Entangling Matter and Meaning
image credit: Jaana Laakkonen
EM&M Residencies/interferences
Throughout
July 2017
Exhibitionary Entanglement Intra-Structures – Monster of the Seven Lakes
22ndJuly - 3rd September 2017
EM&M Workshop
24th - 30th of July 2017
Entangling Matter and Meaning is a project organised by artists Sam Basu and Jaana Laakkonen and curator Jussi Koitela at Treignac Projet. It takes a form of artists’ residences, a workshop, commissioned artistic installations and interventions, and an exhibition. The project will consider contemporary artistic, curatorial and institutional practices through recent queer and feminist-posthuman critical thinking.
The key undertaking of this multi-disciplinary response is the work of physicist, philosopher of science and feminist, Karen Barad. Within Barad’s thinking, artistic, curatorial and institutional practices are doings, in/voluntary ways of participating in versatile processes that are unable to fit into studio, exhibition space, or institutional infrastructures. Nor can they be contained in the spectator, artist or curator, neither solely in mind nor body. Doing is co-doing, material-discursive, and already very much more flourishing than normalised stories and categories imply. How to do art, curate or institute, and who/what is doing? And what if subject and object are the results of specific cuts in their intra-actions, making each other, not pre-existing as the Modern tale proposes.
If the material-discursive entangledness proposed by Barad is taken seriously, and work within the arts is understood as an ethico-onto-epistemological processes, what demands does it set for an artist, a curator and institutions? It can be claimed that the commitment to a continuous re-turning of the patterns in practices crucially matters for lives and deaths amongst the diverse social, political, juridical, economic and ecological urgencies. The first step towards a response-able artistic, curatorial and institutional agency is to acknowledge that every meeting matters and makes and leaves a mark in the world and so attends in the World's Becoming.
Entangling Matter and Meaning entangles different durational, spatial, artistic, discursive and performative forms within Treignac Projet’s post-industrial and rural environment. All of the forms of contributions are planned to intra-act and form multi-disciplinary diffractions. The project starts as a residency/interference with contributions by artists Malin Arnell & Mario Fjell, Jaana Laakkonen and Rachel Schenberg. Exhibitionary Entanglement Intra-Structures – Monsters of the Seven Lakes presents works by Sabrina Chou, Caroline Doolin, The Otolith Group, Laura Põld and Moomin books by Tove Jansson. Entangling Matter and Meaning Workshop participants are artists, curators and researchers: Malin Arnell & Mario Fjell, Sabrina Chou, Caroline Doolin, Magdalena Górska, Jason Hendrik Hansma, Inga L?ce, Mirko Nikoli?, Marina Valle Noronha, Laura Põld, Rachel Schenberg, Sabrina Soyer, Elina Suoyrjö and Eloise Sweetman.
Entangling Matter and Meaning project is supported by Estonian Ministry of Culture, Outset Estonia and Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia (EKKM). Jaana Laakkonen's practice and research is supported by Kone Foundation and The Paulo Foundation. Aalto University, Middlesex University and Art Council of Ireland have supported the travel of workshop participants Marina Valle Noronha, Elina Suoyrjö and Caroline Doolin.
Treignac Projet is a rural Art Centre set in a former yarn factory in the Correze region of France. It programs a series of curated international exhibitions as well as artists’ residencies with a bias towards group and collaborative research residencies. As part of its vision to explore and simultaneously make available and accessible cutting edge approaches to contemporary art, Treignac Projet hosts conferences and workshops to accompany its residency and exhibition program. Treignac Projet is supported by Drac Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Conseil Départemental de la Corrèze and Région Nouvelle-Aquitaine.