Suchergebnisse

Selected for an artist-in-residence programme at Rogaland Kunstsenter, Stavanger, Norway by Director Martin Worts, Beech received grants and in-kind funding from ACE, Statoil, the Stavanger Oil Museum and the CAS helicopter pilot training simulator in Stavanger, enabling the filming on location of an 18 minute single-screen video work. Presenting the Norwegian landscape, its culture and its industry in TV documentary style, the video is inspired by, and is partly based on, a true story that began in Stavanger in the 1980s, centring on one man's fight for justice and truth after the Alexander Kielland Oil Platform disaster in 1980. Documenting key sites linked to this unusual story of political intrigue, and showing important parts of the evidence that supports this theory and the movements and motivations of the key players, the video footage is overlaid with bombastic text that accesses the motivations for the characters explored through historical documents, letters and newspapers that detail these events. Posing new and significant questions regarding the role of individuated languages in society and their (in)stability in terms of expressing facts, truth and meaning, the work examines this by refusing to illustrate, support or exonerate the claims of the story. Rather, the work questions these abstract claims and counter-claims by embedding their language as literal expressions of belief in justice and truth and develops questions about the politics of experience and the materiality of language through the exposure of the relationship between the force of rhetoric and the rhetoric of force. These connections between language, materiality and experience were expanded in a collaborative book 'Falk' (MOT International, 2007 ISBN 0-9554061-3-7) that critiqued orthodox claims concerning the ubiquitous and spectacular power of individuated/universal languages, examined how these universal claims deliver particular experiences of force and acted out another strand of these narratives.

Mark Ingham had two pieces of work in this touring exhibition; both were digital photographs in a series entitled Doppelgängers. It traveled from London to Leeds and then on to Miami. The works shown in the images attached are these photographs as shown were they were installed. "Episodes" are displaced moments - slices of narrative - sequences and instances that are isolated from, stand apart from, and are de-contextualized from a coherent whole. But "episodes" reach out to the universal - something outside. They call upon a totalized narrative without evidencing its existence - a piece of the real. And knowing that "episodes" are singular, self-contained and fabricated inventions does not prevent us from being enthralled, immersed and moved by the power of such fictions. The selected artworks included video projections, monitor-based works, lens-assisted painting, and photographs, all of which subject the audience to the pleasures of disorientation of sensory, immersive and rhetorical devices. They produce iconographic and dramatic visual and aural experiences, through entangling documentary with drama, realism with the sensory, and austerity with conviction. They openly expose themselves as fabricated constructs. They carry you away, shift you around, or demand your collusion. Through the exhibition we explored the pleasure, power and sensory extravagance of the delivery of images that propose themselves as fictions or facts. Rather than identify truth as being behind or beyond images, we analyse the politics of belief in images. The exhibition was set within a simple but dynamic installation of floating white laminated screens that encouraged and guided as well as inhibited the audience's movement around the gallery space. Curating Video is a long-term research project set up to propose new possibilities for re-thinking video curation through understanding the materiality and architectural qualities of video artworks in order to elucidate the relationship between curating video and the politics of social and architectural space. The project was set up and is co-ordinated by: Amanda Beech Artist & Course Director, MA Critical Writing and Curatorial Practice, Chelsea College of Art, University of the Arts London Jaspar Joseph-Lester Artist & Programme Leader, MA Contemporary Art Curating, Sheffield Hallam University Matthew Poole Curator & Programme Director, Centre for Curatorial Studies, University of Essex

"Diseases of the Head is an anthology of essays from contemporary philosophers, artists, and writers working at the crossroads of speculative philosophy and speculative horror. At once a compendium of multivocal endeavors, a breviary of supposedly illicit ponderings, and a travelogue of philosophical exploration, this collection centers itself on the place at which philosophy and horror meet. Employing rigorous analysis, incisive experimentation, and novel invention, this anthology asks about the use that speculation can make of horror and horror of speculation, about whether philosophy is fictional or fiction philosophical, and about the relationship between horror, the exigencies of our world and time, and the future developments that may await us in philosophy itself. From philosophers working on horrific themes, to horror writers influenced by heresies in the wake of post-Kantianism, to artists engaged in projects that address monstrosity and alienation, Diseases of the Head aims at nothing less than a speculative coup d'état.

Refusing both total negation and absolute affirmation, refusing to deny everything or account for everything, refusing the posture of critique and the posture of all-encompassing unification, this collection of essays aims at exposition and construction, analysis and creation – it desires to fight for some thing, but not everything, and not nothing. And it desires, most of all, to speak from the position of its own insufficiency, its own partiality, its own under-determinacy, which is always indicative of the practice of thinking, of speculation. Considering themes of anonymity, otherness and alterity, the gothic, extinction and the world without us, the end times, the apocalypse, the ancient and the world before us, and the uncanny or unheimlich, among other motifs, this anthology seeks to articulate the cutting edge which can be found at the intersection of speculative philosophy and speculative horror."