Creativity, Art and Archaeology

Presentation co-delivered with Martin Westwood at the Valand Academy of Fine Arts, Gothenburg, Sweden as part of a public seminar with Tim Ingold, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen.

This presentation was given as part of an EU-funded NEARCH fellowship awarded by the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, which runs from January 2015 - September 2017. The project involves collaboration with archaeologists; aiming to examine their working methodologies and to develop work which responds to the synthesising of cultural heritage through technological means.

The three partner institutions are: the Archaeological Unit of Saint-Denis (UASD); the Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) and the Archaeology Department of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Press Release:

We welcome you to a seminar with Tim Ingold and artists Joey Bryniarska and Martin Westwood on Creativity, Art and Archaelogy within the framework of the EU-project NEARCH (New Scenarios for a Community-involved Archaeology) of which Gothenburg University is a partner and to which Jason E. Bowman, Programme Leader of the MFA: Fine Art is affiliated as a researcher, together with Dr. Anita Synnestvedt, Lecturer of Archeology at Gothenburg University.

Joey Bryniarska and Martin Westwood are two London-based visual artists whose independent practices have formed around shared themes of mediation, technology and their temporal relationships. Their chosen mediums range widely; from darkroom photography, text-work and video, to large-scale ceramics and sculpture. Bryniarska and Westwood’s collaborative research stems from a mutual fascination in the properties of historical value; how cultural or historical artefacts are extracted, mediated and administrated, either as raw material or as a virtual construction of heritage. Conceptions of technology and time are considered alongside notions of reuse and the ruin. Their current concerns with heritage divide its contents into three sites, situations or economies; the geographic site, the technological site and the regulatory site. This scheme aims to understand a network of relations and processes in which archaeology exists – in order to consider the alignment of technology and its rhetoric, understanding how archaeology produces objects and considering the insight this has for artistic practice. Bryniarska and Westwood were selected for the NEARCH artist in residence project and they have Gamlestaden and its archeological excavations as a case study.