Possibilities of an archive for New Contemporaries, or curating archives in contemporaneity

Gray, E, 2023. Possibilities of an archive for New Contemporaries, or curating archives in contemporaneity. PhD, Nottingham Trent University.

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Abstract

This thesis examines the purpose and potentiality of an archive for New Contemporaries, the UK’s annual exhibition of art by new graduates. Established in 1949, New Contemporaries has become one of the most prominent platforms for student and recent graduate artists within the UK. However, to date, they have no formal archive. Aware that the lack of an archive presents a significant barrier to preserving and presenting their historical knowledge, the thesis explores what and where their historical materials are, how they might be gathered, and how to build upon them.

As a case study operating from the middle of the last century, New Contemporaries brings together the legacy of a durable organisation with the ephemerality of an entity that has undergone a number of changes, breaks and reorientations, as well as being dislocated and reconfigured each year. New Contemporaries’ innate temporality is reflected in its historical materials, dispersed across a number of institutions, personal collections and memories, as well as more recent documents held by the current organisation. Emerging within the framework of ‘the contemporary’, New Contemporaries embodies the ever-evolving artistic expressions of its time. However, the twenty-first century’s shifting contexts have also renewed interest in historical preservation and cultural legacy. Consequently, the research has grown out of New Contemporaries’ practical aspiration to develop an institutional archive and delineate its current relationship to both its historical legacy and the tenets of contemporaneity.

Through research that utilises curatorial methodologies and archival research, the thesis demonstrates the archive's complex and often contradictory position as a validating structure as well as a conceptually temporal and subjective space. This includes the construction of history through archival research while simultaneously resisting the formation of a singular institutional narrative. The research was further developed through two exhibitions, Not a Live Show and Not an Archive, which examined and expanded upon New Contemporaries history. The former presented archival research on the New Contemporaries Live Shows in 1976 and 1977, while the latter served to disrupt the researcher-curator narrative through three artist commissions.

The thesis proposes curatorial interventions that regard the dispersed materials in line with expanded archive practices. These may allow the organisation to access, assess, and review its history in ways that address its needs concerning validation and cultural capital, while also allowing a multiplicity of perspectives. Following the assertion that curatorial projects originating from the archive should be redeposited (Yiakoumaki, 2009), the thesis also demonstrates the potential of this activity to expand extant archival material and support the organisation's ongoing progression through contemporaneous activity.

Item Type:	Thesis
Description:	Abridged version
Creators:	Gray, E.
Contributors:	Name Role NTU ID ORCID Fisher, T. Thesis supervisor ART3FISHETHS https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2565-8805 Grewcock, D. Thesis supervisor HLI3GREWCD https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3528-0335
Date:	July 2023
Rights:	This copyright in this work is held by the author. You may copy up to 5% of this work for private study, or personal, non-commercial research. Any re-use of the information contained within this document should be fully referenced, quoting the author, title, university, degree level and pagination. Queries or requests for any other use, or if a more substantial copy is required, should be directed to the author.
Divisions:	Schools > Nottingham School of Art & Design
Record created by:	Jonathan Gallacher
Date Added:	19 Nov 2025 10:36
Last Modified:	19 Nov 2025 13:29
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/54772

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