‘The Black Kit’ the archive for performance, performance art, performing arts, actions and intermedia arts.

Sinéad will work as an Artist in Residence at ‘The Black Kit’ the archive for performance, performance art, performing arts, actions and intermedia arts. Alongside Director Boris Nieslony, she will focus on exploring this archive and applying disability as a field in performance art. The archive holds documents from the 1950’s, for example those from ‘Black Mountain’ college (1933-1957) where John Cage held his first happening and Allan Kaprow was a student. The formats of documentation within the archive are a point of departure as we are living in a changing digital age. The first video document within the archive records is ‘Video Betacam’ 1971, which documents the ‘F+F School for Art and Media Design Zürich’ (F+F stands for "Form und Farbe", a discipline practiced at the German art and architecture school Bauhaus. It means "shape and colour".) This was an era where disability or disabled people were excluded from society, so I will work back from my present awareness and consciousness of arts and disability and investigate how it meets performance art through archive and practice.

This project is supported by 'iDA' (Individual Disabled/Deaf Artists) scheme, Administrated by the ADF (Arts & Disability Forum) on behalf of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.