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ANYWHERE and
EL SE WHERE
Art at the Outermost Limits of Location-Specificity
2018
ANYWHERE and
EL SE WHERE A Free Two-Day Conference Event at Parsons School of Design, New York
November 15 – 16, 2018
Art at the Outermost Limits of Location-Specificity
Curated by Sean Lowry and Simone Douglas Presented as part of a partnership between Project Anywhere, Centre of Visual Art (University of Melbourne) and Parsons Fine Art (Parsons School of Design, The New School).
Simone Douglas & Sean Lowry Introduction............................................05
Benjamin Matthews New Hypothetical Continents...........................35-37
Anne Gaines & Su Baker Foreword............................................07–08
Nancy Mauro Flude Technās Tranquil Submission...........................38-39
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Ana Mendes On Drawing............................................40-41
Amber Eve Anderson Navigating Digital Landscapes........................10-11 Archie Barry Lexicon of a Body ...................................12-13 Burak Cakmak, Brendan McCarthy & Isabelle Webster...................................14-15 Joanne Choueiri The Missing Album....................................16-17 Mark L. Gardner Collective Intelligence: The Ecological Stewardship of Honeybees..............17-19 Adam Geczy Fashion Anywhere: Fashion, Where Is It?..............18-21 Georgia Banks Every Performance Artist Remembered..................22-23 Marialaura Ghidini & Rebekah Modrak #exstrange: Hijacking E-Commerce for Art.............24-25 Christine Howard Sandoval Live Stream..........................................26-27 Alana Hunt Cups of Nun Chai.....................................28-29 Nicolò Krättli & Kaspar Stöbe Elsewhere/Tomorrow....................................30-31 Laurent Labourmène After Earthrise.......................................32-33 LungA School (Jonatan Spejlborg & Lasse Høgenhof) A Cacophony...........................................34-35
Jacob Olmedo And the World Will Be As One.........................42-43 Macushla Robinson ApeSh*t: In the Wake of Museal Whiteness..............44-45 Ryota Sato Matsushima Bunko Museum...............................46-47 Luciana Scrutchen Textiles as Art, Culture, and Science.................48-49 Leela Shanker Archipelago of the Everyday...........................50-51 Mark Shorter What Happens if Tommy Lee Jones Doesn't Write Back?..................................52-53 Joshua Singer Typographic Landscape Ecologies.......................54-55 Soil Series: Francesca Fiore & Hillary Wagner Social Drawing: Theory and Praxis in Appalachia......56-57 Andrew Stooke High Island Circumambulation..........................58-59 Jessica Winton Ris Publica...........................................60-61 Chris Wood Walking with Satellites and Poetic Research..........62-63 — About the Curators.......................................65 Chairs................................................67–69
2018 INTRODUCTION ANY WHERE AND EL SEWHERE
INTRODUCTION
This biennial conference event features presentations from artists that have successfully navigated blind peer evaluation as part of Project Anywhere's Global Exhibition Program (2017 – 2018), together with a series of invited presentations from established artists, designers, scholars, curators and writers actively engaged with practices outside traditional circuits. Today, an increasing number of artists and creative practitioners are working across spaces, places and temporalities wellbeyond the limits of established exhibition formats. Accordingly, much contemporary creative activity is more concerned with events, actions, sites, relations and processes than with discrete outcomes. Artistic research can be represented in multiple ways as it moves between modes of conception, production and dissemination. This free two-day conference will explore questions associated with presenting, experiencing, discussing and evaluating art located anywhere and elsewhere in space and time.
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Simone Douglas & Sean Lowry — Curators, Anywhere and Elsewhere
2018 FOREWORD ANY WHERE AND EL SEWHERE
FO R E W O R D
Fine Art and the School of Art, Media and Technology at Parsons School of Design celebrate a successful partnership with Centre of Visual Art at the University of Melbourne. Once again, it is my great pleasure to host the biennial conference Anywhere and Elsewhere, 2018. This experience provides an opportunity for artists and participants to introduce critical new knowledge to the community and produce collective and divergent understandings essential to strengthening society. Parsons defining characteristics are its rigorous interrogation of the current state of art and design; its status as a large, comprehensive art and design school housed within a vibrant, interdisciplinary university; and finally, its place within the broader context of New York City, an immersive art and design laboratory and world of creative practice. We welcome the dynamic engagement of this conference on our campus and look forward to all of the progress that is exchanged.
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Anne Gaines —  Dean for the School of Art, Media, and Technology Parsons School of Design
— Pro-Vice Chancellor Engagement & Director, Center of Visual Arts CoVA, Victorian College of the Arts Faculty of the Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne
ARTIST PRE SENTATIONS
Professor Su Baker Am
ANY WHERE AND EL SEWHERE
The Centre of Visual Art (CoVA) is proud to partner with Parsons Fine Art (Parsons School of Design, The New School) on Anywhere and Elsewhere (2018), and to celebrate this as the beginning of this partnership with CoVA at the VCA and Parsons Fine Art. CoVA is a joint project between colleagues at the Faculty of the Fine Arts and Music and the Faculty of Arts School of Culture and Communication and is a new nexus of visual arts study fostering innovative research, collaborative projects and fertile exchanges across various university facilities and with international partners such as Parsons, The New School. Both contemporary and historically-minded, CoVA charts the changing climates of local and international visual art practice and pedagogy, acknowledging and foregrounding the unresolved cultural and geopolitical conditions into which it arrives, on the traditional lands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. New knowledge will be discovered and applied through this lens, forging global connections from within our Asia-Pacific region and beyond, thus influencing fundamental discussions in art and design practice, art history and writing, curating and arts management. We congratulate the artists and writers and all participants and look forward to the multiple modes of experience that we will experience with this new series of projects.
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2018
FOREWORD
Amber Eve Anderson
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NAVIGATING DIGITAL L ANDSCAPES The Internet is a place in which we can travel everywhere without going anywhere. In the blurred boundary between the digital and the real, Google Maps has had a profound impact on the ways in which we explore new surroundings and how we conceptualize ourselves in relation to the places we inhabit. Not only can we search our surroundings for goods or services, but rather than inserting oneself into the space of an existing landscape — as with paper maps — we have become the dot in the middle of a digital landscape constructed around us. One physical address leads directly to another, leaving little room for meandering. We are constantly locating ourselves, but we don't really know where we are. Route variations based on one's method of transportation or the most direct path in terms of either time or distance, implicate the paths traversed. Using Google Maps as the primary method for navigating digital landscapes, Anderson extrapolates and subvert relationships with the physical landscape using language and objects as a means of exploration rather than a specific destination. Images captured at these destinations are publicly uploaded to Google Maps, serving as a public document of these alternate paths.
Searching for Paradise, 2017. Single-channel Video (Still), 3:25.
Amber Eve Anderson is a multidisciplinary artist and writer whose work is rooted in ideas of home and the experience of displacement. She is a graduate of the Mount Royal School of Art MFA program at the Maryland Institute College of Art and is currently a resident artist at School 33 in Baltimore and a regularly contributing writer at BaltimoreArt. Her first self-published book, Free to a Good Home, was purchased by the New York Public Library and is sold at Printed Matter. She founded Ctrl+P, an independent publishing project dedicated to archiving poetic interventions in the digital realm.
