The Archive and Special Collections Centre’s Her Noise Archive has been made available to search on the Archives and Special Collections online catalogue. Since it was acquired for UAL by CRiSAP in 2010, the Her Noise Archive has become one of the most searched collections held at ASCC. It attracts researchers from a variety of fields including sound art, music, exhibitions studies, curation and feminism/gender studies.
Her Noise was an exhibition that took place at South London Gallery in London in 2005 with additional events spread across other London venues such as Tate Modern and Goethe Institut. The ambition of the project was to investigate music histories in relation to gender and to bring together a wide network of women artists who use sound as a medium. The ‘Archive’ was originally created by Emma Hedditch as an artwork in the exhibition, but the word is also used to refer to the material acquired by the university as a whole, which includes the planning process by the curators Lina Dzuverovic and Anne Hilde Neset, the administration, documentation, press and publicity.
Dzuverovic and Hilde Neset approached many artists for proposals, and their submissions can be accessed in ASCC along with documentation of the chosen works; Christina Kubisch’s Security, Hayley Newman’s MiniFlux, Jutta Koethe’s and Kim Gordon’s Reverse Karaoke and Kaffe Matthews’ Sonic Bed. This diverse collection of works and the large collection of zines and vinyl allow researchers a thorough survey of female sound artists and musicians working between the 1980s and 2000s.
New material can still be added to the Her Noise Archive, which makes it unique among the collections at ASCC. LCC Sound Art tutor Holly Ingleton, author of the archival descriptions, describes what it means for an archive to be “living”: “One of the initial intentions of all involved in the project, was that the archive should always continue to grow and the desire for a ‘living archive’ that is used and added to is an extremely relevant concern. Traditionally, archives have been compiled upon the completion of a project, or the death of an artist. But this project, by, about and for people working at the intersections of sound, art, noise and politics is far from complete, and most defiantly still making a noise.”
The online catalogue can be accessed here:
http://archives.arts.ac.uk/CalmView/TreeBrowse.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&field=RefNo&key=HN
To make a research appointment at the Archives and Special Collections Centre, email archive-enquiries@arts.ac.uk, or telephone 020 7514 9333
Image credit: Georgia Clemson