FACULTY

ARCHIVO EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMME

Bergit Arends

The Courtauld, United Kingdom

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Dr Bergit Arends is a curator of contemporary art, museum professional, and academic with research interests in the intersections of research-based artistic practices, material culture, and environmental history within European and global contexts. Bergit’s monograph Photography, Ecology and Historical Change in the Anthropocene: Activating Archives (2024) is part of the Routledge series Photography, Place, Environment. Her doctoral research resulted among other in the award-winning publication Chrystel Lebas. Field Studies (2018). Bergit has curated many contemporary art projects for the natural history museums in London and Berlin. Bergit was British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Bristol and the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, where she is now a Teaching Fellow. She is Curatorial Research Fellow in the UK Research and Innovation Network Plus ‘Shifting Global Polarities: Russia, China and Eurasia in Transition’. Bergit is also a Research Associate in the multinational CoastARTS programme, working together with artists to retrieve, to mobilise, and to shape new forms of environmental knowledge in relation to the dynamics of coastal zones.

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COURSES

Located within archival scholarship, the course explores the historical and contextual influences on exhibition-making and the impact of different and diverse audiences on the archive. Examining new spatial reconfigurations of archival buildings, it considers how exhibition provides a forum for engaging with archives in various ways. It explores how design and narrative work to create experiences with authentic, material archives and how they open up political, reflective and activist understandings of history and the role of archives in this. It considers the implications of contemporary exhibition-making on how we understand and experience the archive and the different ways that we encounter new stories, perspectives and people both in the past and the present.

REGISTRATION OPEN

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PUBLICATIONS

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