Archie Barry
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LEXICON OF A BODY Language is an insufficient but necessary medium. It is a social protocol that serves to both provide and delimit comprehension of material and metaphysical worlds. The production of nonsensical language can be a critical response to the erasure that legislative and bureaucratic systems of legibility have caused people and their bodies. Practicing linguistic incoherence can be a playful form of enacting sovereignty, I do this by pushing language into corporeal experiences: what does a hand want to sing? What words will allow a circular dance for a tongue to touch lips, palate, throat, palate, lips, palate, throat? A crushed language system or a lexicon of this body may be semantically coherent, yet the meaninglessness or confusion it conjures is a familiar human experience. My work aims to be recognisable and cognitively dissonant simultaneously. Remapping language as an embodied practice insists that identity should not be easily digestible and dissolves the Cartesian body-mind split. Much of my practice involves live singing, a medium that disappears in its moment of arriving and compounds the affective intensity of semi-sensical syllables and noises.
Time Sick Big T-Shirt, Meat Market Stables, 6 September 2018. Performance, approximately 25 minutes. Photo Credit: Jacqui Shelton.
archiebarry.com
Archie Barry is an interdisciplinary visual artist based in Melbourne, Australia. Their work embeds language (spoken, sung or written) into gestures, serving to de-form and re-form words as embodied experiences. Their work has been exhibited at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, The State Library of Victoria, The Centre for Contemporary Photography, Neon Parc, Artspace Sydney and ALASKA Projects among other spaces. They are currently undertaking a three-month residency at Phasmid Studio in Berlin supported by the Fiona Myer Travelling Residency Award. Barry completed a Masters of Contemporary Art at Victorian College of the Arts in 2017.
Burak Cakmak, Brendan McCarthy & Isabelle Webster
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BUR AK CAKMAK, BRENDAN MCCARTHY & ISABELLE WEBSTER The primary objective of the project is to address critical women's health needs and challenges around menstruation through the co-design and development with refugees of a sustainable system for high absorbency underwear. Through the use of a collaborative, co-design systems process with refugee women, the approach seeks to empower women refugees as central stakeholders in the creative and design process. Through a partnership and collaboration with Parsons School of Design, UNFPA and Hela Clothing, a design solution has been developed with and introduced for the refugee community living in the Kakuma Refugee Camp and Kalobeyei Integrated Settlement in Turkana County, Kenya. The high absorbency underwear offers women a new, all-in-one, dignified, sustainable alternative to costly and environmentally damaging sanitary pads. Because the sanitary pad is integrated into the underwear, it also simply provides underwear, which is an expensive commodity, that can be worn at any time, not just during menstruation.
Kakuma, Kenya: IRC General Hospital: At-Risk Women's Focus Group, 2018.
Brendan McCarthy and Isabelle Webster have interdisciplinary academic and professional practices that combines their expertise in conceptual art, performance, installation, filmmaking and quantitative analytical methods with fashion design systems. Their current research and pedagogy focus on ways that fashion can address critical social issues facing specific communities by employing user-centric design and conceptual art strategies in combination with ethical and sustainable sourcing and production systems. McCarthy has a BA in mathematics from Columbia University and an MFA in Fine Art from Parsons. He also studied architecture at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. Webster has an MFA in Fine Art from Parsons Prior. They won the BrotherWin Gobi Desert International Art and Design Competition and have held numerous artist residency fellowships. They are both faculty at, and McCarthy is the Program Director, BFA Fashion Design: Systems and Materiality at Parsons.
Joanne Choueiri
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THE MISSING ALBUM The Missing Album is an ongoing research project that attempts to gather an archive of photographs of Lebanese people living/hiding in their houses during the Beirut Civil War (1975 – 1990). The project serves as a continuation of the research project "I did not grow up in a war," which investigated memories through a series of audio testimonials of Lebanese peoples' houses during the war. In particular, the importance of safety and survival within the domestic interior and its particular rooms (bathroom, entrance hall, kitchen etc.) was showcased. Here, individual memories merge into a collective memory questioning the state of the home and its interior during the war, especially with the absence of an equipped bomb shelter. Accordingly, The Missing Album could be considered as a tool with which to shape collective memory and open up discussion as to whether any photographic archive exists showcasing the states of these families within these rooms.
Snapshot of the Toilet Series Video, 2015. Video Still.
Joanne Choueiri is an architect, interior architect, and researcher from Lebanon. Her transdisciplinary training allowed her to work at the cross section between art, architecture, and research. Her research focuses on possible speculative narratives of space, interiors, and the city. With her work, she has participated in several exhibitions in Milan, London, and Rotterdam. Before moving to Australia, Joanne was a lecturer at the Lebanese American University of Beirut. Currently, she is a PhD candidate and lecturer of architecture and interior design at Griffith University, Australia.
Mark L. Gardner
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COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: THE ECOLOGICAL STEWARDSHIP OF HONEYBEES
Jaklitsch/Gardner Architects partnered with Follow the Honey Tanzania and set out to bring a growing collective group of Cooperative & Tribal Beekeepers to a new apiary study center to share information both in formal and informal ways, exchange beekeeping methods and provide a commerce exchange of honey & bee products. The Tanzania Asali & Nyuki Sanctuary, is a honey (asali), bee (nyuki) education center. The program includes a centralized facility for honey extraction and processing, a large porch honey market, and provides education and services especially to local villages in support of their beekeeping activities. The processing facility will be built for global distribution and profits will return to the Sanctuary to encourage land-use policy, conservation, and eco-tourism. The courtyards and cellular pattern facilitate micro-groups to form in discussion and informal gatherings to exchange of experiences and information regarding beekeeping methods, production techniques, weather, disease, micro-finance etc. building upon social fabric that exists in villages but extending that beyond discrete villages into a larger network of shared intelligence and contact with the global community. We are pursuing through our research, design advocacy and pilot program a transformative and "actionable idealism."
Tanzania Asali & Nyuki Sanctuary, 2015. Digital Rendering Montage. Photo Credit: Jaklitsch/Gardner Architects
Mark L. Gardner is a Principal at Jaklitsch/ Gardner Architects. He is Director of the Graduate Program in Architecture and the Assistant Professor of Architectural Practice and Society at the School of the Constructed Environments, Parsons the New School. Mr. Gardner is on the Board of Overseers for the University of Pennsylvania School of Design tackling issues of inclusion. He currently serves on the Board of Made in Brownsville. Mr. Gardner serves on the Van Alen Institute's Board of Trustees and is a Fellow of the Urban Design Forum.
Adam Geczy
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FASHION ANYWHERE: FASHION, WHERE IS IT? A key concern of a recent book project (edited with Vicki Karaminas), The End of Fashion, explores the question of the situatedness of fashion. Many of us have seen the precipitous closure of certain theme stores, from records to books. For the longevity of a business, it has become mandatory to have an online presence. Since its beginnings Amazon has gone from financially precarious to a mega-corporation that can sell next to everything. Online buying and selling of goods like books and bibelots may be an entirely serviceable method, yet the question of clothing still looms. Fashion, and its accouterments from hats to cosmetics, has always been a sensuous, tactile and olfactory affair. One feels fabric, tries a garment on, moves about, smells the perfume, and so on. What then is the meaning of fashion in the contemporary moment when bereft of these experiences?
