Assembling a Praxis: Choreographic Thinking and Curatorial Agency - Clew: A Rich and Rewarding DIsorientation
(2024)
author(s): Lauren O'Neal
published in: University of the Arts Helsinki
This exposition examines the curatorial project "Clew: A Rich and Rewarding Disorientation," held at the Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy in 2017. The project is part of my doctoral research on “Assembling a Praxis: Choreographic Thinking and Curatorial Agency.” “Clew” proposes a framework for curatorial dramaturgy and asks: What is the potential of a dramaturgical approach within an open-ended exhibition structure? Who, or what, is the curatorial dramaturg? How do materials and time contribute to unfolding exhibition narratives?
[This exposition corresponds to Section Six: Extending Lines in All Directions: Curatorial Dramaturgy in the printed dissertation.]
Translucent surface/Quiet body, redistributed
(2019)
author(s): Katrina Brown
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
'Translucent surface/Quiet body, redistributed' is a dissemination of artistic research investigating drawing as a choreographic activity and bringing attention to the material, visual and haptic organisations of moving-drawing in relation to gravitational force and surface dimension. Working in residence and on a large table-like construction at the dance research centre L'Animal, Celrà in Catalonia, a moving-drawing body was recorded from beneath the receiving surface of the elevated table-top, offering an inverted view of surface contact between static and moving surfaces, between paper-glass and skin as the performing body worked low and close in the horizontal plane. The exposition presents a choreographic view of findings and highlights emergent coinciding capacities of surface (paper, glass, skin, screen) to support, receive, record, touch and display. Art historian Leo Steinberg’s notion of the ‘flatbed picture plane’ (1972) was reconsidered within a choreographic practice and research of moving-drawing relative to gravity, orientation and distribution of data. The exposition over the two-dimensional online page presents another surface on which to distribute observations, notes, findings as extended making-thinking, as documentary work-surface - and as flatbed.
(Not so) Casual Conversations: Experiments in Attunement as Method in Investigative Art Practice
(2019)
author(s): Livia Daza-Paris
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition considers how investigative poetic practices could broaden notions of ‘forensis’ in terms of contemporary art. By developing my concept of ‘poetic forensics’ with attunement as a method that is “palpable and sensory, yet imaginary and uncontained” (Stewart 2011) it admits the nonhuman—trees, rocks, streams, animals—suggesting new relations beyond the human as possible witnesses (Williams 2018). This presents an invitation to think differently about articulations of public truth. The question ‘Who else is witness?' emerges while exploring material intrinsically elusive to testimony on what and who has been disappeared by oppressive geopolitics. Human-rights issues are implicit given the project’s focus on historical erasure and state violence at “the threshold of detectability” (Weizman 2017). It also attends to my family’s experiences as we faced the “political disappearance” of my father Iván Daza, in 1960s Cold War-era Venezuela. The project grapples with validity through methods and lively approaches that decolonize both knowledge (Tuhiwai Smith 1999) and nature (Demos 2016) presenting posthuman challenges to a privileged human onto-epistemological position (Viveiros de Castro 2015).