Ways of Undoing presents: video essays in the archive

Coming up in September are two events emerging from Unthinking the Archive, a week-long workshop held in St Andrews and Dundee in summer 2026, and the first major event of the AHRC-funded project: Ways of Undoing: Craft, Collaboration and Videographic Practice.

Led by Professor Lucy Fife Donaldson with Drs Colleen Laird (Assistant Professor, Asian Studies, University of British Columbia) and Dayna McLeod (Performance-based media artist and Research Fellow, Film Studies, University of St Andrews) and partnerships with partnerships with DCA, The Video Essay Podcast, Locarno Film Festival, and Meiji University, the project asks how creative practices can challenge established ways of making films and producing knowledge by placing greater emphasis on craft, community, experimentation, and collaboration.

Ways of Undoing presents: video essays in the archive

Screening: 8pm, 9th September, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee.

Tickets are free, but must be booked via the DCA's website.

Working with archival images, sounds, films, and other materials, the programme explores personal histories, cinematic encounters, the hidden work of filmmaking, and stories of preservation and loss. Mixing playful experiments with longer works-in-progress, the screening offers a window onto the creative process and the unexpected connections that emerge through the experimental juxtaposition of sound and image.

Exhibition: 17th September-29th October, Research studio at the Wardlaw Museum, St Andrews, Scotland. Entry is free to all.

Exploring and reimagining personal, institutional and speculative archives, this exhibition features objects from University Collections , prints made at the DCA print studio, and a short video programme. The installation reflects the workshop's experimentations with approaching absence, materiality, and obsolescence through a series of exercise prompts, and collaborations with the University of St Andrews’ Collections and Dundee Contemporary Arts Print Studio.

The screening and exhibition includes work by video-essayists, artist and scholars from around the world: Jiří Anger and Veronika Hanáková, Nilüfer Neslihan Arslan, Lucy Fife Donaldson, Cormac Donnelly, Lily Ford, John Gibbs, Catherine Grant, Marilia Kaisar, Ritika Kaushik, Christian Keathley, Colleen Laird, Dayna McLeod, Fahad Naveed, Viktoria Paranyuk, Alison Peirse, Andrew Philip, Maksim Selezniov, and Charlotte Scurlock.