Staff profile: https://www.shu.ac.uk/about-us/our-people/staff-profiles/maud-haya-baviera#firstSection
Current research and project: In summer 2021, I exhibited my work at Site Gallery in an exhibition entitled Heavy Water, alongside artist Joanna Whittle and artist and researcher Victoria Lucas. Following the exhibition, together, we decided to form an artist collective with the intent to form new networks and partnerships with specific archives, collections, museums and galleries, both nationally and internationally. Respective interests are tied to our research methods, which consist of working with archival materials to create new artwork. My research, which is related but different from those of Victoria Lucas and Joanna Whittles, seeks to elaborate how artefacts and archival materials can be translated into digital medium, what new understanding can be generated from this translation and how this can participate to the reframing and reassessing of historical narratives. My research also seeks to ask if digital mediums can be part of a strategy to question cultural objects and if this can lead to developing an audience sensibility so that one can see themselves implicated in a variety of political realities and complex histories.
Another strand to my research, which employs the same archival research methods as the ones encountered in the aforementioned Heavy Water project, is in partnership with Dr Amanda Crawley Jackson, University of the Arts London and the Imperial War Museum. Dr Crawley Jackson is currently leading a research project on Post-Traumatic Landscapes at La Cité de la Muette, in Drancy, France, a location where histories related to World War II, the Holocaust and forced migrations converge. Dr Crawley Jackson has invited me to conduct my research, alongside hers, to further our respective research outcomes and to collaborate on future dissemination. The Imperial War Museum, London, holds a vast array of pre-1960 archives on La Cité de la Muette. Other archives are held in Drancy, France. The research periods I will conducted both in Drancy, France and the Imperial War Museum, London, will allow me to study specific archival materials and make artworks in response to these materials.