South London Gallery - Researcher in Residence.

The SLG is seeking an engaging and energetic Researcher-in-Residence to work closely with the Art Assassins, the SLG’s youth forum, to explore, unpick and make accessible the archive of materials collected by government anthropologist Northcote W Thomas in Nigeria and Sierra Leone from 1909–1915.

Taking the lead from the Art Assassins, you will explore the relevance of this incredible archive for young people today and help them produce work in response to the material for an exhibition in the SLG’s Fire Station annexe. Working with a number of different artists and SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), this role will bridge the gap between complex ideas and academic information and a group of young people who are keen to interrogate their own histories.

As well as working alongside the Art Assassins, the Researcher-in-Residence produces a written paper. This will form the basis of an accessible resource exploring the archive and its significance for the Art Assassins, as well as for the SLG’s audiences and the wider community.

The Researcher-in-Residence will be an experienced and critical researcher with a specialist interest in colonial era archives, diasporic experience and the decolonisation of education and history. At the core of this position is a desire to engage a non-academic public with research methodologies and critical thinking.

We are particularly interested in applicants from low-income backgrounds and those from black and ethnic minority communities, who are under-represented in museums and galleries.

The Researcher-in-Residence is supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

This is a freelance role, the deadline is 19th of August and further details can be found on the SLG website.

Call for papers: Symposium – Curating the Global Film Archive

Venue: Moving Image Archive, Kelvin Hall, Glasgow

Date: 28 October 2017

In 2017 Africa in Motion Film Festival collaborates with the Universities of Glasgow and Stirling on a year-long AHRC-funded project entitled Africa’s Lost Classics. This project aims to bring to UK screens some of the greatest African film classics, works that have been neglected or forgotten. Through this project, contact with archivists around the world have led to discoveries of films that were deemed lost, and collaborations with restorers have brought old and decaying film reels back to life. As such, we became newly aware that curators can re(dis)cover old films and transform films’ material deterioration into the cinematic experience the film was made for. By organising, as part of this project, a one-day symposium on curating the global archive, we aim to place African cinema at the centre of the global film archive, while providing a context of worldwide archival curation and research. During the Africa in Motion annual film festival and Black History Month in the UK in October 2017, we are also curating a large exhibition entitled African Film: Looking Back Through the Lens at Kelvin Hall in Glasgow. Curated in conjunction with the Africa in Motion film festival and the symposium, this exhibition is motivated by the desire to revive lost histories, spaces and times, and it includes 15 key classic films accompanied by posters, contextual information and film clips. We invite scholars to submit abstracts on topics related to practical and theoretical uses of worldwide film archives, and the relationship between archives and curation. We are interested in the archives of the world: from the Balkans to the Far East, Beirut to Seattle, Cape to Cairo. Without wanting to limit the scope of the symposium or proposed papers, some of the central questions we wish to explore are:

• What is the role of the curator in bringing the archive to life?
• How do archives and film festivals perform as sites of memory and commemoration?
• Can festivals act as archives?
• How do we best access archives if the materiality of film is under threat?
• What has the digital revolution contributed to the preservation of cinema?
• What is the role of the archivist in curating retrospectives?
• How do history and the present enact the discourse between contemporary films and archival footage?
• How do films, archives and the cinema as a public space interact with the present and the future, and what is the archive’s role in preservation and access?

Please send 250-word abstracts and 100-word biographies (including relevant publications) to the conference organisers Dr. Lizelle Bisschoff at and Dr. Stefanie Van de Peer by 31 August 2017. Delegates will be notified of their acceptance by 15 September. We regret we have no funding available for travel or accommodation but delegates will have the opportunity to attend film screenings of restored African Classics at the Africa in Motion film festival (27/10 – 5/11) in Glasgow and/or Edinburgh, and visit the accompanying exhibition.

About the venue:

The Moving Image Archive is Scotland's national collection of moving image located at Kelvin Hall in Glasgow. More than 2,000 digitised films are online in the Moving Image Archive catalogue, and a further archive of over 60,000 films about Scotland is being preserved at Kelvin Hall. These archives are accessible by booking an appointment with the manager of the Archive, please see online for more details.

Digitising the Museum Ethnographers Group Archive

Over the past six months ACE SSN funding has enabled MEG to undertake a major scanning initiative on its archive, and I feel very fortunate to have been the person engaging with the historic and personal documents held within this resource. The archive was transferred from Liverpool Museum to Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery by Adam Jaffer and Jen Walklate earlier in 2015 and consists of ten boxes. I was tasked with scanning as much of the archive as possible over an allotted 100 hours. Over this time, I have been able to work through approximately 60% of the correspondence and documents contained within the archive, creating over 1,000 PDFs that span the almost 40 years of MEGs existence, from its founding documents to more recent additions. It soon became clear that I would not be able to scan everything, so I have focused on digitizing the older material, predominantly from the 1980s. The support of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery has been key to this work as they provided desk space off their main archive room to install the scanner, and set up a laptop.  Curator Adam Jaffer has also negotiated for the loan of an empty filing cabinet for MEG to use, and in 2016 the MEG committee will decide on how to improve the current physical sorting by transferring some of the box contents to this cabinet.

The archive contains evidence of the personal and business side of running MEG, and bears witness to the commitment of its members to ensure the group provides support for those working with and interested in anthropology and ethnography collections. It provides examples of the kind of issues faced working with collections, from repatriation requests to necessary specialist advice, highlighting the important role of the group within wider academic and museum circles within the sector, and the important connections MEG has made and the opportunities it has responded to.

The MEG committee is now debating how to improve the archive and would love there to be more photographs. Of the handful currently included several relate to the celebration of MEG’s 21^st birthday in Manchester. See the photograph of the cake here (which sets the bar high for the 40^th birthday cake in Manchester in 2016). If you are a MEG member, past or current, please do have a look in your work or personal photograph collections to see if any survive of MEG events or meetings. The current Chair of MEG, Antonia Lovelace, would love to hear from you. There are also only a few conference packs and contemporary brochures for museums that meetings took place at, and if you have been a lifelong member and have any of these old brochures these would also give context and colour to the typescripts of the meetings. MEG has agreed to support Claire Wintle at Brighton University, in her research project on ‘World Cultures Collections, UK Museums and Changing Britain, 1945-1980’. A bid has gone in to AHRC and the project is due to begin in October 2016. It will involve a close look at the MEG archive as well as interviews with key MEG member’s active in that period. Watch this space for news!

More details on the MEG archive and its development will be presented at the Manchester conference and AGM, on 18-19 April 2016. Below is an example of a piece from the archive from 1974-5.

By Olivia Maguire