One of an endless series of examples of online fashion boutiques, 2018.
Adam Geczy is an artist and writer who teaches at the University of Sydney. His Art: Histories, Theories and Exceptions (Berg, 2008) won the Choice Award for best academic title in art in 2009. Having published over 14 books, recent titles include Fashion and Orientalism (Bloomsbury, 2013) and Artificial Bodies in Fashion and Art (Bloomsbury, 2017). With Vicki Karaminas his titles include Fashion's Double: Representations of Fashion in Painting, Photography and Film (2016) and Critical Fashion Practice, and (edited) The End of Fashion: Clothing and Dress in the Age of Globalization. He is editor of the Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture and ab-Original (both Penn State University Press).
Georgia Banks
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EVERY PERFORMANCE ARTIST REMEMBERED The task is, as the name of the work suggests, to remember every Australian performance artist. This is of course impossible, but in these fifteen minutes we will attempt to do so. The definition of 'performance artist' is yours; I put no limitations on this and will not censor any name you say. I am not a good speller, and you can correct me if you choose. We can converse about any of the artists either of us don't know. It's fine to sit in silence. Ultimately, there is no evidence of who recalled what name. Re-writing of Agatha GotheSnape's instructions for Every Artist Remembered. Every Performance Artist Remembered is a reenactment of Australian performance artist Agatha GotheSnape's Every Artist Remembered. Offering a snapshot of the Australian performance art within an international context, this work explores new ways of remembering, visualizing, and reactivating history. Through this work, an overview of key junctures within Australian history may unfold, with the potential to map a trajectory of not only the performance art world, but also of key movements and moments within Australian history. This work also has the potential to reflect upon the isolation of Australia's performance art history at an international level.
Georgia Banks Decides to Boycott, 2018. Performed at Testing Grounds for 'Melbourne Fringe Festival' 12/09/2018—22/09/2018.
Georgia Banks is a Melbourne based performance artist holding a Master of Fine Arts from Victoria College of the Arts. Her work is concerned with extrapolating new frameworks with which to better understand the potential for reenactment as a feminist act. Her work has recently been exhibited as a part of Adelaide's Feminist Renewal Art Network Festival, and Melbourne's Festival of Live Art, with upcoming performances in Melbourne Fringe Festival, The Other Art Fair presented by Saatchi online and Project Anywhere.
Marialaura Ghidini & Rebekah Modrak
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#EXSTR ANGE: HIJACKING E-COMMERCE FOR ART The online project #exstrange invited a global group of designers, artists and curators to subvert the conventions of eBay, presenting artworks masquerading as goods and services. Artists created artworks-asauctions using the online marketplace's auction template as the tool of production. The chosen sale category (from Business & Industry to Tickets & Experiences), title and descriptive text, strategic images, and pricing worked together to constitute each work. #exstrange put art in a networked context, based on one-to-one exchanges. Artists, makers, and jammers communicated directly with strangers, collectors, and hobbyists who asked questions, and consumed and enacted purchases and tasks proposed by the artworks. #exstrange artists explored the politics of e-commerce space, defined by the global market. For example, when Masimba Hwati initially posted his (Kutengesa Nyika) Soil sample from Harare Kopje under eBay.uk to reach ex-pats from Zimbabwe and to convey the significance of land in Zimbabwe's struggle for independence (the country having been colonized by the British from 1888 – 1980), the site offered him the category of Property in order to reach the sub-category of Land. Collectively, #exstrange re-imagined curating as the practice of initiating actions to dislocate expectations, confuse frameworks of interpretation, and merge high and popular culture into what we experience in the everydayonline experiences included.
#exstrange Live Now on Ebay (Featuring Anke Schüttler), 2017. Internet-Based Work.
Marialaura Ghidini is a curator and researcher. She founded the webbased curatorial platform or-bits.com (2009-2015), organizing online and gallery exhibitions and site-specific interventions in public spaces, radio broadcasts and AiR programmes. With a background in the humanities and a PhD in Curating After New Media (CRUMB, University of Sunderland, UK), Marialaura is currently faculty and course leader for the Bachelor in Creative Arts in Experimental Media Arts at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore, India.
Rebekah Modrak is an artist and writer working at intersections of design and creative resistance to consumer culture. She creates Internet-based interventions, such as Re Made Co., an artwork posing as an online “company.” Re Made recreates actual company Best Made Co. (specializing in $350 designer axes) to satirize their appropriation of manual labor for leisure consumption and revitalization of traditional male roles. Her work Rethink Shinola exposes the company Shinola’s co-option of Detroit’s image and its promotion of the white savior myth. Modrak is Professor of Art in the Stamps School at the University of Michigan.
Christine Howard Sandoval
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LIVE STREAM A live streamed performance using surveillance technology as a tool to channel now disappeared migratory paths, waterways and colonial presences along the boundary of the Taos Pueblo, NM. Using her own body to physically trace the path of a hand dug Hispanic waterway made during colonization in the seventeenth century, the performance examines ongoing pressures of land ownership, boundary systems, and the built environment. Navigating these contested spaces with a wireless camera attached to her own body, a video installation transmits her remote exploration as a disorienting but potentially "grounding" viewer experience. Can an authoritarian technology be transformed by a bodily perspective? Through the use of video and performance, Live Stream attempts to perceive beyond the surface of the built environment through the act of walking to uncover and reclaim the vitality of ecological resources and Indigenous space that continue to exist today. The performance was commissioned by PASEO Project (NM) and will evolve through continued work with community partners during a residency in 2019.
Live Stream, 2018. Video Still.
Christine Howard Sandoval is a Chumash and Hispanic artist based in New York City. Her work challenges the boundaries of representation, access, and habitation through the use of performance, video, and sculpture. Sandoval makes work about contested places such as the historic Native and Hispanic waterways of northern New Mexico; the Gowanus Canal, a Superfund site in New York; and an interfacing suburban-wildland in Colorado. Sandoval has exhibited nationally and internationally at The Museum of Capitalism; Designtransfer; Universität der Kßnste Berlin; El Museo Del Barrio; and Socrates Sculpture Park. Her first solo museum exhibition will debut at The Colorado Springs Fine Art Center in 2019 during which time she will be the Mellon Artist in Residence at Colorado College. Sandoval has been awarded residencies at the Santa Fe Art Institute, Triangle Arts, and The Vermont Studio Center. She holds a BFA from Pratt Institute and an MFA from Parsons The New School for Design. She teaches at Parsons.
Alana Hunt
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CUPS OF NUN CHAI Alana Hunt will discuss the seven year participatory memorial about the seven-year participatory memorial Cups of Nun Chai. Through personal conversation and public media intervention Cups of Nun Chai explores some of the most challenging areas of contemporary life including the failures of democracy, state violence, armed struggle, the inherent fragility of the nation state, the power of the media and the idea of freedom. This work unfolded over two years of tea and conversation in memory of 118 people who died in pro-freedom protests in 2010. From June 2016 to April 2017 the work circulated as an eleven-month newspaper serial in Indian occupied Kashmir, reaching tens of thousands of people on a weekly basis and placing the memory of 2010 in conversation with the news of the day. These 100+ newspapers have been bound into three volumes written in part by the artist, and in part by world events, by Kashmiri journalists, by the actions of the state and civilians, and by advertisers whose very business enable the production and circulation of the newspaper itself. Considered together, they paint a telling picture of life in Kashmir today, and also shed light on its relationship with the world we share.
