A virtual tour of the exhibition Dragging the archive: Re:Encounters with Franklin Furnace’s cyber beginnings by Elly Clarke, on view January 19, 2023 through April 6, 2023 onsite at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn Library and online at franklinfurnace.org/dragging-the-archive
Video documentation of the February 1, 2023, 3:00 pm-4:00 pm EST event of Dragging the Archive Virtual Tour. Recorded on Zoom, edited by Xinan Ran
An online/onsite exhibition by artist Elly Clarke of materials from the early cyber years of Franklin Furnace, 1996-2002. Installed in heavy museum-like vitrines across all levels of the Pratt Library, the show is to be encountered in any order, (pro)posing a starting point rather than an end. This ex:position is an invitation: to discuss. To encounter. To reflect. And to be involved: by writing, by posting, by augmenting the text/s by zooming in via the QR codes that will give greater clarity to the fade of the fax, the detail of the slides, the YES / NO / YES notes scribbled on the edge of a rejected proposal dug out from deep storage, and grants a voice to the person who encounters it. In physics, drag is a force that pulls in two directions at once: forwards, and back; up, and down. It is also both a performance – with the possibility of transformation – and a burden, or resistance. Within the context of this archive, how to hold this tension? How to re:present evidence of a time, an event, a happening, a performance – as well as the major institutional shift taken by Franklin Furnace at this time – out of the physical and digital matter that remains?
Curator's Bio
Elly Clarke
Elly Clarke is an artist interested in the performance and burden (‘the drag’) of the physical body and object in a digitally mediated world. She explores this through photography, screengrabs, video, music, writing, community-based projects and #Sergina – a multi-bodied, border-straddling drag queen who, across one body and several, sings and performs online and offline about love, lust and loneliness (and data discharge) in the mesh of hyper-dis/connection. Clarke’s work has been shown at venues that include Kiasma, Helsinki; Galerie Wedding, Berlin; mac Birmingham; the Banff Centre and the Lowry, Salford Quays.
Now, in collaboration and sometimes competition with her alter ego #Sergina, Clarke is doing a practice-led PhD at Goldsmiths London, examining the ‘Drag of Physicality in the Digital Age’, in which she is proposing drag as a potential mode and method of resistance to the feedback loop of bodies and data, and the constant tracking and tracing of identities in a capitalist surveillance context.
Dragging the Archive is curated by Elly Clarke. Exhibition identity is designed by Yunjia Yuan. Live at the Library VIII is presented with the support of Michael Asher Foundation; The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; The New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; Pratt Institute; The Silicon Valley Community Foundation; and the Board of Directors, members, and friends of Franklin Furnace Archive.
