News from the Document and Location Research Group

20 January

Following the conclusion of Huma Mulji’s solo exhibition, Your Tongue in My Mouth, MIRROR have published a new short covering the ideas central to Mulji’s exhibition. Detailing various productions stages of the exhibition, the short film sees Mulji discuss the cultural histories behind her works as well as making astute reflections on how her work transforms between the studio and exhibition space.

Immediately after independence in August 1947, the government of Pakistan began the long process that would, over the next few decades, modify street names, discard memorials, reshape cultural markers, revise school textbooks, weekends, architecture, law and language. To heal the deep wounds of partition, and in a hurry to distance itself from anything un-Islamic, centuries of syncretic cultural and religious rituals were slowly stripped away, eroded and transformed in collective memory.

Your Tongue in My Mouth explores collective memory, time, place and belonging; complicating accepted historical linearity, placing two worlds in parallel entanglement, taking the viewer to glimpse geographies other than their own and to re-read illegible stories. Watch the full Your Tongue in My Mouth video.

29 September

Document and Location member, Lizzie Lloyd, was in conversation with artist, Katy Beinart, and curator, Marianne Mulvey, at Arnolfini, Bristol. Accompanying a new publication developed by Beinart and Lloyd through their collaborative project called Acts of Transfer, Beinart, Lloyd and Mulvey considered their shared interests in socially engaged or participatory art projects.

15 July

Document and Location member, Huma Mulji, is one of two artists selected for the South West Showcase 2022, a recurring open call platform, showcasing artists from across the South West region. The award saw Mulji develop new work for her upcoming solo exhibition, Your Tongue in My Mouth, at MIRROR, Plymouth.

18 May

Dr Lizzie Lloyd, a Bristol-based art writer and researcher, is the latest member to join the Document and Location research group. Lloyd’s practice turns on the translation of encounters at the intersection of art, history and literature, into words. She interrogates how the matter of writing about/with/to art constitutes individuated responses that are moment and site-specific, alive to the landscape of particular images, words, audiences and situations. She likes to see what happens when writing about art bears witness to such coincidences of attention. Or when it is encouraged to enact critical and imaginative leaps of association, spurring subjectivities to make themselves felt through affective description, experimental rendering and serendipitous detour. She has contributed widely to leading international art publications including Art Monthly, Art Review, Frieze and This is Tomorrow. Her writing has been commissioned by numerous organisations in the UK and Ireland, and she has been writer-in-residence at the Arnolfini, Bristol; Art Writers Group, Plymouth, and at the CCA, Brighton.

We are thrilled to welcome Lloyd as the latest member of Document and Location group following her recent Arts Council funded project developed in collaboration with Katy Beinart, Acts of Transfer, which documents and reactivates a selection of past artworks that all contain elements of social engagement or public participation. Learn more about Lizzie Lloyd’s research by exploring Acts of Transfer.

2 November

Document and Location member, Dr Mike Ricketts, and Dr Daniel Keech (Countryside and Community Research Institute, University of Gloucestershire) have been working together to explore the transgression of physical and social boundaries during severe floods experienced on the Somerset Levels and Moors in the consecutive winters of 2013 and 2014. Their latest research article The submersion and adaption of routines in the Somerset Levels and Moors has been published in the most recent edition of peer-reviewed journal, Landscape Research. In the article, Dr Ricketts and Dr Keech focus on the experience of these floods in the village of Muchelney and explore how the floods submerged the landscape’s physical geometry and disrupted mobility, but also presented new physical and social conduits.

29 October

Document and Location members, Jonathan Mosley and Sophie Warren, participated in a roundtable discussion, as part of Practising Radicality For A Sustainable Architecture, that explored a set of propositions and provocations of how we see, live together, and imagine alternative futures for a radical architecture for sustainability via Zoom on 29 October. Joined by Ana Betancour, Sonja Oliveira, Torsten Schröder and moderated by Ahn Jae Woo, the roundtable drew from multidisciplinary insights to stretch the possibilities of how we represent, create and dream an architecture that embodies and inhabits complexity and entanglement in all its guises. 

Organised by RAPS (Radical Architecture Practice for Sustainability) within An Atlas of Global and Local Imaginaries, a strand of the Korean Pavilion Future School Exhibition Programme for the 17th international Architecture Exhibition at la Biennale di Venezia.

30 August

Document and Location have been awarded research funding from UWE Bristol for the fourth consecutive year. The funding award of £4,000 will support the Group’s ongoing publishing and public events programmes, as well as members academic publishing and contributions to national and international events.

26 March

The Document and Location research group is delighted to announce a new member, Huma Mulji, Senior Lecturer in Fine Arts. Mulji has an abiding interest in examining the specificity of place, the city, and its collective memory. Her anti-heroic works amplify a perpetual discomfort and scepticism from the perspective of both observer and participant, in the face of colonialism and capitalism. Critically exploring locale against a backdrop of economic globalisation, state and military power, the artist works across media, using photography, collage, drawing and sculptural installation. Mulji has exhibited widely internationally and in her native Pakistan including in Karachi Biennale; Pakistan, 2017; Venice Biennale, Italy, 2015; and 10th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea, 2014. She has won a number of prestigious awards including the Nigaah Award for photography in 2017 and the Abraaj Group Art Prize 2013.

We are thrilled to welcome Mulji and look forward to supporting the dissemination of her work and research. Mulji will subsequently draw on her active international networks to expand the possibilities for Document and Location to work with new partners beyond the UK, especially in South Asia and the Middle East. Learn more about Mulji’s practice by exploring her project, Dry Cleaners.