| Description | 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 includes the planning process of the exhibition by the main curators Lina Dzuverovic and Anne Hilde Neset . This includes the researching of artists, reflected in the diverse collection of works by those who both approached and who were approached by the curators to submit portfolios and proposals. The Administration of the exhibition is documented via the various funding applications that were researched and submitted, those that were successful and those that were unsuccessful. There is extensive funding documentation, including detailed developments of budgets, artist contracts and applications.
The archive includes documentation, press and publicity from the culmination of the Her Noise exhibition at the South London Gallery in November 2005. The five main installations are documented here and consist of Emma Hedditch's Archive, Christina Kubisch's Security, Hayley Newman's MiniFlux, Jutta Koethe's and Kim Gordon's Reverse Karaoke and Kaffe Matthews' Sonic Bed. |
| Individual or organisational biography | The Her Noise Archive, occupies a space in time where polyphonic conversations travel, in which many different voices can be traced and heard. The project, as a process over five years in the making, may be perceived as a working through of passionately felt concerns toward gender imbalances in sound and music experienced by the project curators and all those who became involved in the project. It offers itself as an example of an extremely successful collaboration, one in which determination and perseverance were paramount. The strength of these attributes perhaps begins to register in significance when one discovers that over sixty four separate galleries and arts organisations were approached between 2001 and 2004 throughout the UK, before the South London Gallery finally agreed to house the exhibition.
Her Noise was initially conceived by Lina Dzuverovic and Anne Hilde Neset in 2001. At the time, Dzuverovic was the New Media curator at London's ICA, and Neset was assistant editor at The Wire. The two women shared passions in music and sound and from 1998 to 2000 collaborated on a project at the now defunct LUX Gallery in Shoreditch London, called Interference, which hosted audiovisual performances from people such as Christian Marclay and Brandon Labelle. It was during this curatorial experience that both Neset and Dzuverovic realised that they had unintentionally curated a season showcasing only one woman artist over the two year period, even though much of their inspiration came from women such as Diamanda Galas, Lydia Lunch and Kim Gordon. This realisation was driven home when Neset interviewed Kim Gordon on behalf of The Wire in 2003, in which a shared desire for the celebration of women as sound makers was discovered.
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. As intended, since 2005, the Archive has continued to expand, through various touring projects, additional interviews, correspondences evolving throughout the researched networks, and as a valuable study resource.
Holly Ingleton, archival intern, 2010 |
| Custodial History | In early 2010, the recognition of the Her Noise Archive as a valuable study resource was acknowledged by CRiSAP at the London College of Communication, who acquired the archive in its entirety with a commitment to continue its growth. The current archive charts the progress of the project in its entirety to 2013. |