Challenging Archives: Delivering research access, public engagement and the curatorial care of the Franko B Archive (360G-Wellcome-210436_Z_18_Z)

In consultation with the artist, this project will catalogue and conserve his unique, research-rich archive and make it accessible to meet established demands for research and public dissemination. The nature of the documentation, however, presents a set of particularly complex legal, ethical and practical challenges for archival and museological practice. These challenges, reflecting FB’s work, are interdisciplinary, and run parallel to those faced by other medical and LGBT+ collections containing similarly challenging material. As part of the project we will develop guidelines/methodology for curatorial care - and research access to - such material: an advisory committee of curators, academics, lawyers and regional medical humanities network representatives will support us and a case paper will be published at the end to serve as a model for other 'challenging' archives. FB is an artist whose extraordinary body-based performances have often involved blood-letting. His work, which explores the limits of the body, touching on pain, suffering and sexuality in contemporary culture, attracts considerable multi-disciplinary research interest, from art historians, artists and curators to medical humanities historians and anthropologists researching questions of the body as a site of connection between the social, bio-medical, political and affective forces that constitute contemporary life and well-being.