Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University College London : B - Fine Art
Multiverse and Multiverse Expanded
'Multiverse Expanded' at Akershus Kunstsenter, Norway 2011 is the expansion of an exhibition project instigated by Ole Hagen and Danielle Arnaud, beginning with ‘Multiverse’ at Danielle Arnaud Gallery in London and its accompanying performance event ‘Open Multiversity’ at Swedenborg Hall in 2009. The project addressed the production of worlds and universes in science, art, fiction and philosophy. Work for the project, produced with Simon O'Sullivan, took the form of performances and assemblages/diagrams indexing the processes, narratives and subjective and temporal states that the performances explored. The research explored Atonin Artaud’s proposition (offered in his essay on Balinese Theatre) that all performances are diagrams. The figures produced for Multiverse exhibitions indexed aspects of performance (experiences and associations) but also served as diagrams for others to explore the performances and their themes. The diagrams draw upon research of figures produced by modern thinkers such as Henri Bergson and Jacques Lacan addressing virtuality and subject structure, but also folk and pop imagery to present finite and infinite relations and transformations. In this, the research was concerned with the allegorical and gestural aspects of diagrams often elided by modern diagrams. The subjective states and temporalities explored in the work related to notion of an ‘outside’, alterity and duration addressed in JG Ballard’s ‘Concrete Island’ and Olaf Stapleton’s ‘Starmaker’. These novels served as the basis for artworks and performances. The film from ‘Multiverse’ was exhibited in ‘We Are Grammar’ at the Pratt Institute New York 2011 and the diagrams were also shown at ASC Gallery London 2012 and Grand Union Gallery Birmingham 2013. A paper on diagrams written for ‘Open Multiversity’ was published in ‘The Diagram’, produced for a project of the same name initiated by Banner Repeater and Folio Magazine at Space London and Torna Istanbul for 12th Istanbul Biennale 2011.
