The Eco-Mesh Approach: A Sustainable Methodology for Socio-Culturally Interrogative Artistic Research
(2020)
author(s): Charulatha Mani
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
One of the most striking features of Artistic Research is that apparently disjointed issues including pressing calls to action from social, ethical, political and cultural perspectives can organically unfold, evolve, and shape interdisciplinary academic discourses through the centralised lens of artmaking. It thereby creates a holistic picture of research in a manner that only an artist’s singular perspective can yield. A methodology approach that looks from the enmeshed and messy microcosms of ecologies at interplay to the broader macrocosms of the world, through the lenses of socio-cultural interrogation and ethical accountability, I argue, presents an sustainable model for a decolonised artistic research ethos to emerge. According in this publication, I offer "an ecomesh approach" to achieving a framework for "socio-culturally interrogative artistic research" with music and culture as my two key modes of inquiry. As a female native culture bearer of South Indian Classical music now also active within the sphere of Western academia, I feel that I have an ethical responsibility towards the ways in which culturally contingent aspects of my music and culture are represented in and communicated to the world (both in education and artmaking). I leverage my insider/outsider position to problematise aspects of power, belonging, and ownership in global ecologies of dissemination and reception of material and material labour.
Palestinian Wildlife Series: embodiment in images, critical abstraction
(2016)
author(s): Rania Lee Khalil
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
The expanded cinema performance ‘Palestinian Wildlife Series’ parallels posthuman and postcolonial circumstance, using appropriated imagery of African animals shot directly from a television set in Palestine.
Chronicling the experimentation and process that went into this work of ‘animal-video choreography’, the author interweaves research on Palestine, materialist film, and Afrofuturist thought. The exposition reflects on the impact upon Khalil’s work of women performance artists and avant-garde jazz musician Sun Ra, presenting a journey from text-based and signifier-heavy early experiments to the wordless and open-ended cinematic outcome the author comes to defend.
Drawing on her transition from live performance to moving image production, this exposition will interest those concerned with interdisciplinarity and embodiment in digital imagery. It examines alternative modes of art activism and political uses of abstraction and experimentalism in art, specifically where critical ethnic and postcolonial studies are concerned. It supports discussions of rights and representation within artistic research and beyond from a diasporic perspective.