Past Events

Archival Research into Exhibition Making after a PhD

DRN Events – Syma Tariq

  • 1 November 2023
  • 5:00 – 7:30 pm
  • This is an event for DRN members only. 
  • 16 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3JA

Join artist-researcher, writer and radio producer Dr Syma Tariq who will reflect on the opportunities and challenges of working with archives within and beyond a PhD. This event is an opportunity to explore critical methodologies for engaging with archives. It will also provide a space for collective discussion around questions that arise in the process of exhibition making as part of (or after) a PhD.

Syma Tariq holds her PhD from London College of Communication’s research centre CRiSAP. Tariq’s audio work Delay Lines was commissioned for Everything Is Different, Nothing Has Changed, an exhibition of sound art that responds to the Tower Hamlets Local History Archive and Library’s audio holdings, running from 15 August to 23 November 2023.

Tariq’s contribution to the exhibition explores the diverse connections and disruptions between complex political, anti-racist, housing and migration narratives that are still felt today in the borough through archival sounds and contemporary field recordings. Her audio work is accompanied by hanging banners which offer partial and unstable “indexes” referencing the archive’s classification and cataloguing systems.

In this event, Tariq will host a listening session and deliver a talk on her research-led creative process, experience of working with the archive and will discuss the ways in which her PhD informed the project. There will also be an opportunity for DRN members to bring their own projects for collective discussion as well as respond to the themes and problematics raised by Tariq’s work and presentation.

The event will run from 5pm–6.30pm, followed by a welcome drinks reception from 6.30pm–7.30pm.

About the speaker

  • Syma Tariq’s recently completed a PhD at the Centre for Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP), University of the Arts London, focused on aural-archival forms and processes of knowledge production connected to the 1947 Partition of British India. Her wider creative audio research has developed by way of radio, music and artistic projects, including the ongoing seriesA Thousand Channels and live-radio space Café Univers (2017). She has collaborated with several publications, arts organisations and cultural platforms including Colomboscope festival, Sri Lanka; Nottingham Contemporary, UK; Radio Al-Hara, Palestine; Radio Appartement 22, Morocco; SAVVY Contemporary, Germany; and World Records journal, USA.