Cups of Nun Chai (serialised in Kashmir Reader), 2017. Photo Credit: Faisal Khan.
Alana Hunt makes art, writes, and produces culture through a variety of media across public, gallery and online spaces. She lives on Miriwoong country in the north-west of Australia and has a long-standing engagement with South Asia. The politics of nation making and the colonial past and present of Australia and South Asia are central to her practice. Her work is invested in the capacity of art and ideas to shape the social space between people and the public sphere.
Nicolò Krättli & Kaspar Stöbe
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ELSEWHERE / TOMORROW How might identity be represented? Identity is located in the present, positioned between the past and the future. Since the past is given by history, in order to drag identity into the present, we must oppose reality with a projection of the future. Once, the mosaic was a medium for identity representation, effectively storing a spirit in time for eternity. Today, by contrast, the screen shows live images based on light. By combining the durability of the mosaic and the 'transient moment' of the screen, we can make a mosaic of the present. The oldest and most contemporary mosaic is the sky, visible from every place on earth. It remains recognizable as the sky, while never being the same. Over decades, it served as a canvas for the representation of society, its structures and its dreams. To create a mosaic of the present, we calculate an image, showing the prediction of the sky in 24 hours. This prediction of the future is the stage for the negotiation of the topics of today, such as: power, dreams, territory, ephemeral, Anthropocene, big data, surveillance and spirituality. This live image is conceived to be shown on a large screen, contrasting with the real sky, and being updated constantly.
Elsewhere/Tomorrow 1, 2017. Digital Collage. 3508 x 2481cm. Image Credit: 11/2017
Kaspar Stöbe lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany. He studied architecture at ETH Zürich/CH and TU Delft/NL and completed his Masters at the Chair of Christian Kerez. Working with Herzog & de Meuron, Stöbe understands how workflow design and structure influences outcomes. His recent stay with Tomas Saraceno and Tue Greenfort in Berlin gave him a glimpse insight into the international art scene and its requisite mechanisms. Since 2016, Stöbe runs his own office as a platform for multidisciplinary collaborative projects at different scales and in the fields of architecture, art and beyond.
Nicolò Krättli lives and works in Zurich and Chur, Switzerland. He studied architecture at the ETH in Zurich, and completes his Masters with Prof. Christian Kerez in 2015. Amongst others, Krättli has worked at the atelier of Peter Zumthor. More recently, Not Vital brought him to Agadez in Niger, where he attempted to build a minaret sculpture. Krättli now works as an artist. In a recent project, he aimed to preserve and materialize virtual data such as film in a so-called Video-Solid sculpture. For this project, he received (together with Jann Erhard) a prize for digital Sculpture 2016 at Art Museum Ulm, Germany.
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Laurent Labourmène
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AFTER EARTHRISE It is only during the last eighty-seven years of the +200,000-year history of our species that we have been able to physically travel to the stratosphere and beyond. While the impulse to imagine and view the Earth from celestial heights is ancient, the 'orbital perspective' remains something that fewer than 570 people have experienced first-hand. This presentation will explore a new work being developed by the presenter: an observatory specifically designed to enhance our contemplation of Earth. Unlike many observatories that look out to the stars, this observatory is envisaged as a type of mirror that reflects a living, real-time, constantly-changing portrait of Earth back to humanity. In the tradition of ancient stone labyrinth structures that have been 'walked' by people around the world for centuries and used as a contemplative tool, the intent is for the observatory to be a site of pilgrimage and ritual which invites us to reflect on our place in space and time, not just conceptually but viscerally as a wholebody experience. The presentation will also include an overview of some of the ideas and experiences that guide this endeavor together with a collection of reflections from people invited to consider the project.
Study for the observatory, Lagrange points in the Earth-Sun system, 2018.
Laurent Labourmène has spent the last 20 years working at the confluence of art, science, culture, foresight and societal change. He began his career with the United Nations and later founded and supported numerous social enterprises. Named an Architect of the Future by the Europeanbased Waldzell Institute, his journey and work have been profiled in several publications and incorporated into a 'social sculpture' created by American artists Clegg & Guttmann and housed at Melk Abbey, Austria.
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LungA School Jonatan Spejlborg & Lasse Høgenhof
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A CACOPHONY The LungA School is the name given to a particular period of time spent in a particular place-namely 84 days in Seyðisfjörður, East Iceland. It is an entity staging its own existence. It is a composition, a set of arranged circumstances, notes on a string. Each note is in its place, which could be any place, but then again, it could not. It is where it is, and it isn't where it is. The motives are still unclear. But since we are alive we might as well play the part and not resign our existence to whatever available mode of indifference we are around. The LungA School is multitudes. A temporary organism, an everlasting echo, a memory, anticipation, a surprising/ surprised group of beings, a school, a performance, a commune, a bunch of questions and critiques. Spiraling pointless intentions. A collapse of understanding which allows for uncertainty. We become estranged from ourselves.
Oral, Vocal, Visual—The Musical. Devised and performed in February 2018 in Seyðisfjörður, 2018.
Jonatan Spejlborg and Lasse Høgenhof, both based in Seyðisfjörður, are artists, teachers, janitors, carpenters, friends and more depending on the situation. They are living and working in and through the experimental art school, LungA School, founded in 2014. Their collaboration and praxis is founded on enthusiasm and centred around creating and exposing interesting situations through more or less civilised structures, actions and complete engagement as well as fostering environments for conscious, social praxis of generating culture.
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Benjamin Matthews
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NEW HYPOTHETICAL CONTINENTS Vermeulen and van den Akker (2015) describe a "utopian turn" in contemporary art, where a "structure of feeling" that moves beyond the postmodern has emerged. This ambivalent quality — evanescent, yet all about — evidenced during the 2010s has given rise to collective aesthetic and intellectual movements that engage with the impact of global flows of digitised capital and culture, and the expanded influence of related industry such as high-tech manufacturing. Examples include "Vaporwave" (music), "the New Aesthetic" (design) and "ruin porn" (photography), made coherent by presenting consistently ambivalent responses to the effects of technology and relying on high-tech means of creation and mediation. These are emergent — not intended or centrally governed — spontaneous creations of extended networks whose participants respond to a broad set of themes and conditions via aesthetic means, rather than the particular circumstances and politic that tended to define the art movements of the 1900s. New Hypothetical Continents (NHCs) is a project that aims to establish a growing, interactive archive of digital media that responds to the rise of utopia in art, popular culture and public discourse, and contributions can be intentional creations or found art in any media that comment at a remove or by playfully adopting a utopian mode.
New Hypothetical Continents (maquette), 2017. Bronze, Edition of 5 + 1AP. 26 x 20.5 x 8cm.
