The Institute are delighted to announce a forthcoming pop-up exhibition in Cambridge Artspace entitled ‘Archive Song’ curated by Drew Milne.

The exhibition features artworks by Redell Olsen, Jo Milne, Andrew James and Drew Milne, with music by Tom Hall and a range of conversations – featuring Rod Mengham, Ian Hunt and Sarah Wood – with poetry readings and talks.

The show’s prompts include a 1917 song by Evelyn Sharpe and Edward Lockton entitled ‘When the great red dawn is shining’. Popular in 1917 amid World War 1 and contemporary with the moment of the Russian Revolution, the song’s red dawn is framed as a patriotic ballad seemingly without reference to political symbolism. This red dawn nevertheless quickly takes on other meanings.

Existing across multiple media – sheet music, 78 records, song cards, phono cylinders, pianola scrolls – which feature in the show’s archival materials, this song poses a series of questions about how songs exist in music, popular memory, artworks and archives. How red can a song be? What sort of synaesthesia exists between art and song, between songs and visual archives? How do songs come alive in new and archival forms?

Drew Milne has curated for this exhibition glimpses and paintings from an earlier collaboration with Jo Milne around ‘pianola’ songs.

Redell Olsen’s artworks for the exhibition pursue a parallel trajectory through a protest song – ‘The Powte’s Complaint’ composed around 1611 – working with LP shaped cyanotypes.

Andrew James responds to the question of the red dawn of song with his own silent animation.

Alongside archival materials and artworks, there will be musical interventions by Tom Hall, and informal conversations, poetry readings and talks. All welcome!

All welcome!