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Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Performance and instolation works

One aspect of the tragedy of human existence is the suffocating feeling of isolation. We barricade ourselves behind elaborate defense mechanisms, which operate on physical as well as on psychological levels. Clothing is one wayto wear a mask. We dress to hide our vulnerable bodies and souls, to fit into a social system and hide our insecurities. Through my wearable sculptures I question and redefine the role of the garment. Wrapping the body to reveal instead of conceal. The wearer’s emotional landscape gets exposed and invites to an honest and open dialogue between the wearer and the viewer

8x12 fit big jar 









  

























drawings
























A perfect soul:Are we not the same: Between Bodies - emotion - sense - affect -

Between Bodies - emotion - sense - affect - 
I will be exploring how researchers in molecular and cellular microbiology are using retroviruses as vectors to regenerate the memory of damaged cells through transduction. Scientific processes and biotechnologies for documenting the ‘performance’ of viruses and tissue culture will be considered from the perspective of both practice and critique. My practical training in tissue culture engineering practices with the supervision provoke documentation strategies used in art and science to remember performance of ‘liveness’ –raising pressing questions regarding the political and philosophical implication of surveillance, data collection and storage to render the liveness of human/animal and microscopic bodies.

The ephemeral flesh projects explore, in differing ways, relationships between practices in biological technologies and the physical, ethical and ritual body, through the augmentation of human material in object based form and performance. The living fragments of the human body in these works originate from three distinct sources, each involving their own layering of complexity: my body (through biopsy); a generic human cell line and an anonymous living donor.

These fragments are estranged from the body, presented in the form of alternative tissue reliquaries - both static and fluid

Emotion and affect lie at the very heart of our understandings of the world: subjectivity is embedded and embodied and bodies, in their very being, are transgressive and transgressed as the ‘self’ and ‘the world’ bleed into one another through the various porosities of the senses. Such sensory immediacy highlights both the temporal primacy of our senses in understandings of the world but also the way in which particular senses demand attention at particular times in particular contexts. Thus not only are the senses, emotions, and affect, primary to our perception of the world, but they also operate within personal, cultural and political orderings dependent on the positioning of the individual, collective, species. -, are dependent on space, cultures, technologies; they delineate, reinforce, undermine and are dependent on the material and cultural boundaries which we hold as significant. They are overarched by the multiplicity of approaches, theories and conceptual frameworks that decide which sense(s), emotion(s), affects are significant and how they should be (re)presented. Fields and structures of power privileging certain perspectives and veiling the partiality of these perspectives have given priority of certain senses as more reliable and valuable than others and have enforced categorical boundaries of identity and difference. Further, the endemic anthropocentricism of these frameworks has shaped which sensory immediacies are prioritised along the strata of animality. In addition concepts of sense, subjectivity and emotion are simultaneously deployed to police the various divides between human and animal, and also to create the contact zones where human-animal encounters become most apparent. This symposium will draw together recent work which places the body (human and non-human) as it is present (whether in its presence or absence) at the core of the so called emotional turn
the body as a centre for emotions, sensations and affectivity. It enquires into the relation between inner emotions and their expression in outer forms of behavior. It asks questions concerning the role of emotion and affectivity as foundational for intellectual life, for thinking, rationality and communication. It highlights the vast milieu of meetings between human and animal, nature and technology, self and other which constitute and are constituted by bodies. By examining the idea of bodies and embodiment as transgressive in a number of different ways, we put focus on bodily boundaries, points of meeting/melting/tension, kinship and skinship between bodies of different kind and different singular experiences; making manifest the interrelationality of drawing boundaries and constituting singularities, differences and commonalities.