Benjamin Matthews is a consultant and Adjunct Fellow at Western Sydney University in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, researching in the areas of digital practices and literacies, postindustrial media work, media art, globalisation and networked collectives. I collaborate with artists, and frequently appear as a guest lecturer. My areas of interest are inspired by a decade of experience in media work, and academic background that cuts across anthropology, digital media studies and literary studies. I am co-author of the forthcoming Understanding Journalism (Sage, 2018).
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Nancy Mauro Flude
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TECHNĀS TR ANQUIL SUBMISSION (PERFORMANCE LECTURE) Through poetic-speculative live software coding storytelling the performer uncovers visually opening the insides of the operating system behind our daily computer interactions. Through enquiring conversations, the amplified sound of fingertips dancing across the keyboard conveys the poetics and isokinetics of machine and human intelligence. File searching and text parsing are the main scene of action, the clacking of keys, throughout acquires a parallel rhythm and presence of their own. Weaving her story through performative algorithms, the execution of code in a surreal first-person narrative, touching on subjects from dark matter to rogue bots, through her journal entries, and conversations with a non-human entity, the performer muses about security, embodiment, habitus and morphology; demystifying the mysterious black magic box of the commuter. The intention is to highlight profusion, play, ivresse and how the written symbolic formulae of computing machines, metaphysics and the performance of language have historically co-constituted one another.
Error_in_time, 2017. Production Still.
sister0.tv
Nancy Mauro Flude is an artist who specialises artisanal networked systems; she is interested in the demystification of technology, and the ‘mystification’ that lies in and through the performance of the machinic assemblage. Mauro-Flude has devised and curated extensively within the field of experimental art forms. She has contributed to publications such as: FLOSS+Art London: Mute; Intersecting Art and Technology in Practice: Techne/Technique/ Technology, Routledge; Unlikely: Transdisciplinary Journal for Creative Arts; Live Interfaces, Leonardo MIT Press. Formerly, Assistant Professor Communications and New Media, National University Singapore, Nancy now runs the Post Digital Culture studio in the Digital Media Programme, School of Design, RMIT Melbourne.
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Ana Mendes
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ON DR AWING On Drawing is a research project that explores the connection between drawing and thinking, in the realms or arts and science. The project is based on the video On Drawing, filmed with Mina Perougie, the cleaner of an artist in residence that Mendes attended in France in 2016. Since Mina does not know how to read or to write, she uses drawing as a tool for everyday life. Taking the video as a departure point, Mendes initiated a research project that aims to analyze how different people use drawing as a thinking tool — from plumbers to architects, students or choreographers, everyone draws — so, why do we draw? And what is the impact of drawing on the brain?
Ana Mendes is a writer and visual artist who develops projects using video, performance, text, photography, drawing and sound, to address issues such as memory, language and identity. Recent solo shows include the Natural History Museum, Vienna, Austria (2017), the Universalmuseum Joanneum/ Natural History Museum, Graz/Austria (2017). Recent group exhibitions: Jerwood Space, London, UK (2017) and the MAC, Belfast, UK (2016). She has been the recipient of several awards in literature, photography, performance and drawing throughout Europe and North America — recently the Jerwood Drawing Prize 2017, second prize winner, Jerwood Charitable Foundation, London, UK.
Production created using public funding by Arts Council England and British Council and a Visual Artist Bursary, awarded by a-n (artist information company), UK, 2018.
On Drawing, 2016. Video Still @ 09:53.
anamendes.com
Jacob Olmedo
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AND THE WORLD WILL BE AS ONE We are currently in a new era, combatting mass species extinction and climate change. This work explores the political and social implication of the environment with the strong intention to bring humans and the natural world together as one, this work is expressions of growth, change, activation, and participation. These wearable garments that conceptually act as environmental armor made of a hydroponic textile and are almost completely made by hand. Created with scientific research to engineering this hydroponic growing textile, that has utilized already existing hydroponic system to create textile the supports and promote plant life. This work aims to evolve with a community to create a material dialogue that explores how we as individuals and as communities share being alive on earth now. As the work expands it stays true to its roots in experimentation and innovation but is unfolding with new techniques in textile of hydroponic yarns, 3-D Printing, and new forms.
Process, 2017. Hydroponic Textile, Wheatgrass Seeds. Model: Valerie Grapek Photo: Teagan West
Jacob Olmedo holds a BFA in Fashion Design and is in the inaugural class for his MFA in Textiles at Parson School of Design. He is a designer who focuses on sustainability and the future of textiles and garments. He is the first Liz Claiborne Scholar in 2018 awarded by the Council of Fashion Designers of America, while also winning the Designer of the Year: Future Textiles Award in 2017. Jacob practices in-depth research, systematic analysis, experimental material development, user testing, and garment construction, all as a part of his continuing design work And The World Will Be As One.
Macushla Robinson
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APESH*T IN THE WAKE OF MUSEAL WHITENESS In the videoclip for ApeSh*t, The Carters traverse the Louvre after dark. A troupe of dancers loop through hallowed halls asserting the continuing presence of people of color in the spaces of high culture. The Louvre’s collection rests on colonial entanglements and a history of enslavement. Many have dissected this videoclips art historical references, and Kimberly Rose Drew (best known by her twitter handle MuseumMammy) identifies the influence of Black photographers Deana Lawson and John Edmunds to remind viewers of the voices of Black culture that resonate here. This paper looks at the ways in which the videoclip references a theme that literary scholar Christina Sharpe articulates in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, the four chapters of which deploy concepts from the history of transatlantic slavery — 'The Wake,’ ‘The Ship,’ ‘The Hold,’ and ‘The Weather.’ Beyoncé and Jay-Z perform in front of classical antiquities and French paintings, two of which reference disasters at sea: The Winged Victory of Samothrace — originally a ship’s figurehead — evokes a passage across the sea and, inevitably, the slave ship’s hold. Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa depicts a scene from an 1816 shipwreck off the coast of Mauritania. The line ‘I can’t believe we made it’ in front of these pieces speaks of the cultural survival of a people whom Audre Lorde wrote were ‘never meant to survive.’ Indeed, the video signals their arrival as royalty in the spaces of French colonial subjugation.
Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Portrait of a Negress, 1800). Oil on canvas, 81 x 65 cm. Courtesy of Musée du Louvre & Museum of France, 1999. Photography: Hervé Lewandowski
Macushla Robinson is a writer and curator. She is currently the General Sir John Monash Cultural Scholar completing graduate study at the New School for Social Research in New York. She is also Assistant Curator to the New School Art Collection. Prior to this she was Curator of Contemporary International Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. She has worked on a wide range of projects at the AGNSW including curating the exhibition See You at the Barricades (2015); managing the contemporary project series for 2014 and working on projects including Tino Sehgal: This is So Contemporary (2014); Francis Bacon: Five Decades (2012) and the John Kaldor Family Gallery (2011). Publications include a chapter in the Kaldor catalogue and articles for Art & Australia, Art Monthly Australia and Art Asia Pacific, dealing with a range of topics from the devotional text in contemporary art through to empathy in contemporary Indian video art.
