ON BURNOUT: The Development of an Artistic Research Project
A reflection on the ability of artistic research to resonate with an audience and connect with the contemporary conditions of life within the arts.
➢ Sharing the development and process of a multi-year long artistic research project on burnout.
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This exposition presents an artistic research project that took the very conditions of our own field of practice as its subject. Starting as an experimental research lab titled Band of Burnouts that took interest in states and stories of exhaustion within the arts and creative industries, the project continued to develop through a morphing succession of forms and outlets and remains active today.
Walking the viewer through this a broad range of experiments and collaborations, it now reflects upon the specific strategies that created an unexpected level of resonance, and highlights how an approach of recursivity enriches artistic research practices. Through its interventions, manifestations,and strategies, this artistic research endeavour grew a community and garnered an audience that continues to evolve almost four years later.
We discuss the techniques that opened up transformative spaces for sharing experiences and vulnerabilities, de-stigmatising mental health topics and challenges, (co)creating from embodied and tacit knowledge, and making encounters with the not-fun into a source of connection and counter-culture.
