Radio As Current : Inside the Fred Hunter Archive
Radio as Current is an homage to Fred Hunter’s career and work. Hunter was a journalist and a course leader at London College of Communication in the 1970s, founder of the UK’s first radio journalism course, and thereby teacher to many of today’s radio journalists. We knew little about radio broadcasting, but through Hunter’s archive, we became his last, posthumous, students.
As listeners of podcasts, after video killed the radio star and our mobile phones ultimately decimated media, we asked how his teaching would sound today. Radio as Current means contemporary disruptiveness. Public radio reports and challenges current affairs. Whether it be a cheerful chat with your morning coffee or a stern debate with your evening tea, issues are resolved through discussion, by talking and establishing dialogue. Time and again, radio charges conversation.
A tableau of plants and furniture, a microphone and a curtain. The invisible hosts of this radio programme are in front of you, currently speaking. Or perhaps you happened to stroll past at the wrong time, in which case our podcast is also available online. It is 2019 after all.
Extract of the Fred Hunter Archive, LCC
Photographs by Glenn Michael Harpe
The window exhibition is an homage to radio as a performative and live-action. We reproduced an interview room. Plants and, furniture hint towards the presence of interlocutors. We added a timeline in the background, as to give the viewer information on the archive we analysed, as well as a sense of the history and relevance of radio as a social and cultural vector.
The curtain, up-front evokes an intimacy one might find between an interviewer and his interviewee. It references this sensation one has when listening to the radio at home, in a car, this familiarity with the presenter.
Curated by Helena Adalsteinsdottir, Krishna Balakrishnan, Mya Berger, Yuehan He, Junyu Lei, Nina Lissone, Anna Spryropoulos and Clara Wong.