Ryota Sato
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MATSUSHIMA BUNKO MUSEUM Matsushima Bunko Museum is located on a smallest inhabited island in Setouchi sea called Matsushima where population is just two. Matsushima Bunko Museum is an ongoing project between artists, architects, designers, musicians and local community members. The goal of the museum is unknown, and it has little to offer. No formal exhibitions. No art collections. No curators nor even a director. The only thing the museum offers is an invitation. An invitation to build programs, platforms and the museum itself. By actively engaging in the development of the museum, Matsushima Bunko Museum hopes to provide education through participation, not by offering lessons. The museum's current projects include working with a geologist, historian and local residents to study the history and geology of this island. Working with a potter to experiment with clay found on the island and artists to make salt. Artist-in-residence program could happen if artists wish to stay. Matsushima Bunko Museum it is an ongoing collaboration between the institution and the participants.
Matsushima Bunko Museum, 2018. Photo Courtesy of the Matsushima Bunko Museum
Ryota Sato (b. Okayama, Japan) is an artist currently based in New York. His practice spans digital media, video installation, painting, photography, and sculpture. His work explores the relationship between human bodies, landscapes, information media, slippage of nature-culture and the circulation of imagery particularly in relation to image capturing devices. He will be joining Matsushima Bunko Museum in 2019, working as a collaborator and a liaison between the museum and participants.
Luciana Scrutchen
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TEXTILES AS ART, CULTURE, AND SCIENCE: DISCOVERY OF THE EPHEMER AL AND PERENNIAL IMPRINTS THROUGH MODELED ECOSYSTEMS
Textiles are inextricably woven into conversations of sustainable practices in fashion. Scrutchen's work investigates subsistence cultures and resources of Alaska, in addition to utilizing raw materials from Aquaponic farming. Collaborations with science scholars from Eugene Lang has informed research consisting of exploration of extracting colorants from living microbes. Scrutchen's aim is to utilize waste material for dyes, as well as a resource for cultivating textile fiber plants and tanning substances for harvested fish skin by-products. Accordingly, she hopes to contribute to industry by designing a scalable circular system for textile production. A deeper understanding of scientific processes and cultural practices feeds Scrutchen's art and design (without appropriation, exploitation or harming the ephemeral beauty of natural ecosystems). She take a path that illuminates what can be taught to us as opposed to what can be exploited. Old and new converge as I examine the intrinsic beneficial attributes of Alaskan resources; lichen and glacial waters, beaver pelts, whale baleen, shed fur from arctic Muskox, and salmon skin. Creating perennial sources with minimal impact on nature or need for additional land cultivation. We cannot ignore the impact that humans have on nature. We can, however, change that impact from a negative into a positive.
Gathering the Coveted, Lichens from Juneau, Alaska, 2017. Photography and Digital, 4.5 x 10in.
Luciana Scrutchen, Asst. Prof. of Fashion, Parsons School of Design, received her BFA in Weaving and Textile Design from Rochester Institute of Technology and her MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons School of Design. Her textile and digital work embodies an exploration of plant, insect, and earth colorants with the visceral materiality of new and experimental fibers and leathers gathered from Alaska's sustainable and subsistence cultures. Her research integrates intersections of biology and textiles, developed into constructed and printed materials, investigating the relationship to fashion, ecological systems, as well as the impact of small-scale and large-scale textile production practices.
Leela Shanker
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ARCHIPEL AGO OF THE EVERYDAY SUSPENDED IN LIGHT AND DARK When standing face to face what lies between is shared by both. This field of the “in between” takes form as a spatial and experiential commons defined by its adjacent bodies as much as it charges each of them with proximity. In the vernacular of the city, void that lies between carved mass can similarly be scripted as a form of spatial and experiential commons. Situated within the public realm, we find the distinct opportunity of The Street. The Street is a body of space. Programs overlap and flow into each other without clearly defined edge or boundary, overlaying dissonant and harmonic uses. Immersed in light and dark phenomena, we move through this volume as a body of people, the collective defining physical parameters as well as characters of the scene. A mass in motion, we traverse the continuum of conditions that connect the disparate spaces, activities and people that form the archipelago of our Everyday. Light and dark as a found phenomena become prompts for discovery. Urban encounters with a medium that simultaneously dictates and conflates time, provides provocations evoking a fertile sense of possibility. Commuters then become inventors and the kinetics of the unexpected become experiences shared between strangers that brim with narratives of What Could Be.
Suspended, 2018.
Leela Shanker’s practice at the intersection of art and design investigates conditions of the constructed environment as potential provocations for alternate constructions of reality. After 10 years in the Australian film and media industries, Shanker’s exploration of narrative evolved from screen to the public realm. Founding the Flint Collective NYC with peers from art, architecture, lighting design, interactive design, product design and film, the city provides a platform for suggesting new ground of the commons and collective experience. Having collaborated and curated with art and design collectives in Berlin, Shanghai, New York and Sydney, Shanker recently completed the Master of Architecture and Master of Fine Arts — Lighting Design at Parsons School of Design. Based in New York, she continues to work across the mediums of light, film, LED art, performance art and interactive media with a focus on site specific interventions.
Mark Shorter
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WHAT HAPPENS IF TOMMY LEE JONES DOESN'T WRITE BACK? In the TV miniseries Westworld (2017 –) the automaton Dolores Abernathy rises every morning to paint Castle Valley; a landscape that has become synonymous with American Cinema and The Western through film directors such as John Ford. Dolores' daily gesture raises two important questions: First, why is she programmed to repeatedly paint this iconic scene? And second, and more importantly, what exactly is she painting? Through film, sites like Castle Valley have become mythic locations; virtual sites where rivalling masculinities have been given a privileged site to violently compete for supremacy. This presentation will consider how this conflict has shaped the environment so that it has become a world far removed from the actual politics of the site. Through the reading of series of letters that have been penned to auteurs that include Tommy Lee Jones, Jonathan Nolan and Kelly Reichardt this performance will consider how the iconic Western landscape has been fashioned by white male directors to play out their fears and explore the limits of a gendered masculinity.
Hello Stranger, Campbelltown Art Centre, Sydney, 2018. Performance and Installation. Photo Credit: Document Photography
markshorter.com.au
Mark Shorter is an artist and academic who completed a PhD in Visual Arts at the Sydney College of the Arts, Australia. Significant exhibitions and performances include: Hello Stranger, Campbelltown Art Centre, Sydney 2018; 6m of Plinth, Artspace, Sydney 2016; Mapping La Mancha, The Physics Room, New Zealand 2015; The Groker, Plato's Cave, EIDIA House 2015, New York. From 2010 to 2012 he was the host of "The Renny Kodgers Quiz Hour" on Sydney radio station FBi 94.5FM. Shorter currently Head of Sculpture and Spatial Practice at Victorian College of Arts, University of Melbourne.
Joshua Singer
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TYPOGR APHIC L ANDSCAPE ECOLOGIES: AL AMEDA, CALIFORNIA, USA Typographic Landscape Ecologies is an ongoing design research project that documents, maps, and visualizes typographic artifacts in the urban landscape as a way to explore cultural forces in the constructed world. It presupposes a model of a semiotic landscape; a complex multidimensional text or collection of texts; an ecology of discernible semiotic units that define a concept of a geographic space. It uses conventional research as a means to authoritatively document the landscape in an attempt to reveal patterns and relationships working data into new syntaxes, into alternative and speculative narratives, that can offer glimpses of other potentialities. It uses experimental methods as a foil to the authority of conventional research as a way to generate speculative conclusions (the illumination of new knowledge is the ultimate goal of research and so we can assume that subjective and illegitimate conclusions have value by revealing something not yet known). It is a theoretical conceptual research project about design disguised as an instrumental experimental methodological design research project. It does not offer concrete answers but instead poses new and unexpected questions.
