Photography and Archive

PHOTOGRAPHY AND ARCHIVE:  Stuart Whipps and Photo Colour Services return to Johannesburg

On Friday, 2 October 2015, at 11:00, UK artist Stuart Whipps will be in conversation with a group of WiSER fellows, researchers, academics, and Johannesburg-based artists and curators. The conversation emerges out of Whipps’ ongoing research into defunct photo-lab, Photo Colour Services (PCS), which until 1996 was based on the 9th floor of the Old Arcade in Johannesburg’s central business district. The decline of Photo Colour Services traces the disinvestment in the inner city of Johannesburg in the 1990s, but also pre-empts the decline of analogue photographic technology and its associated infrastructures. In 2007 Whipps undertook a three month residency at the Bag Factory and whilst exploring the empty buildings of inner-city Johannesburg, encountered the remains of Photo Colour Services. Whipps rescued material from the building-developers, who were intending to destroy all contents of the building. Some of the material was included on an exhibition earlier this year at Ithuba Gallery, entitled Lab: An Exhibition in Three Parts. Whipps is in Johannesburg undertaking research and a series of workshops concerned with local archives, and will be realising a project at Ithuba Gallery drawing on the PCS material.

You are warmly invited to attend and to participate in the discussion.

Date: Friday 2 October 2015  

Time: 11:00-12:30

Venue: WiSER (Wits Institute for Social & Economic Research), University of Witwatersrand, 6th Floor, Richard Ward Building, East Campus

Stuart Whipps - Brief Bio

Stuart Whipps (b.1979) works predominantly with photography and video alongside reconfigured existing or remade materials. In taking an artefact or historic position as the starting point for his work, the artist questions the role of documentation in constructing a shared understanding of cultural values and contexts. Recent works have utilised found negatives from redundant photographic labs, the online archive of Margaret Thatcher’s speeches, interviews and statements, an online archive of vintage ‘adult publications’, microfilm collections, and the photographic collection of the British Motor Heritage Museum amongst other diverse sources.

Selected solo exhibitions include: Invites, Zabladowicz Collection, London 2014; Birth Springs, Death Falls, Flat Time House, London, 2013; Tick, Tack, Tick, Tack, Tick, David Dale Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland; Why Contribute to The Spread of Ugliness? Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 2011; New Wooabbeleri, Focal Point Gallery, Southend-On-Sea, 2010. Selected group exhibitions include: British Art Show 8, UK, 2015 – 2017; Reference Works: Guangzhou, Guanghzhou, China, 2014; Relatively Absolute, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire, 2013; Community Without Propinquity, MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, 2011; East International, Norwich, 2009.

In 2005 Whipps won the Observer Hodge Photography Prize. In 2009 he was the joint recipient of the East International prize.