How long have you not heard some stories of female elders?
My master's project is called Old Friends of Time in Fragrant Harbour. During my one-year study in Zurich, I could keep on working on my previous project as a continuity and on a bigger scale and think of the ideas and notions that I would like to transmit in this prospect. I aim to creating a unique view, share a message as an artist. The terms that I use are also important to convey this idea. My core research question is: How can the embodiment of intergenerational questions through a sensory experience bring the audience to reflect on communication problems and stereotyping between young people and elderly people?
Now, my master project is an transdisciplinary experience design project integrating video, sound, photography, pictures, performing interaction and experimental creative products (mainly smell soap). Also, the project is about valuing the stories and know-how of elderly women, about giving visibility and space to this not often heard narrative in the public space. Therefore, it is based on a co-creative process that I run together with six elderly woman from mainland China and Hong Kong, which I consider the co-author of this project. More importantly, I want to give a platform for under-represented elderly women to share their life stories in new and unexpected ways with the public. So I take the life stories of grandmothers as the creative background, use the medium of smell soap, and combine my own body to interact with soaps. With the passage of time, the friction of the body and the scouring of liquid, soap gradually changes from solid to liquid under various forms of consumption. These changes will make this work of art pull the author and audience into an instant state. The changes of social development, the transience and eternity of history complement each other, and the common experience with a female elder as a child. These will make the author and the audience put themselves into memories and experiences to complete a deeper reflection on their own identity cognition and current situation.
In this thesis, I construct lateness as a disobedient stance against the temporal domination by narratives of progress. Arguing that these narratives have played a significant role in, firstly, the making of global inequality and, secondly, the bringing forth of plantetary warming, lateness could offer a vocabulary to bridge both issues in the need for a fundamental reimagination of time. Intrinsic to the idea of progress is
the modern conception of time as unilinear, homogenous, and empty; but rather than seeing this as a natural characteristic of time, this thesis emphasizes its power-sustaining function. Against this imagination of time and the derived narrative of progress, lateness resists the synchronizing imperative to follow a normative path of development and embraces heterogeneity as the condition for commonality.
In a theoretical argument, I seize lateness from its negative connotation in the geopolitical context of development, where the so-called West is seen as ‘advanced’, ‘civilized’, and ‘timely’, while the Rest is imagined as ‘backward’, ‘uncivilized’, ‘belated’. Instead of regarding the command to catch-up, develop, and modernize as keys to a hopeful future, I argue that this rhetoric performs a demand for complacency against which lateness positions itself in undisciplined defiance. It is, therefore, a refusal to sustain the colonial mechanism of temporal difference that postulates a naturalized timeline of developmental progress in order to justify its expansionary and exploitative missions. This refusal, by not following the predetermined path towards the western civilizational model, also holds the possiblity for alternative ways of living and
conceptualizing the relationship between humans and nature that are vital to prevent the worst effects of climate change. I mainly discerned three types of lateness that are genealogically connected: a cultural symbol of subordination, an existential condition in the face of climate change, and a disobedient position towards temporal domination.
Ich arbeitete zusammen mit Co-autor Stefan Staubin und Produzent Noah Bohnert in den letzten 5 Jahren an einem Spielfilm WUNDE (Arbeitstitel), den wir im
Herbst 2022 drehen wollen. Ich thematisiere im Film das Andere im eigenen Körper, und wie sich dieses in der jugendlichen Suche nach Identität auf unheimliche
Weise manifestiert.
Logline
Der introvertierter Teenager Malik zieht sich während seines Landdiensteinsatzes eine seltsame Wunde zu. Lina, die gleichaltrige Tochter der Gastfamilie, entdeckt
die Wunde und sie beginnen sie gemeinsam zu erkunden. Was als eine faszinierende Art des Begehrens beginnt, kriegt schnell bedrohliche Züge – Lina und Malik
durchgehen eine Metamorphose, die sie für immer miteinander verbindet.
Die Wunde, die sich an den Körpern der beiden jungen Menschen auftut, zeigt die Fremdheit und gleichzeitige Vertrautheit jeglicher Körperlichkeit. Sie löst die
Körper der beiden Figuren an den Grenzen auf und eröffnet ein Portal zu Möglichkeiten, anders wahrzunehmen, neue Verbindungen einzugehen und neue
Zustände zu finden.
Das Individuum als unteilbare Entität vorgestellt, widerspiegelt ein bestimmtes, westliches Verständnis vom Selbst als klar nach aussen abgrenzbar. In WUNDE
versuche ich, von dieser Vorstellung abweichend, die wechselseitige Verwobenheit und Fragilität von Individuen und Umwelt zu betonen und auf eine fabulativen
und gleichzeitig verkörperten Art zu befragen.