Typographic Landscape Ecologies: Alameda, California, USA, 2017. ArcGIS map.
adhocatlas.com
Joshua Singer is a designer, teacher, and writer. He is Associate Professor and Coordinator of Visual Communication Design at San Francisco State University, and Director of the San Francisco State University DESIGNSPACE gallery. His work sits at the busy intersection of design research, design theory, geography, and experimental and critical methodologies. He has a BA from Hampshire College, MFA in Fine Art from the City University of New York/ Hunter College, and MFA in Design from California College of the Arts.
Soil Series Francesca Fiore and Hillary Wagner
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SOCIAL DR AWING: THEORY AND PR AXIS IN APPAL ACHIA Since June of 2017, artists Francesca Fiore and Hillary Wagner have been living and working in Wagner's hometown of Bethel, Ohio — a rural Appalachian village suffering from widespread disinvestment, eroding economic opportunity, and a staggering opioid epidemic. Through their work on SOIL SERIES: A Social Drawing, Fiore and Wagner are collaborating with community members to research local history, investigate social conditions, and make art that imagines an alternative future of cultural and social nourishment. Fiore and Wagner will present their concept of social drawing as a methodology for community-based praxis rooted in a deep understanding of place. Modifying Beuys's theory of social sculpture to operate at a smaller scale, social drawing builds upon existing community networks to identify and develop new pathways toward health, knowledge, resources, and support. Where social sculpture imagines a utopian work of art to which all of humanity contributes, social drawing emerges from within a community, considering its specific needs and concerns and prioritizing the cultivation of trust between artist(s) and community members through horizontal partnerships. Fiore and Wagner will offer examples of the forms social drawing may take and effects it may have based on their experiences in Bethel.
Soil Series. Material Inventory of Ranch (detail), 2017. Inkjet prints on Plywood. Photo Credit: Francesca Fiore.
Soil Series: A Social Drawing is an ongoing collaboration between artists Francesca Fiore and Hillary Wagner and the rural Appalachian community of Bethel, Ohio. A dynamic set of relationships between artists, community members, and local organizations, SOIL SERIES is a drawing in the most expansive sense. As it creates the conditions for new conversations and relationships within the community and without, each new connection becomes a dynamic line in a relational web. This relational web, or social drawing, is the generative engine for communityinitiated social change.
Andrew Stooke
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HIGH ISL AND CIRCUMAMBUL ATION The High Island Circumambulation was a performance undertaken in the days leading up to the Anywhere and Elsewhere conference. High Island is a tidal island in Long Island Sound. The walk around the island was a side project of From the Larger to the Smaller Islands, included in Project Anywhere for 2018; involving walks around all the UK's 43 tidal islands. Using experimental documentation this presentation will explore affective evidence as a means of recording durational, site-specific performance. The walk is made as a solitary, low-impact, event-discreet, to the point of absorption into people's everyday movements. The work enacts arrival and departure at a place sometimes separate and sometimes integral. The walk involves a remote interpretive collaborator, based on the other side of the world. The collaborator responds to photographs, transmitted by cell phone, with animated gif emoticons. The sequence of responses is the work's documentation. Lucy Lippard defined 'sedentary exhibitions' as 'odd vehicles for communicating and informing about global issues.' The presentation will address the metaphor of sediment, revisiting 'dematerialization,' as a humanist project in an age of displacement.
High Island Circumambulation (concept image), 2018. Digital montage.
Andrew Stooke is an artist and writer based in London and Shanghai. His work combines of new and traditional media. Recent projects include; Impossible Bands at Shanghai Power Station of Art, testing empathy via fallible Internet messaging; and Pigeon, commissioned to mark the anniversary of the UK's legalization of private homosexual acts, concerning the love of birds nesting on the roof of a former home of British modernist composer Benjamin Britten. Previously he was director of the Oliver Holt Gallery in Dorset UK; a space for artists' residencies and commissions based in the context of heritage, education and science.
Jessica Winton
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RIS PUBLICA As a sculptor working in the expanded field of art, public support is vital. Recognition of art's importance can only happen — as Hannah Arendt has noted— through increased visibility, or "appearance" in public. Ris Publica (trans: public laughter) proposes the site of the civic parade as a unique possibility — as an event that carries forward a history and infrastructure of civic culture, while containing potential for the enactment of a diverse civic identity. Through a humorous form of open participation, the project ensconces itself in the event of the parade. This endeavor seeks to jointly engage members of civic society for the parade, a process by which art facilitates having 'exclusive characteristics and yet simultaneously shared experience.' The postulation is that public aesthetic literacy will improve, along with an elevated regard for arts and thus an increase in heterogeneous participation. Several parade entries have been created, performed and documented since 2016. Responses to these works have been gathered through discussion with the participants and the public in the weeks following the performances. Ris Publica presents each public event and describes how knowledge acquired from the collection of responses drove upcoming projects.
Domestic Cleansing (from the Ris Publica series), 2016. Mixed Media. 2in x 10.5ft x 16ft. Photo Credit: K. Knight, 2016.
Jessica Winton is an advocate for art in the public realm, who creates performative/sculptural installations to provoke civic engagement on socio-political issues. Her experiences as a prop builder in the film & television industry have influenced her atypical approach to material usage. Having recently attained an MFA from NSCAD University, she continues to investigate the role of the artist in the public spheres we occupy. Her art projects aim to unwind public ambivalence through common metaphor and intriguing illusion. Her home and studio are based in Halifax, though her projects often carry her off into the streets, woodland and open fields.
Chris Wood
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WALKING WITH SATELLITES AND POETIC RESEARCH This presentation will showcase Walking with Satellites, the project presented by Project Anywhere. It situates this project within Wood's subsequent work to develop 'poetic' research methods. This approach builds on Bowker and Star's concept of "texture" (1999) to explore how the operation and effects of large technical infrastructures can be felt, described and understood through metaphor and creative practice. Walking with Satellites leveraged moments of breakdown in smooth functioning of the GPS network to draw attention to its presence and ask people to rethink their practice. It also re-cast existing narratives around GPS through speculative workshops, culminating in the project "GPS Tarot" which uses the overhead positions of satellites to create a chart of tarot cards that formed the basis for one-on-one readings. The collective name for a group of satellites is a constellation and this project asks how, like the stars, satellites could enjoy a dual role in navigation and divination. By offering transformative experiences and re-understandings of familiar technologies, such work can provide powerful reflective prompts for participant-based research into the emergence of sociotechnical practices.
Walking With Satellites, 2016. Composite Photo, Ermoupoli, Greece.
chriswood.art
Chris Wood is an artist and researcher interested in imaginaries around technology, especially the ways emerging technology define our experiences of space and time. His practice is based around collaborative workshops, conversations and interactions. He uses these to develop interactive installations and encounters. His work also draws on his background as a sound recordist, engineer and radio producer, through a strong use of speech and narrative. He had exhibited across Europe and in North America and recently completed a PhD in Media & Arts Technology at Queen Mary University of London.
