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The Audioguide as an Art Commission

We are very happy to announce the HSFA’s collaboration with artists Linda O Keeffe and Louise K Wilson.

This project has been made possible through the Imperial War Museum’s Second World War and Holocaust Partnership Program. Linda and Louise will be developing a set of audio guides for the Holocaust Exhibition and Learning Centre over the next few months, as we begin to explore approaches based around the idea of artistic responses to Holocaust collections and narratives. In the beginning of January they started their research on site, exploring some objects in our archive, with the help of Hari, our archivist.

Louise K Wilson: ‘Looking for traces: last week I started research towards an audio commission at the Holocaust Exhibition and Learning Centre in Huddersfield (together with artist Linda O Keeffe).’ 10.01.2022

Together, Linda and Louise have begun following the traces of history in our archive, reflecting on what is present in our collection, but also what is absent: memories of sound, lost evidence, and impalpable stories of making new lives in England’s North. Initial conversations also revolved about what it means to be working with Holocaust history and our Digital Intern Paula provided some context to the organisation’s history.

Here are some of Linda’s initial reflections:
‘Looking at the importance and evolution of words and language. Reading Why: Explaining the Holocaust by Peter Hayes, to get to grips with the emergence of the word antisemitic, its evolution and use. This is for my commission at the Holocaust Exhibition & Learning Centre in Huddersfield. There’s a lot to take in and reflect on. The next three months are going to be an interesting and difficult journey but still very excited to be making this work.

display case from exhibition, showing a shoe brush and photograph of Eugene Black
Image taken from https://lindaokeeffe.com/blog/

Keep an eye out on our blog in the upcoming months – we will be sharing updates on Linda and Louise’s research, first outputs and events.  Any donation to support the project will be gratefully received.

Louise K Wilson is a visual artist who makes installations, live works, sound works and single channel videos. Processes of research are central to her practice and she frequently involves the participation of individuals from archives, museums and the scientific community in the making of work. Her research uses sound to ask philosophical and material questions about both histories and the spatio-temporal physicality of certain sites and our perceptions of them.

Louise has exhibited widely in North America and Europe. Recent exhibitions include Submerged: Silent Service (Ohrenoch, Berlin, 2015); Duet for One:Intangible Culture (Ohrenhoch, Berlin, 2014); Dukes Wood, Nottingham (2013); Topophobia (Danielle Arnaud Gallery, London; Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool and Spacex Gallery, Exeter, 2012). Recent publications include a book chapters for ’In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker: Affect, Materiality and Meaning Making’ (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017).

She is a lecturer in Art and Design at the University of Leeds and attained her Doctorate from the University of Derby. She lives in West Yorkshire.

http://lkwilson.org

https://land2.leeds.ac.uk/people/wilson/

Dr Linda O Keeffe is an arts practitioner and theorist of sound. She has exhibited internationally with commissions for the UK city of Culture festival in Derry 2013, a solo show at the Leitrim Sculpture Centre in 2014 Spaces of Sound Radio Spaces, a commission for Irish Biennale in 2016, and a touring exhibition of international female sound artists, Sounds Like Her, with her piece Hybrid Soundscapes I-IV, which toured from 2017 – 2020. She has created sound designs for dance and theatre, most recently for the Horsefall Production Hidden, which was shortlisted for the Northern Soul Theatre Awards. In 2021, she was awarded funding from Creative Scotland with her arts collective Non-Random to explore a sci art collaborative research project titled Evolving Ourselves with unnatural Selection, https://evolvingourselves.non-random.co.uk/. The purpose of this Sci-Art R&D project is to make tangible with visible/audible outputs, the ethical implications of emerging technologies in the biological sciences, in particular the field of CRISPR gene editing technology.

She has researched and written extensively about sound and the social, sound and ecology, and sensory perception and the arts. See a list of full texts here:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Linda-O-Keeffe/research.
www.lindaokeeffe.com 

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