Staff

Tracy Mackenna

Course Director, Master of Fine Art

Tel: 01382 385225
Email: t.mackenna@dundee.ac.uk
Room 605, Crawford Building, DJCAD 

13 Perth Road DD1 4HT

Biography

Tracy Mackenna is Personal Chair of Contemporary Art Practice. The multidisciplinary collaborative practice Tracy shares with Edwin Janssen is a creative and discursive site central to which are exhibition projects that integrate research, production, presentation, exchange and education. Research focuses on issues of life and death, cultural identity, notions of place, and visual publishing. Major exhibitions have been held at Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich; Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Contemporary Art; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; CCA Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow. Recent publications include 'Truth, Error, Opinion', 'Shotgun Wedding' and 'A Perfect Image of Ourselves'. Contribution to international debate on research in art is ongoing through exhibition, publication and presentations. Collaborative working within and beyond the academic sector is central to their research and collaborative practice.

Individual practice and research explores the role of creative writing in visual art, and research focuses on the mediation of history and private archives, migratory aesthetics, and gender within collaborative practice. Tracy has spent extensive periods living and working in Hungary, Romania, France and the Netherlands making art, and establishing networks and organisations. She has taught extensively in Europe and Asia. She is a founding director of Glasgow Sculpture Studios, and her contributions to art policy include membership of The Scottish Arts Council's Reference Group for National Policy for Public Art and Visual Arts Awards Panel, Faculty of Fine Arts at The British School at Rome, Steering Group Pépinières Européennes pour Jeunes Artistes, Board of the Scottish Sculpture Workshop. She is an Academician of the Royal Scottish Academy.

www.mackenna-and-janssen.net

Research Projects

WAR AS EVER!

Nederlands Fotomuseum Jan – March 2012

Multifaceted project, leading to an exhibition, a series of performative actions in Rotterdam, a symposium event and a publication. With Edwin Janssen.

The subject of the research, related artworks, exhibition, performative events and publication is the Van Kittensteyn Collection (Atlas van Stolk, Museum Rotterdam), a historical collection of engravings related to the Dutch Revolt against the Spanish Empire (1568–1648). Working in partnership with the Museum Rotterdam, through a process of visual interpretation and photographic re-presentation we are exploring the similarities between historical and current political and religious conflicts with the aim of situating the Van Kittensteyn collection in a contemporary social political perspective. Continuing our expansion of the domains and territories of large art institutions, we are active on the streets of Rotterdam in a series of ‘performative actions’. Using significant city institutions and major cultural venues and events as key points in a constellation of sites between which to move, the character of a ‘Print Pedlar’ is employing visual material (exploring ideas of truth and propaganda, individual experience, memory and the construction of narratives) derived from the exhibition to engage people on the streets and in the institutions in discussions about the project’s central issues and their significance to contemporary citizens.

http://www.mackenna-and-janssen.net/mackenna-and-janssen/The_Print_Pedlars_Blog/The_Print_Pedlars_Blog.html

The Museum of Loss and Renewal

Highland Institute for Contemporary Art, and Centrespace, Visual Research centre DJCAD, 2011 and ongoing. A partnership with The Highland Hospice. With Edwin Janssen.

A multifaceted project, leading to two distinct exhibition projects to date, with embedded live public studios, interdisciplinary public seminar events and a publication. The ongoing project investigates areas of significance to contemporary art that are central to our collaborative art practice; material culture, collecting and artist-led curatorial practice, with an emphasis on their framing within a participatory approach. Objects selected from The Highland Hospice charity shops act as vehicles that enable conversation, knowledge transfer and knowledge exchange. Through our approach to artist-led curatorial practice the modes of presentation and display of these everyday objects enable new understandings and meanings and activate embedded knowledge and subjectivities. As the artists, we take on the roles of collectors, keepers and curators. ‘The Museum of Loss and Renewal’ is durational by nature and manifests itself in venues that support the interrogation of issues specific to the project, such as presentation, display, curation (The Highland Institute of Contemporary Art); the establishment of ‘placemaking’ through durational approaches to curation and commissioning, the interface between art/anthropology fieldwork (VRC). The next stage is being developed through further collaboration with The Highland Hospice’s charity shops.

LIFE, DEATH AND BEAUTY: accessing grief through art

Chapter in section Mediating Life and Death: Theory and Practice, in book Envisaging Death: Visual Culture and Dying; Cambridge Scholars, 2012.

The chapter interrogates contemporary art’s ability to affect understandings of issues around death: how artists have interpreted death throughout history; how objects and images impact on people's ideas about death: and the role that art can play in mediating issues of life and death. The chapter positions the collaborative exhibition project, with Edwin Janssen Life is Over! if you want it, 2009, drawing on material generated through this large-scale exhibition presentation that contained an embedded live participatory public studio, public interdisciplinary seminars and a symposium.

Life is Over! If you want it

Frances Cooper Gallery, DJCAD, University of Dundee, Jan-Feb 2009. With Edwin Janssen.

Multifaceted project leading to an exhibition and a symposium event. Project centred on the familial experience of the death of Edwin Janssen’s father by assisted suicide in the Netherlands in 2000 and reflected on a range of contemporary issues around death: how artists have interpreted death throughout history; how objects and images impact on people's ideas about death: and the role that art can play in mediating issues of life and death. The research process continued during the exhibition and opened up to the audiences through: artists’ performative presence in the gallery; multi-disciplinary events programme curated by Tracy Mackenna and Edwin Janssen sited within the gallery that included a symposium, seminar and Masters students’ performative response. The project combined research with production, presentation, education, participation, debate, exchange and reflection in the site of the exhibition. The artists were present in the gallery producing work through dialogic reflection on the exhibition and its themes, visually and through text narrative.

Micromégas

Multifaceted project, leading to an editioned artists’ publication, exhibitions, a symposium; collaboration with Dundee Contemporary Arts, 2012. With Edwin Janssen.

New work commissioned from 6 artists in response to issues in Voltaire’s Micromégas text. Each artist will produce a poster that will be folded to become both an element of the content of the book, and when open will form a component of the exhibitions. The publication, exhibitions and symposium will explore notions of portability, reproduction, distribution, and presentation in contemporary art practice and curation, with reference to Marcel Duchamp’s seminal work Boîte en Valise. Number two in Duchamp’s series is in the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland, whose research will contribute to the project. Issues central to our art practice are explored; recycling, appropriation, reproduction, re-presentation and curatorial practice. Importantly, the exhibition and symposium will draw upon the VRC’s Centre for Artists’ Books collection to debate contemporary issues within art writing and making within the book format. Each component of the project will contribute to an exploration of the innovative possibilities of ‘the book’ and visual publishing, of how and why an artist’s book can exist in parallel to other structures in the art discourse as a separate yet crucial marker, hovering between production, analysis and self-conscious artistic reflection.

Website www.mackenna-and-janssen.net