2018
CURATORS
Sean
THE CUR ATOR S
Lowry
Simone
ANY WHERE AND EL SEWHERE
Douglas
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is a Melbourne-based artist, writer, curator and musician. He holds a PhD in Visual Arts from the University of Sydney and is currently Head of Critical and Theoretical Studies in Art at Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. He has exhibited and performed extensively both nationally and internationally, and his writing appears in numerous journals and edited volumes. Lowry is also Founder and Executive Director of Project Anywhere ( projectanywhere.net ), and one half (with Ilmar Taimre) of The Ghosts of Nothing (ghostsofnothing.com). For more information, please visit seanlowry.com. is a NYC-based artist, curator and writer. She is currently the director of the MFA Fine Arts Program at Parsons School of Design, The New School. Douglas’ works have been exhibited at, and are held in Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Photographers Gallery, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney; and Month of the Photo, Paris. Douglas has curated for the Auckland Festival, The Pingyao International Festival of Photography and on behalf of the Getty Conservation Institute and the Australian Museum. She is co-editor of Anywhere and co-curator of Anywhere and Elsewhere.
2018
CHAIRS
Thom
THE CHAIR S
Donovan
Genevieve Hyacinthe
Les
ANY WHERE AND EL SEWHERE
Joynes
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is the author of numerous books including Withdrawn (Compline, 2017), The Hole (Displaced Press, 2012) and Withdrawn: a Discourse (Shifter, 2016). He co-edits and publishes ON Contemporary Practice. He is also the editor of Occupy Poetics (Essay Press, 2015); To Look At The Sea Is To Become What One Is: an Etel Adnan Reader (with Brandon Shimoda; Nightboat Books, 2014), Supple Science: a Robert Kocik Primer (with Michael Cross; ON Contemporary Practice, 2013), and Wild Horses Of Fire. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Literary Studies at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts. holds a PhD from Harvard in Art of West Africa and the Black Atlantic with a subfield in contemporary art. She teaches in the MFA Fine Arts Department of Parsons. Hyacinthe is a former dancer and current board member for ANIKAYA Global Dance, Boston, and serves on the editorial boards of ab-Original: Journal of Indigenous Studies and First Nations’ and First Peoples’ Cultures, Penn State, Stella Maris Multidisciplinary International Journal of Academic Research, Chennai: Stella Maris College. Her book, Radical Virtuosity: Ana Mendieta and the Black Atlantic, is forthcoming with MIT Press, Fall 2019. She teaches in the MFA Fine Art program at both Parsons School of Design and School of Visual Art, NYC. is founder of the nomadic installation series FormLAB, Les Joynes is a New York-based artist-explorer, curator and visual culture scholar at Columbia University. A graduate of Central St. Martins and Goldsmiths, London, he holds a doctorate from Leeds Metropolitan University, a Post-doctorate from University of São Paulo; was Bauhaus Artist Fellow and TrAIN Fellow at University of the Arts London. A US Fulbright-Hays awarded artist, he is 2019 US Department of State Art and Technology Artist for Sri Lanka. Exhibiting, writing and lecturing worldwide Joynes is visiting faculty at Renmin University, Beijing and serves on the Editorial Board for Project Anywhere. He is represented by Jaeckel Gallery in New York.
CHAIRS
Lan Thao Lam
Christiane Paul
Jane Philbrick
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is an artist whose practice is grounded in research, installation, object-making film and photography. For over 15 years, she has been part “Lin + Lam,” producing works engaging issues of immigration, sites of trauma, national identity and historical memory. Lam received his MFA from CalArts and considers his experience in refugee camps and housing projects as education. They have exhibited at The Busan Biennale; Auckland International Festival of Photography; 3rd Guangzhou Triennial; Korean Arts Council; Taiwan International Documentary Festival; Stedelijk Museum; The International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. Her awards include Canada Council for the Arts and Vera List Center for Art and Politics Fellowship. Lin + Lam are 2018 – 2020 fellows at the India China Institute. is Chief Curator/Director of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center and Professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School, and Adjunct Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She received the Thoma Foundation's 2016 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, and her recent books are A Companion to Digital Art (Blackwell-Wiley, 2016) and Digital Art (Thames and Hudson, 3rd edition, 2015). At the Whitney Museum she curated exhibitions including Programmed (2018) and Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools (2011), and is responsible for artport, the museum’s portal to Internet art. Other curatorial work includes Little Sister (is watching you, too) (Pratt Manhattan Gallery, 2015) and What Lies Beneath (Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, 2015). is an artist, educator, and writer working at the community level in the global context. Her large-scale installations and sculpture range in media from ultrasound and rammed earth to magnetic levitation and found space. She works in collaboration across disciplines in science and engineering, architecture, music, and performance. She teaches in the Art, Media, Technology
CHAIRS
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Program, Parsons School of Design/The New School, and is former director of C:Art MFA, Valand School of Fine Art, University of Gothenburg, artist fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT, and co-curator of 2019–20 Dirt & Debt artist residency at Residency Unlimited, Brooklyn. Sreshta Rit Premnath
Macushla Robinson
is an Indian born artist, editor and educator based in Brooklyn. Premnath is the founder and co-editor of the publication Shifter and has had solo exhibitions at venues including Ace Gallery, Los Angeles; Nomas Foundation, Rome; Kansas Gallery, New York; Gallery SKE, Bangalore; The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; Tony Wight Gallery, Chicago and Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions at venues including Queens Museum, New York; YBCA, San Francisco; Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai and Art Dubai Projects. Premnath is Assistant Professor at Parsons Fine Arts. is a writer and curator. She is currently the General Sir John Monash Cultural Scholar completing graduate study at the New School for Social Research in New York. She is also assistant curator to the New School Art Collection. Prior to this she was curator of contemporary International art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. She has worked on a wide range of projects at the AGNSW including curating the exhibition See You at the Barricades (2015); managing the contemporary project series for 2014 and working on projects including Tino Sehgal: This is So Contemporary (2014); Francis Bacon: Five Decades (2012) and the John Kaldor Family Gallery (2011). Publications include a chapter in the Kaldor catalogue and articles for Art & Australia, Art Monthly Australia and Art Asia Pacific, dealing with a range of topics from the devotional text in contemporary art through to empathy in contemporary Indian video art.
ACKNOWLE D G M E N T S
Proudly supported as part of a partnership between Project Anywhere, Centre of Visual Art (University of Melbourne) and Parsons Fine Art (Parsons School of Design, The New School).
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Editors Sean Lowry & Simone Douglas Design
This publication would not have been possible without our forward-thinking publisher, Conveyor Studio. The conference would not have been possible without Kate Parvenski, Conference Production and Parsons Fine Arts office. Published by Project Anywhere; Centre of Visual Art (University of Melbourne) and Parsons Fine Art (Parsons School of Design, The New School).
Contact Information projectanywhere@gmail.com
Christina Labey ISBN 978-0-692-06323-1 Cover Image NASA All Images Š the Artist Unless
Otherwise Noted
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