documentation, identifying the material and poetic possibilities of dust in relation to time, and through the melancholy experience of preservation and loss in the artworks. Her PhD thesis articulates the concept of ‘enduring temporality’, addressing questions about what we seek to preserve compared to what we identify as worthless, and the paradox of experiencing life as perpetual while knowing we will return to dust.

Jo Ritale – Director, Collections at the State Library Victoria

Jo has worked in public, university and state libraries for almost 20 years and for the last 10 years has managed the development of heritage collections and delivery of services from these collections, including policies for managing Indigenous collection material. In 2009 Jo moved to Melbourne to take up the role of Collection Services Manager at the State Library Victoria which included management of the Australian manuscripts, rare printed, pictures, art and Australian history and literature collections. Her current portfolio includes the development of the collection, acquisition and cataloguing, preservation and conservation and digitisation.

This event is part of a broader program of events led by local artist Leisa Shelton in which she will be burning the archive of her work. Find out more.