Nina is exhibiting piece of work at Lewisham Arthouse with fellow fine art students from Goldsmiths in an group exhibition. Go see it. It’s good. It closes soon.
[btw - the dog isn't part of the work but it was interesting to see the extra attraction of Nina's work to small children and dogs who wanted to stamp on it or eat it - it is made of icing, eggs, ash and glitter - which added an further layer of fragility and temporality to it].
UNHOMELY
Dates: 14 – 25 May 2008
Private View: Wednesday 14 May, 7-9pm
Aliceson Carter, Dorothea Magonet, Victoria Scott, Nina Wakeford
Despite the proliferation of virtual worlds, and the simulated realities of computer games, the home, and the capacity to be settled or at ease in a place of one’s own choosing, remains one of the most culturally important experiences of our time. In a period of migration and constant mobility, the home appears to provide a respite from the global forces as well as the local stresses that intrude on our intimate, private spaces. And yet the starting point of the four artists in this show is the need to reconsider experiences that, even though they make emerge from our domestic experiences, are distinctly unhomely.
Beginning with the literal translation of Freud’s concept of ‘Das Unheimliche’ as ‘The Unhomely’ the work in this show begins to comment on the lack of coherence of the contemporary home, either as a literal architectural space, or as a symbolic realm of promise and disappointment.
Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has written of the ‘vicious bacteria of domesticity’, a phrase which recalls the capacity of the home to be colonised by destructive forces. The phrase might well suggest that the only way to respond would be an equally ferocious cleansing. Yet the artists in this show use a range of strategies to explore the energies and experiences of the contemporary unhomely, including a restaging of the mundane domestic object or process, or an overlooked emotional experience. The work also questions the boundaries of the home, as work looks to architectures beyond the four walls of the conventional structure.
By acknowledging the contradictions within contemporary formations of the domestic, the show is far from a sullen treatise on the unhomely. New narratives are explored, and new emotional horizons suggested.
All four artists are currently studying fine art at Goldsmiths.
May 21st, 2008
a very lazy susan on the lounge…. it didn’t move at all.
and the last train back….. it stopped at midnight, which was half way across town for us and we had to get a taxi!.
July 18th, 2007
I should have done this earlier but…… I’d like to officially introduce some new members to INCITE. Goetz Bachmann, Britt Hatzius and Sebastian Olma are all working with Nina on the Understanding European cultural intermediaries project. They have just finished interviewing thirty designers in two European countries, Amsterdam and Helsinki, for the initial part of the project. See blog posts below. They recently took over one of the seminar rooms in Goldsmith’s Warmington Tower to make mess with post-it notes, big boards and images to start to analytically work through their findings. Nina and Goetz took some of these ideas across to Intel’s PAPR group and they form the basis of their presentation at Ubiquitous Media, Asian Transformations conference at the University of Tokyo.
July 13th, 2007
Things proceed apace (aka: slowly) over here in American PhD-land. While Kat speeds towards having things like central concepts and chapters, I struggle to pass classes and have simple thoughts about stuff that other people have had thoughts about. I’m also TAing for a class called “The History of the American Built Environment,” which is fun.
So, I’m exiting course work (only 1 left, which I’ll take in the Spring with a new art history professor here: Matthew Jackson), and deep into the process of preparing to prepare for my exams, which here consists of creating three very large, thematically-guided readings lists and then reading them and then being tested on them. I’ll take my exams in June 2007. To be epigrammatic about it, my lists are “Image Relations,” “Belonging and Un-belonging, Personality and Impersonality [this one is still wobbling around some axes],” and “Image|Technology|Photography.” I’ll start reading in earnest in the winter (from Dec until April, in fact, I’ll have no other official task except reading). Everyone tells me how awful and existentially harrowing exam-prep time is; which I suspect everyone is so keen to tell me about because the feeling came as a great and terrible disillusionment for someone who had spent their life identifying as an avid reader (this is true for most of my fellow-students), and for whom the idea of 4 months spent doing nothing but reading therefore sounded like and had to sound like a dream, so that when it wasn’t, it was existentially harrowing…and they want me to be prepared. How does one prepare for such a thing? Would it help if I squint my eyes real tight and balled my fists?
After that (summer of 2007) I’ll start to write my dissertation (thesis) proposal. If it gets accepted in/around September 2007, then I’ll have 2 years to work on it. But let’s not talk about that now.
I’ll be in London for a weekend in Nov. giving some talks and attending an opening for a pair of artists I’ve been writing about, which is nice.
And I might be co-organizing a panel at the Cultural Studies Association conference in Portland next year, but we’ll see about that. More info as it happens to me.
In other meteorologies, we’re turning the corner from summer to winter here (Autumn is less a season than a hinge around which summer pivots into winter). I was taking a tour of the Robie House on Monday with my students and a gigantic branch heavy with dead leaves fell to the ground just to our lefts. That’s how Autumn happens here. Maximo-efficiently. Already I’m cycling with gloves and tights (that makes me sound more like a superhero than is really the case).
November 1st, 2006
Mary had her viva last week and her examiners, Frank Webster and Christine Hine, awarded her the PhD degree with no required amendments. Her study Democratic spaces, Delayed utopias examines how journalists and Sudanese exiles use online technologies to construct meanings of democracy.
Congratulations Mary.
August 9th, 2006