----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Hello all,
Forgive my slow response. Hectic times for us all!
I thank Tarsh for getting all this messiness going! Love to you Trash for your
ongoing work!
I have been thinking a lot about Kira O'Reilly's performance in Perth Australia
of late entitled " What if this was the only world she knew?" This performance
has had a profound influence on me in the last few days! And I cannot shake its
hold on me!
I have only seen a few images on Facebook. I was not present for any of the
performance.
But knowing Kira - it must have been very moving.
And I cannot get the title and the images that I have seen out of my head.
A containment in the laboratory - a body trapped inside a hood - a sequined
muffled face - and a windowed egg embryo... maybe with a beating heart...
So what if we imagine a creature that only knew a laboratory setting. And what
if that was her entire world. Perhaps this is what Kira's performance alluded
to... perhaps other things...
But what it has made me think of - besides the containment of lab life and the
precious organisms who enable lab experiments - is how much I think of my own
life this same way as well.
I am turning 64 tomorrow (no need for birthday wishes as a result of this
posting please!). But in my years I can see how much I operate in a vacuum. I
try to be "wide-angle" - I try to see and experience things as much as I can
outside my "box". But honestly I still feel so contained and sheltered.
Protected - and kept.
I am kept by the institutions I work in. The privileged spaces that house.
I am kept by my skin color - pale and northern european.
I dive deeply into my microbial self to branch into the "multitudes that I
contain"! To broaden my view...
But I do feel controlled and managed.
Kira's performance brought me to a place where I see my existence from this
place of containment. And I also see the limits of my vision! Of how I view my
animality.
I have more to say but am not being terribly articulate.
I thank you Kira for the ways that your work allows me to focus on my
advantages, my limits and where I really want to go...!
And to think about ways to escape and revolt and rebel. I think about animal
revolution a lot... I am plotting now!
Kira made me think of this a lot more!
Thanks Kira O'Reilly!
Much love to you!
Onward.
Kathy
On 10/15/18, 6:36 AM, "Tarsh Bates" <tarshba...@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi empyrists
Huge apologies ... the hectic-ness of installing 26 artworks for the
TMWI exhibition kind of exhausted me. Huge thanks to Laura, Sue and Mike
particularly for helping make it look so awesome and gratefulness to all
the artists involved. Your work is exquisite and funny and moving.
Week 3 will be almost as crazy for me. I am a co-convenor of the Quite
Frankly: It's a Monster Conference, which is on this week at the
University of Western Australia. Keynotes are Fiona Wood, Karen Barad,
Ambelin Kwaymullina and Kira O'Reilly and we have an awesome lineup of
140 presenters. It is going to be epic. I am very excited!
So, we have five -empyre- guests this week, all of whom are artists in
TMWI and some of whom will be at Quite Frankly. They work in very
diverse media and conceptual spaces and I expect they will prompt some
interesting discussions. I am very pleased to introduce Abhishek Hazra,
Kathy High, Sue Hauri-Downing, Svenja Kratz and WhiteFeather Hunter.
*Abhishek* uses video, performance and text with an ironic fascination
for theoretical debates around knowledge production and historiography.
His recent series of lecture performances explore questions around
affect, precarity and provincial cosmopolitanism. Abhishek has exhibited
widely, including Kochi Muziris Biennale, Experiment Marathon Reykjavik
and MAXXI Museum, Rome. He has been an artist-in-residence in various
residences including Gasworks, London and SymbioticA, Perth. Abhishek
has also been the recipient of multiple awards including the Sanskriti
Award for Visual Art.
*Kathy* is an interdisciplinary artist working in the areas of
technology, science, speculative fiction and art. She produces videos
and installations posing queer and feminist inquiries into areas of
medicine/bio-science, and animal/interspecies collaborations. She hosts
bio/ecology+art workshops and is creating an urban nature centre in
North Troy (NATURE Lab) with media organization The Sanctuary for
Independent Media. High is Professor of Video and New Media in the
Department of Arts, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. She
teaches documentary and experimental digital video production, history
and theory, as well as biological arts.
