Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of South Wales (joint submission with Cardiff Metropolitan University and University of Wales Trinity Saint David)
“Hidden Country: Photographs of the Free Wales Army 1966-68"
Curated exhibition drawn from the Mass Observation Archive and National Library of Wales
Research Context
Roberts’ curatorial work has focused on and around archives and collections; spaces and practices that help to define the values of photographs. Moving the photograph between the realms of the archive and the collection, to the gallery and the book, has resulted in cross-cultural reflections that resist a static value. At its core is dissatisfaction with restricted ideas of photography and a desire to push at the boundaries through exhibition to unpack photography’s multiplicity.
The work developed from collaboration with artist Tim Brennan, whose "English Anxieties" (2009) investigated the archives of the social research group Mass Observation, making connections between shifts in social realism and the rise of modernism in Britain and anxieties that emerged around espionage.
Research Imperatives
Roberts’ curatorial strategy for “Hidden Country“ expanded on the ways Brennan had ‘mined’ the archive and linked this back to methods of data gathering and archival practice.
“Hidden Country”, was developed and curated by Roberts to respond to elements in the previous exhibition around the theme of ‘surveillance’, the state and ‘English Anxieties’. The photographs, used in the Crown prosecution of the Free Wales Army (FWA), drew on police surveillance and samizdat propaganda by the FWA.
Project methods
Roberts’ research sought to convey something of the mutability and cultural richness of the photograph and the contexts of its making. The specifics of visual display become an arena for transformation of the objects of display that also suggests an ‘alchemy’ to the act of curating; a cultural practice that plays an integral part in the mediation process as well as a way of speaking about a subject.
The work led directly to the Exhibition "Mass Observation: This is Your Photo”, Photographers’ Gallery, London (2013)
Dissemination
Roberts, R., Biswell, A., & Davidson, P. (2009) “English Anxieties – Tim Brennan”. Ffotogallery, Cardiff