Während der Ausarbeitung verschiedener Aspekte der Ästhetik des Filmes im Fokus. In diesem „Worlding“ - Prozess tauchten Fragestellungen, die in
herkömmlichen Filmproduktionsprozessen zu wenig Platz haben, denen ich aber undedingt nachgehen wollte. Ich wollte mich der erzählten Welt der WUNDE auf
eine mehr experimentelle und transdisziplinäre Weise nähern.
Ich widmete mich für meine Masterarbeit in verschiedenen Versuchsanordnungen diesen Fragen, die verschiedene Ebenen der sinnlichen Wahrnehmung
ansprechen und die Untersuchung verschiedener filmischer Ausdrucksformen erlauben. Ich versuchte mich damit einer Ästhetik des Sich-Im-Eigenen-Körper-
Fremd-Fühlens anzunähern und gab gleichzeitig der erzählten Welt von WUNDE Konturen.
Dafür habe ich mit verschiedenen Menschen zusammen gearbeitet, die den jeweiligen Fragen entsprechend besondere Erfahrungen in Wahrnehmung und
Audrucksmöglichkeiten mitbringen. Dabei entstand eine Palette von Ausdrucksformen und eine Sprache, mit der ich über die „Wunde“ sprechen kann.
Sustainable and Innovative art and related exhibitions have been a topic of great interest in China in recent years. During 2021, the author curated three exhibitions of very different scale
and style in three cities in China: Guiyang, Chengdu and Shanghai , in collaboration with various institutions. The main artists of the exhibitions are Swiss artists Marco D’Anna and
Bernard Garo with local Chinese artists. The exhibition concentrations fall under the general
development theme of the Swiss Embassy in Bei jing: Smart & Sustainable. This paper will
analyze the three exhibitions from the curatorial preparations to the on site exhibition
conditions and audience reactions. They will be related to Western theories of the
development of sustainable art to see if it is possible that the sustainable art can motivate the
development of the art curating industry as a whole in developing countries. In addition, it
will be questioned whether the development of sustainable art can truly act as the catalyst of
the sustain able development in the society.
In this research paper, the author analyses the implications of participatory art which solely exists in online spaces. Bringing conventional and historical theoretical perspectives on participatory art in general and combining them with contemporary research on digital cultures, the author builds typologies of online participation and dives deeper into specific curatorial methods of guiding participatory projects online. Contrasting the provided arguments to the present surge of digital platforms, the author tries to focus on the online-specific cases and examples, and argues that online as a space exists according to specific laws and mechanisms and should be researched separately as is, and not as a secondary space to the physical presence. The author distinguishes between individual interaction, where the viewer/participant aims at interpreting and creating a subjective experience of art, drawing a metaphorical map of their journey, and communal participation, where the participants are multiple, and the goal of both the curator and the participant is to collaborate and to connect. The author then continues to review the case studies of recent digital participatory projects that deal with different levels and intensities of engagement and navigate the participation through the use of the contemporary instruments and formats.
Theory has historically been a form of discursive gatekeeping, because of the deliberately complex use of terminology and the insistence on objectivity. It is inaccessible to many who may not be able to afford the resources required in order to practice it, such as time, energy, or money for tuition, making it an exclusive preserve of the already privileged. Beyond who gets to write theory is the question of who is allowed to read, understand, and dialogue with it.
This thesis examines the work of practitioners who counter the exclusivity of theory by puncturing the ideal of objectivity through the insertion of their self-hood, the parameters of which are framed by the marginalised nature of their bodies and perspective, thus allowing for subjectivity to come through. Specifically my thesis explores the contours of autotheory, a strand of theoretical discourse that relates the personal to the structural, while contextualising it within scholarly research and systems of citation. Authors, such as Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, bell hooks and Helene Cixous, incorporate their personal body-shaped lived experiences, through their writing and art, and highlight the extant place of subjectivity, thus dismantling the myth of universality by embracing difference.
Queer curating has received a great deal of attention as a field of study within the visual arts. And
while scholars, practitioners, and indeed curators may disagree upon a single definition of its
nature, its key focus is to act as a medium of addressing inequality and to provide an approach
to showcasing works in a democratic and equal manner. This paper will explore the notion of
‘cruising curation’, which focuses on expansive and experimental forms of knowledge production
or circulation, departing from texts, objects, audio visual and analogue materials in search for
alternative epistemes. Reviewing the realm of exhibitions that have explored queer themes, we
will examine their impact upon knowledge creation from a queer curating lens, while exploring
the historical evolution of queer curation within the western world. The paper will illuminate queer
cruising curatorial practices that can be translated within institutional spaces and commercial
galleries alike.
