Henric Benesch

Sweden °1972
en

Henric Benesch (1972) is an architect, educator and researcher, based in Gothenburg, Sweden, whose work explores intersections between critical spatial practice, institution building and critical heritage. Ongoing speculative inquiries involves environmental and cultural heritage dilemmas posed over time by toxins in built environment, as well as reconsidering how design and design education can be actualized as a right (drawing on Arjun Appadurai´s notion of “right to research”.

Currently, he is a Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor at HDK – Academy of Design and Crafts at the University of Gothenburg as well as co-coordinator for a research cluster – Curating the City – within the Centre for Critical Heritage Studies (CCHS), and since September 2019 – the Pro-Dean at the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts at the University of Gothenburg. Recent work includes Heritage-as-Commons – Common(s)-as-Heritage (2015) as editor and author, PARSE ISSUE on Management (2017) as editor, and a Special Issue of Co-Design – Co-Design and the Public Realm (2017) as editor and author.

comments

Exposition: 'Unfixed Landscape' - Is it possible to define 'place' through artistic practice? (01/01/2012) by Ruby Wallis
Henric Benesch 10/11/2012 at 01:12

What seems to be at stake here is the crucial matter of the how, why and who in terms of representation of place. Artistic issues that have been with us for a long while and most certainly will continue to be with us in the future as a seemingly endless resource of artistic challenges and reflexions. In “Moving Stills” these issues are approached in multiple ways. It involves a return to a community/place and the challenge to respond to and represent this community/place in a “tactile non-verbal way” by means of various methods such as walks/talks (audio recordings and photographs), slow still shots (Moving Stills), phenomenological written accounts and drawing (a map). Altogether the work brings notions such as visibility and invisibility (Ranciere) into mind, where the various positions taken as well as the various techniques (or methods) applied not only make certain (and different) things visible which otherwise might not be visible (but then again rendering others things invisible). In all there is a methodological richness, more generous than rigorous, which still manages to represent the subject in a polyphonic (spoken as well as unspoken) way, which I think we all recognize in our muddled experience of space and places. The work that draws its momentum from the impossibility of representing the “other” (Levinas). The artist’s past in the community/place in question further on brings the notion of “closeness” (and distance) to our attention. When are we too close and when are we too far away (in order to be able to represent something)?  I think the real challenge and resource in this exposition is how to deal with closeness. A notion suggesting an alternative ontological point of departure than (within the sciences) well established notion of distance (or infinite distance as in “objectivity”).

Approaching a community of one’s own in order to represent it in images and words is a subtle and tricky thing. As mentioned earlier I think the polyphonic character of this exposition finds a tone of voice that works in this regard. Still when it comes to being framed as artistic research many question comes to mind regarding what is there and what is not. There are so many interesting things going on here so it would impossible to address them all. When the artist writes “I struggle with definitions, descriptions and distances” I would very much like to hear more of this – accounts of the struggle and perhaps even some conclusions in direct relations to single works. There is also a “distance” between the text and the pieces – why not benefit more from the closeness of being an artist commenting on her own work in the writing. Is it not one of the major points with artistic research that it can become a “scientific” mandate of vicinity and closeness? And although close is difficult both in terms of subject and the methodology I think this is where the challenge is (we are very good a taking things into an account from a distance).

Finanlly, the exposition, as stated by the artist, creates more questions than it answers. It approaches the stated issues and questions in a broad manner by means of various forms such as film, photography, writing and drawing, where that which is a stake seems to emerge in-between, rather than within these forms. The work is explorative, not only in its richness in forms, but also they way this richness in form calls for an explorative mind when approached. Still I think the exposition could have put the “exposition” format more to work, where the focus seems to have been the single works and the written text rather than the exposition as such. The setup is fairly linear and polarized with the text running to left and stills/move “attached” to the right, which in end, although straighforward and “functional”, corresponds little to the layered and polyphonic character of the material and subject matter –which is a pity. Even so, the expositions strongest point is its multiplicity and the energy this multiplicity draws from the articulation of the single pieces, avoiding any priviliged vantage point.