An
exhibition of doctoral research projects from
Winchester School of
Art
Level 4 Gallery,
Hartley Library, University of Southampton.
10th
February - 16th March 2014
Works shown by:
Richard Acquaye, Bedour
Aldakhil, Hazel Atashroo & Oliver Peterson Gilbert, Najla
Binhalail, Jane Birkin, Rima Chahrour, Ian Dawson, Kate Hawkins, Ben
Jenkins, Sunil Manghani, Kay May, Nina Pancheva-Kirkova, Nicky Athina
Polymeri, Walter van Rijn, Elham Soleimani, Lisa Temple-Cox, and Simiao
Wang.
Practice [ˈpraktɪs]
trans. To test experimentally, to put to the test; n. the actual
application or use of an idea, belief, or method, as opposed to
theories relating to it; v. to perform an activity or exercise a
skill repeatedly or regularly in order to acquire, improve or
maintain proficiency. ORIGIN late Middle English to mean ‘a way of
doing something, method; practice, custom, usage’; also ‘an
applied science’ (late 14th Century); similarly from the Old French
of practique to mean ‘practice, usage’ (13th Century) and
directly from the Medieval Latin practica, meaning ‘practice,
practical knowledge’; with the underlying root from the Greek
praktike to mean ‘practical’ as opposed to ‘theoretical’.
Yet, equally, practice encompasses understanding, relating, for
example, to the knowledge of the practical aspect of something, or
practical experience, which arguably underpins all forms of enquiry,
research and the creation of new knowledge.
“In everyday language
we refer to practice as the application or use of an idea, belief or
method. For example, we can speak of the principles and practice of
teaching. It also means exercising a profession. The lawyer practices
law, the doctor practices medicine. We’re familiar with the idea
of business practices, which may differ across sectors of an economy
and alter over time. Practice can also refer to the premises of a
business, such as the doctor or solicitor’s practice. Perhaps most
frequently, however, we refer to practice as the repeated exercise of
an activity or skill so as to acquire proficiency in it; a child
practices a musical instrument and if they complain we gently remind
them: ‘Practice makes perfect!’ Practice, then, can mean a
customary, habitual, or expected way of doing of something: a
technique or set of techniques that end in a particular result (as
Aristotle claims for praxis). In the university setting, the practice
of a subject, such as law, medicine, art or music, refers not simply
to attaining of a certain degree of proficiency, but to becoming
situated and expert within a field of study. Furthermore, practice in
this sense can refer to speculative endeavours, which allow
unexpected outcomes and help challenge established ways of thinking,
thus making it both repetition and variations based on and in
response to repetition required to hone a skill. The artist’s
studio, for example, is a site of sustained practice in making and
re-making images and objects of culture. The writer, as a
practitioner of words, works and re-works texts in pursuit of new
thoughts, images and meaning; while the ethnographer, as participant
observer, reports on the knowledge and the system of meanings in the
lives of a cultural group, which otherwise remain unarticulated.
As a set
of interacting centrifugal and centripetal forces, research practices
– simultaneously and paradoxically – take us toward and away from
disciplined ways of understanding and fashioning the world we
inhabit. We look, ponder, write and make; always prompting practical
forms, engagements, and processes. To decouple the misconstrued, yet
persistent divide of practice/theory, we might usefully pair the
Greek praktike not with a single term for theory, but two
philosophical terms: theoria (contemplation) and theoros
(participation), the latter emphasizing an act of witness and
participation in an event or activity. Together these terms help us
consider a more fluid notion of theory and practice, whereby the two
become inextricably intertwined and one impossible without the other.
In experiencing an artwork, for example, theoria helps conceptualise
the interface between art and its viewer. The artwork does not
possess an intrinsic ‘truth’ claim, but does have a claim upon us
– at its simplest, the artwork demands it be considered an artwork,
to which the viewer must respond, even if the response is to deny it
such status. The artwork, then, places us immediately into both a
practice of thinking and a thinking of practice.”
Sunil Manghani 2014
Private View 13th February 5pm – 7.30pm
As I have only recently begun this programme of practice-based research, I will be showing an installation combined of elements created during and after my MA, provisionally titled 'An Order of Things: False Membranes'.
"There
is a symbolic order within the conceptual architecture of a space
that exists, in potentia, in both clinic and altar. What is the
relationship between these systems? Both have relevance to our
exploration of self, during which we invariably encounter something
primal, unconscious, alongside the scientific – here represented by
the supposedly objective medical gaze. We use art in our search for
self, and art uses media that not only signify the body – flesh,
blood, faeces - but invoke a sense of the abject: a separation
of subject from object, a rejection of death. The aesthetic of the
medical museum and its exhibits may have similar psychological
effects on its visitors, containing specimens that simultaneously
attract and repulse. In the casting of the face the eyes of necessity
remain closed, thus blurring the distinction between life mask and
death mask, in much the same way that the preserving fluid and curve
of the glass jar further distorts the teratological specimen.
Our
relationship with our bodies and selves is reflected in the mirror of
the operating theatre. The theatre of medicine becomes the stage: the
speculum becomes spectacle, the looking-glass of self turned outward.
The work shown is a visual exploration not only of the way in which
the museum specimen can seem to reflect, in some measure, residues of
the human, but return the gaze of the spectator to create a deeper
reflection of self: from object to abject, self to other, and back.
Here, the artist becomes both subject and object. The eyeless faces,
made diseased and necrotic by the rough textures of the materials,
serve to connect the contemporary concerns of anatomy with an
unconscious atavism – a simultaneity of the pure and the profane.
There is a realm of sympathetic magic in the territory between form
and misform: somewhere in these anachronistic juxtapositions of
scientific paraphernalia and animistic object, the clinic and alter
may be revealed to be synonymous."