The core of our research interest lies in knowledge production and artistic activity that emerge from politically decentralized positions. Though these positions may connote subordination and powerlessness, alternative sites can constitute new and valuable perspectives within the field of art and beyond. Drawing from prior year’s research on fluid yet potent categories of alternativity, in-betweenness and para-sites, we decided to merge our trajectories and perform our MAS research collectively. Our study of these hybrid sites as tactical positions for asserting counter-hegemonic narratives continues with an exploration of how the margin can embody another alternative space of articulation. In today’s interconnected, networked, yet politically fragmented world, how are these spaces of solidarity and resistance formed and sustained? This research aims to explore how artists and cultural practitioners have used literary and exhibitionary strategies to assert counter-narratives and ‘othered’ identities within the globalized art world.
"A word is dead/ When it is said,/ Some say./ I say it just/ Begins to live/ That day".
Emily Dickinson's poem "A word" stands as a source of inspiration for the research
questions of this paper. Its focus lies on the possibilities inherent in the relationship
between art and language and the ways that language is being physicalised,
transcribed or used as medium, narrative and a central communication vehicle in the
artistic expression; mainly the polysemy of language, its potential and dynamic, as
well as its performativity. Taking J.L. Austin’s seminal book How to Do Things With
Words (1962) and Dorothea Von Hantelmann's study, How to Do Things With Art—
The Meaning of art's performativity (2010) as a point of departure, I tackle the question
of "How to do things with art and words". Yoko Ono's Grapefruit (1964) constitutes the
core case study of this research, and it is examined through the theoretical lens of two
key structuralist texts by Umberto Eco and Roland Barthes, which concern the new
role of the viewer in relation to modern art, music, and literature, aiming to query the
relationship between writing and performance, script/score and enactment, as well as
their blurring boundaries.
Das folgende Paper versucht eine Adaption einer Fragestellung der postkolonialen Kritik auf die kuratorische Praxis, indem die Frage der indischen Philosophin Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: «Can the Subaltern Speak?» auf Künstler:innen, angewendet wird, die vom Kunstbetrieb ausgeschlossen werden. Spivaks Konzept der epistemischen Gewalt wird auf eine Bevölkerungsgruppe angewendet, die sich zwar nicht ethnisch von der Mehrheit unterscheidet und doch von Machtstrukturen, die sich geschichtlich manifestiert haben, ausgeschlossen wird. Im Transfer aus dem klinischen in das Kunstfeld durch Jean Dubuffet 1949 ist mit dem Begriff Art brut eine Vereinfachung und Pauschalisierung passiert, die noch heute nachwirkt. In der Mythenbildung des Anderen durch die Kunstrezeption spielen Begrifflichkeiten eine wichtige Rolle. Die von Michel Foucault genannten Effekten des Diskurses bestimmen das Aussen und das Innen. Diese nicht materielle Infrastruktur kann durch die Präsentation, die Rezeption und das Publizieren neugeordnet werden. Anhand zeitgenössischer Projekte wird die Frage untersucht, inwieweit die kuratorische Praxis diesen Prozess der Neuordnung unterstützten kann, um Künstler:innen in den Kunstbetrieb einzuschliessen, bzw, um sie selber sprechen zu lassen, denn nach Spivak geht es darum, Infrastrukturen für die aufzubauen, die von den Strukturen des Staates abgeschnitten sind. Denn es sind keine Positionen von Aussenseitern, sondern verschiedene Stimmen aus der Gesellschaft und erst in der Zusammenführung und Gegenüberstellung diverser Positionen, wird eine gemeinsame Narration gebildet.
Organic Traces is a curatorial project conceived with the aim of constellating four young artists who are rooted in bordering territories. The symbiosis between their perspectives reveals common strengths by proposing distinct narratives and hybrid expressive languages that disclose the itineraries and perceptions pertaining to their practices. Those that might be defined as their biographical geographies flow into a broad and intertwined mapping of personal and collective themes.
In order to comprehend the articulation and reflection of the research carried out, the core of this project has been divided into three chapters or cluster terms: Site-Specificity, Female Presence and Organic Trace. Each section is interlaced with the other and finds in the named keywords theoretical references and explanatory cases, global or autochthonous, iconographic or etymological, through which the authors are related. The fusion of an investigation with references to significant essays and practices, combined with the realisation of a tangible drawing, is therefore based on the analysis of the three pivotal sections mentioned above. Firstly, it looks at the dynamics of implementation and at the importance of the specific location selected for a cultural event conceived in a small-scale reality, as well as at the possible audience and the type of works displayed. Furthermore, it offers a space to contemporary female artists who operate through multiple narrative media. Finally, the third chapter investigates to what extent and how the organic-visceral trace is an essential element of the pieces presented, in terms of the materials selected, semantically in the analysis of the subjects proposed, as well as in their concretisation.