Submission to the 10th International Art Award Criticism
Worlds within Worlds: insights of collective intelligence and wonder of the common place
Worlds within Worlds: Eruptions from a “still-life” Microverse, at the Advanced Business College in Accra, is an exhibition about, or better, a gate to invisible but ubiquitous horizons. Artist Tracy Naa Koshie Thompson and curator Patrick Nii Okanta Ankrah have concocted a multisensory, multimediaand multidisciplinary exploration of something mundane, food, in a representation that feel uncanny - alien but intelligible at the same time.
The experience begins with an earthy aroma and electronic sounds, a sensuous preamble to an artistic project where traditional foo preparations and digital technology converge in a synesthetic experience. [...]
The experience begins with an earthy aroma and electronic sounds, a sensuous preamble to an artistic project where traditional foo preparations and digital technology converge in a synesthetic experience. [...]
Jollof Pop Sponge (2024), Tracy Naa Koshie Thompson.
Ultra-processed food samples.
Published by The DC Arts Center, 2024, Washington DC
Labor of Fire
Artists, together with a number of workers that grew rapidly between 1950 and 2010, have responded to the transition to a post-industrial, service economy with increasing professionalization and academic institutionalization. They have become progressively more interested in theoretical discourse and in addressing, intellectually and emotionally, some of the most pressing cultural and political issues of our society. Yet artistic work is often economically precarious, exploited and devalued—conditions with deep-running implications for various aspects of equity, including diversity and representation, within the art world.
This project puts labor in front of the audience to dispel the illusion that the gallery space can exclude or suspend the tension between art and equity. […]
This project puts labor in front of the audience to dispel the illusion that the gallery space can exclude or suspend the tension between art and equity. […]
Left to right: Rice meditations 1 and 2 (2021), Isabella Whitfield; Signage - Iteration 3 (2024) and Chronicle on Choice and Consequence (2022), janet e. dandridge; Precariously Placed (2023), Fanni Somogyi.
Left to right: Precariously Placed (2023), Dust pan and Hand broom (2024), Fanni Somogyi.
Featured in Gestures of Disappearance, VisArts, Rockville, MD
Treading Lightly
An eco-politics of matter Gestures of Disappearance is a project by Murat Cem Mengüç that took
seven artists – Inga Bragadottir, Maggie Gourlay, Susan Main, Louisa Neil,
Kevin Pyle, Gabriel Soto, and Cem himself – and one curator (myself) through a
research journey on the carbon footprint of art-making.
[...]
The most interesting reflection prompted by the project is less obvious and is about our attitudes towards objects and materials: our relation to them and more importantly to the world as users and producers.
[...]
The most interesting reflection prompted by the project is less obvious and is about our attitudes towards objects and materials: our relation to them and more importantly to the world as users and producers.
Material Study (2024), Louisa Neil.
The Monuments of Great Notch (2023), Kevin Pyle.Central Saint Martins, UAL, 2022
Land & Environmental Art from the margins
How can environmental, site-specific practices at the peripheries of the art world contribute to thedevelopment of a spatial and institutional critique?
This study is based on a reading of Land and Environmental art as fundamentally engaged in the exploration of art’s ability to produce space and spatial practices that critically question the role and place of nature in contemporary society. Since the birth of this broadly defined genre, a key idea has motivated that artistic inquiry: that art does not and should not exist in isolation, but rather should work as a social agent, in dialogue with other actors. […]
Locally, art worlds vary greatly, in structure, actors, content, practices and more. The systemic nature of Land and Environmental Art can offer incredible insight on this diversity. But even more, the products of this diversity can provide inspiration and contribute to complex socio-political discourses on the design and production of space and institutions. Institutional and spatial critique cannot continue to neglect these perspectives [in the Global South], their relative position of marginality and its political meaning in an art world that is growing to become global.
Locally, art worlds vary greatly, in structure, actors, content, practices and more. The systemic nature of Land and Environmental Art can offer incredible insight on this diversity. But even more, the products of this diversity can provide inspiration and contribute to complex socio-political discourses on the design and production of space and institutions. Institutional and spatial critique cannot continue to neglect these perspectives [in the Global South], their relative position of marginality and its political meaning in an art world that is growing to become global.
Aerial view of Zoma Museum. Photo credit: Rasmus Hjortshøj.
Aerial view of Zoma Museum. Photo credit: Rasmus Hjortshøj.
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