Cleaning in progress: the line between art and life
(2021)
author(s): Ulvi Haagensen
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition combines image, text, and video to provide an overview of my artistic research, which focuses on the embodied experience of art-making in relation to the everyday. Equipped with the notions of a line and a circle, I explore the connections and overlaps between art and life through a multi-disciplinary art practice that combines installation, sculpture, drawing, performance, and video, and merges this with everyday experiences, mainly cleaning, one of the more mundane aspects of everyday life. In this work, I am accompanied by three imaginary friends, who are also artists. We find ourselves constantly crossing the lines between art, art-making, and everyday life as we move between our roles and various places of work, such as home, university, library, and studio. We dip into the everyday for materials, tools, and techniques, and work in the manner of a bricoleuse, using a ‘make do’ approach and ‘what is at hand’. Along the way, we ponder the specialness of art, especially from the perspective of an artist for whom art and art-making are a part of the everyday and therefore quite un-special. As we puzzle over the distinctions of whether something is practical or impractical, useful or useless, art or non-art, mundane or special, we end up blurring the borders to discover an approach that attempts to dispense with the idea of boundaries and binaries altogether.
Breathing Lessons
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): N Liebenberg
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In one of the chapters of the 1959 publication, 'Plant Pathology: An Advanced Treatise', two scientist, Ikuzo Uritani and Takashi Akazawa, formulated an equation for depicting what a change in the metabolic process of respiration in a plant caused by an outside pathogen might look like.
This exposition will use this equation as a starting point to think through empathy and more-than-human modes of being. Using disease and the afflicted body (human and more-than-human) it will explore how art-making and curatorship can translate this equation into the affective and the visual realm through various modes of play. In this manner, it will also speak back to, and subvert, the clinical scientific language through which these occurrences are conveyed in scientific communities - making the familiar strange to these practitioners.
Documentation of these various translations will take on the form of text, sound, video and images of personal explorations, as well as manifestations from a range of other artists and disciplines (such as architects, musicians, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and philosophers, to name a few). As such, the exposition will be an expanded 'object-study' of this equation, realised curatorially.