Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Huddersfield
Institute of Beasts Project
The ‘Institute of Beasts’ is a large scale exhibition-installation at Kuando Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei, Taiwan (2009), which was underpinned by a 3-month international residency at Ssamzie Space Studios, Seoul, South Korea (2008). Both the residency in Seoul and exhibition in Taipei were the result of competitive applications via international open calls. The exhibition consisted of over 50 artefacts, which included photographs, prints, ceramics, vinyl wall-text, video, flash animation and sound works. In 2008 we were recipients of £23,400 Arts Council of England award to attend the residency and develop subsequent exhibitions across Asia. The underpinning research involved producing the conditions of an event to create an encounter with something new or unfamiliar; and in the context of collage, to see whether an encounter between distant realities remains a possibility (Danto 1997). The making process involved animals and ‘human-animals’ co-habiting within the studio as a method of breaching or rupturing habitual ways of being and thinking. The intention was not for the artwork to represent animal encounters, rather, for the artwork to become notionally animal like by adopting a sense of unruliness and a different consciousness. In this respect, the notion of collage underpinned the research as: an interrelationship between low-tech modes of production (such as painting/drawing) with high-tech modes of production (such as flash animations and digital sound works); between human and non-human sensibilities; and contrasts between Asian and Western thought. Following the residency the work appeared in ‘Preoccupations ...’ (2008), Studio Bibliotheque, Hong Kong, and a conference paper delivered at the Writing Encounters Conference (September 2008), York St. John University led to a journal paper ‘Institute of Beasts’, Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, Volume 2: no 1, Intellect Journals, ISSN 1753 5190. The work was reviewed in Photonet Magazine (South Korea), January 2010 issue.
