Contiguous (Enlightenment Panel no 1)
(2024)
author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
published in: Research Catalogue
Painting, digital video with dance performance, 2010-2011. Apartment renovation in central Athens (with Sean A. Hladkyj), 2016-17.
1. What happens at the borders where two colours meet? Purposefully exposing by meticulously smudging the edges of painted surfaces shows that there is a small area at the margins that remains undecided.
2. How do we formalise external sensory information? Experimenting with painterly techniques, such as pouring paint directly onto paper and moving the paper around to apply liquid paint, for the larger painting, I methodically applied processes of rationalisation and abstraction for painting a tree branch from life.
The research for the painting and the final work were produced during a painting workshop at the Slade School of Fine Art. The digital video was recorded at one of the rehearsals for a dance performance by choreographer J. Y. Corti at the London Contemporary Dance School.
The title "Enlightenment Panel" comes from Peter Sloterdijk's 'Critique of Cynical Reason', published in 1983, which critically discusses philosophical and popular cynicism.
Body Hegemonies 2017: An Experimental Transfer
(2021)
author(s): Monica Clare van der Haagen-Wulff, Michael Lazar, Fabian Chyle
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Body Hegemonies is an artistic project aimed at exploring and making transparent some of the themes of epistemic violence and hegemonic orders resulting from the legacy of colonialism and slavery, as the hidden flip-side of modernity and enlightenment. Our aim was to examine the Eurocentric logic of dehumanization and processes of exclusion from the perspective of bodies and their embeddedness within these hegemonic structures. The goal was to use artistic methods as tools to research topics commonly examined within an academic framework. The project focused on aspects of bodies that have been/are being excluded or made invisible within contemporary and historical discourses. “Body Hegemonies” worked on the trans-disciplinary interface (entanglement) of theorists, performers and everyday practitioners (experts), in an attempt to make possible other forms of knowing and knowledge production. Specifically, we tried to performatively re-inscribe the historically erased body within the production of knowledge. To engage with and explore these questions, a one-week laboratory was held in which six artists/(social)scientists gathered in a secluded location near Cologne Germany to hold video conversations with international experts over three days on the topics mentioned above. Resulting from these conversations, the Cologne participants presented individual performative responses to the group, which in turn were worked into a “performative score” presented to the public on the last day of the laboratory. This was flanked by a mini-symposium with two international scholars on the topic of body-hegemonies to expand the discursive field within which to locate and understand the artistic explorations.