The brief to our group was to work with the University of Edinburgh’s Art Collection and the Travelling Gallery, to create an exhibition working with the two organizations to center their dynamics as well as their interests. The exhibition would feature the work of Winnie Herbstein, which the Art Collection had already acquired. A key part of this brief was to discover the extent to which exhibition making could be used as a form of knowledge production in collections.
As a group we watched Winnie Herbstein’s films; Dampbusters (2021), Minutes (2019), and Studwork (2018); and discussed the directions this exhibition could take. Taking these films into consideration we started building an idea of what the exhibition would look like and focus on. Collectively we were particularly interested in the notion of house and home; the duality of building a house versus making a home. This thought process brought us to a central question that remained central to the exhibition and became the center of the living archive, ‘what does your dream home look like?’ As we did research surrounding these films and the work of housing activist Cathy McCormack, among other other aspects of this topic came together that somewhat changed this trajectory. We focused in on the idea of resistance and the ability to make change though imagination.
Our research brought us to the work of artists Joey Simons, Keira McLean, and Lucas Priest. Each artist with their own unique perspective influenced the way in which the exhibition began to take shape. Joey Simons and Keira McLean had both worked with Cathy McCormack in some capacity, they had worked with Cathy’s research and Glasgow archive material related to housing struggles. Lucas Priest creates walks in Edinburgh through the School of Pedestrian Culture that interact with the dynamic of the city, the most recent walk explores the complex nature of studentification. We brought Joey Simons, Keira McLean, and Lucas Priest into the exhibition, turning it into a group show – built around Winnie Herbstin’s film Dampbusters, to create the exhibition titled Resistance in Residence.
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