In A place Like This
Professor Johan Sandborg and Professor Duncan Higgins
In A place Like This is an on-going research practice that expands the issues and critical discourses within Higgins’ and Sandborgs’ collaborative artistic research.
The central questions for the research is concerned with specific identified conflicts inherent in the act of making the image and subsequently questions of representation.
The research methodology is constructed through photography, painting and text. This further utilises the form of artist publications – on-line, hard copy and large scale unique hand bound editions - as a point of critically engaged dissemination and container of conflict in itself. The research identifies this as a place for the tension between conflicting ideas and investigation to be explored through discussion.
Echoes of places, people and historical representations constitute the experience of our presence in the world. Stories and objects should not be accepted as mere constructs of fact or fiction but rather be considered as conduits for pluralities. Constructed through the dialogue between fieldwork, creative production, visual memories and fragments of history the research raises questions such as:
How do we approach facts though the complex relationships of personal immediacy?
How do we operate the ambivalence of testimony itself?
The research aims to put forward visual discussions and critical positions that can function as responsive ‘friction points’ in an image saturated culture where images are produced with unthinkingly ease, and potentially proceed to be disposable and forgettable.
