An exploration of Site Gallery’s history, featuring archival materials that show how art has been curated and presented over the years.
Over the year before the exhibition, Programme Producer Robyn Haddon had been exploring the materials held in Site Gallery’s exhibition archives.
Site Gallery traces its history back to 1978, where a group of photographers got together to form the South Yorkshire Photography Projects (SYPP). In 1979, they conceived Untitled Gallery, taking over a shop front on South Road in Walkley and installing a gallery space, workshops and darkrooms.
Over the years, the organisation grew and changed, through funding grants and capital projects, locations and directors, evolving and expanding to get to the gallery building we have on Brown Street today.
This exhibition featured slide projectors with images that show the building works, pivotal exhibitions in Site’s past and exhibition marketing materials. The equipment used in the exhibition was itself part of the archive – projector screens, slide projectors and furniture. There was also a reference library of Site publications available to explore.
Material has been teased out of the archive that showed glimpses of curatorial work that were invisible and some that were charmingly archaic – the invisible framework of presenting art, written notes sent back on faxes, telephone call notepads and dimensions drawn on the back of envelopes.
The space was held together with a gentle soundscape recorded at dusk outside Site Gallery’s front door – groaning buses and car door slammings, but also the natural phenomenon of a flock of pied wagtails who roost in the undulating hedge on the other side of the street.
Image credit: approx. 1986, AutoWays building. Site Gallery archive.