Dr Irene Revell
Staff details
Irene is a curator, writer and researcher who works with artists across sound, text, performance and moving image.
Irene has a long-standing commitment to multidisciplinary sound arts and their intersection with politics, especially feminism(s). Stemming originally from DIY cultural production, Irene’s curatorial practice centres on close, often ongoing working relationships with artists, archives and collections, and the fostering of nurturing and rigorous conditions in which work(s) can be produced and become public across multiple contexts.
Much of her curatorial work over the past 20 years has been with Electra, and she is closely involved with collections including Electra’s Her Noise Archive, and Cinenova: Feminist Film + Video. Usually collaborating with others, she has (co-) curated exhibitions and live programmes with institutions including Tate Modern, South London Gallery, Wysing Arts Centre, Flat Time House, Chelsea Space, White Cubicle.
Academic qualifications
- PhD Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP) research centre, University of the Arts London, practice-based (curatorial) 2022
- MSt Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of Oxford 2003
- BA Physics, University of Oxford 2002
Research interests
In 2022 Irene completed her practice-based doctoral thesis, 'Live Materials: 'Womens Work', Pauline Oliveros and the Feminist Performance Score', with a focus on the curatorial challenges posed by text instruction scores and related live ephemera, developing the workshop as a curatorial format amidst the wider notion of the embodied curator.
Most recently (2022-2024), she has been a postdoctoral researcher on artist Aura Satz’s Preemptive Listening project at the Royal College of Art, co-curating the eponymous film, performance and symposium programme at Tate Modern. In Autumn 2024 she will launch the anthology book project 'Bodies of Sound: Becoming a feminist ear' co-edited with Sarah Shin for Silver Press, that consolidates a more expanisve field of interest in sound, listening, archives and embodiment.
She is currently developing a long-term project on ‘score thinking’, exploring expanded uses of text instruction in contemporary practices that often pertain to urgent political question, including the decolonial, and disability justice.
Featured publications
2024:
Bodies of Sound: Becoming a feminist ear
Co-editor with Sarah Shin (Silver Press)
2019:
Womens Work (co-edited by Alison Knowles & Annea Lockwood, 1975 - 8)
Managing editor with James Hoff (Primary Information)
2019:
Lots of Shiny Junk at the Art Dump: The Sick and Unwilling Curator
article co-authored with Lina Džuverović (Parse)
2024:
Preemptive Listening: A roundtable discussion about sirens
article co-authored with Francesca Laura Cavallo, Paul Dorfman, Judy Edworthy, Lisa Lavia, Gascia Ouzounian, Aura Satz, Joel Stern (Sound Studies)
2022:
Working with Womens Work: Towards the embodied curator
Book chapter in 'The Body in Sound, Music and Performance' (Routledge)