Panel One: “Archival Impulses”
This panel seeks to explore the role of archives within artistic practice. Coined by American art critic and historian, Hal Foster, in his seminal essay for October (Issue 110, Fall 2004), ‘An Archival Impulse’ describes a practice in which artists operate as archivists. The panellists will discuss how they access, utilise, and activate archival records, objects, and ephemera within their work, while also considering the shaping of cultural meaning and the authoring of alternative histories.
Lecture Theatre 1, 10am – 11:15am
JOHN BEATTIE is a visual artist whose work investigates historical and cultural narratives through video, film, and photography. Beattie’s work reconstructs temporal themes, prompting questions on cultural history, time, and its interpretation. Shadowing the Archives (2023–2021), commissioned by the National Archives of Ireland, and Reconstructing Mondrian (2013–2023), Beattie’s solo exhibition at the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, are examples of recent projects. Beattie has been awarded a number of residencies to date, including the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris (2020) and the apexart Fellowship, New York (2015), and his work is in many public and private collections.
johnbeattie.ie
MARIANNE KEATING is an Irish artist and researcher based in London. Her practice-based research addresses overlooked Irish histories, particularly those of the Irish diaspora in Jamaica. She narratively reconstructs these histories through visual, material and oral traces, and onsite investigation, seeking to insert these previously muted voices into the archive and give them a presence through her work. Keating has a practice-based PhD in Visual and Material Culture from Kingston University, London, an MA from the Royal College of Art, London, and a BA from LSAD. Her work was recently shown at the 25th Biennale of Sydney and the World Expo in Osaka, Japan.
mariannekeating.com @marianne_keating
MAIRÉAD MCCLEAN is a visual artist and filmmaker from Northern Ireland, based in Bath, UK. Working across film, sound, installation, photography and drawing, her practice explores memory, transmission and the ways personal and collective histories are carried through objects, images and archives. Over the past three decades, McClean has developed an internationally recognised practice, with her work being presented at venues including the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, Whitechapel Gallery, Belfast Exposed, Tate Modern, and Deutscher Künstlerbund, Berlin. Recent projects include Breath Memory (2025), a series of films made using archival home movies from the Polish Archive of Home Films.
maireadmcclean.com @maclofski
FRANK WASSER is an Irish artist, writer, curator, and educator based between Vienna, Dublin, and London. Spanning performance, installation, text, and moving image, his interdisciplinary practice examines institutional power, artistic labour, working-class methodologies, and the production of cultural knowledge through archives, pedagogy, and critical writing. He completed a DPhil at the University of Oxford and lectures in Fine Art and Critical Studies at Goldsmiths. Wasser was the 2025–26 Artist in Residence at Tate Britain Library and Archive, in partnership with Askeaton Contemporary Arts, where he developed The Irish Face. He is represented by COMMUNE, Vienna, and has upcoming exhibitions at Grazer Kunstverein and TBG+S.
frankwasser.info @studiofrankwasser