*Sue* is an Australian/Swiss artist interested in biocultural diversity,
biopolitics, solastalgia and the intricacy of interspecies
relationships. She is currently exploring relationships between honey
bees, humans and ecologies, focusing on the poetics and aesthetics of
human/bee/plant interactions and communications, and is particularly
interested in how artistic practices might allow humans to
experience/understand interspecies time. Previous work has included
explorations of the personal and cultural implications of the global
cultivation of native and foreign plant species, including aesthetics,
ties to "home", food security, traditional food availability, and
materials as artefacts. When possible, she repurposes donated or surplus
materials. She draws on the support, services and resources of volunteer
organisations or government funded individuals/groups to network, share
information, reduce costs, and to add passionate and concerned voices to
the issues being explored. Production of her works often involve groups
of people who share concerns and who might act as consultants,
designers, participants, technical specialists or evaluators. Sometimes
her artistic role may be simply as a facilitator.
*Svenja *is a contemporary Australian new media artist interested in the
intersections between science and art. From 2008 – 2012, she produced
three major bodies of work that mapped her engagement with contemporary
biotechnologies including primary culture of human and fetal calf cells,
tissue and genetic engineering, including /The Absence of Alice/, /The
Immortalisation of Kira and Rama /and /The Human Skin
Experience/Equivalent Project/. In 2013, she received the QLD Premier’s
New Media Scholarship and undertook a 5-month residency at Leiden
University and the Art and Genomics Centre in The Netherlands. In 2015,
she was artist in residence at the University of Queensland in a
collaborative project across Architecture, Music, Interaction Design and
Neuroscience. She holds a PhD in Biotechnology and Contemporary Art
from QUT and has exhibited at a range of national and international
venues, including The Science Gallery in Dublin in 2010, The Sydney
Powerhouse Museum in 2013 and Experimenta Recharge, 6th International
Biennial of Media Art touring Australia from 2015 – 2016. Svenja is
currently based in Hobart, Tasmania and works as a Lecturer in
Interdisciplinary Creative Practice at the Creative Exchange Institute
(CxI) and Tasmanian College of the Arts (TCotA) at the University of
Tasmania
*WhiteFeather* is a multiple award-winning Canadian artist-researcher
and scholar, as well as educator, arts administrator, curator and writer
based in Quebec. She holds an MFA in Fibres and Material Practices from
Concordia University and presents her work internationally, most
recently at Ars Electronica (Linz), Berlin (DE), Helsinki (FI) and
various North American cities, with forthcoming presentations in Namur
(BE). WhiteFeather positions her BioArt practice within the context of
craft and feminist witchcraft, via material investigations of the
aesthetic and technological potential of bodily and vital materials. She
hacks/builds electronics, uses web-based platforms to generate new
mythologies, works in narrative video, and performance as embodied
research. WhiteFeather is Principal Investigator and Technician for the
Speculative Life BioLab within the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture
and Technology at Concordia University and artist-in-residence at
Sporobole centre en art actuel in collaboration with Dr Denis Groleau,
Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Microorganisms and Industrial Processes
at Université de Sherbrooke.
Enjoy
--
Co-Convenor Quite Frankly: Its a Monster Conference 18-19 October 2018
Curator This Mess We're In 13 October - 2 November 2018 Unhallowed Arts
Festival 2018
Postdoctoral Research Associate • SymbioticA • School of Human Sciences
• The University of Western Australia • M309, 35 Stirling Hwy Crawley WA
6009 Australia • T +61 8 6488 5583 • M +61 (0) 432 324 708 • E
natarsha.ba...@research.uwa.edu.au
I acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands on which I live: The
Whadjuk people of the Noongar Nation. I acknowledge their ancestors and
pay my respects to their elders; past, present and future.
_______________________________________________
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