Online Events: Things Entangling


Artists conversations in the frame of the collective exhibition Things Entangling, a collaboration between MOT and KADIST.
We are inviting four artists from the exhibition to talk about their practices with a focus on the work presented in the exhibition, followed by a discussion led by Andrew Maerkle.
Program schedule:
Artists conversation with Tom Nicholson and Alexandra Pirici
On Friday, September 18th, 8—9.30pm JST, 1— 2.30pm CEST
The conversation will revolve around the artists’ works which bear witness to mechanisms of uprooting, displacement, or appropriation applied throughout the course of colonialist and imperialist policies.
If Comparative Monument (Shellal) (2014-17) by Tom Nicholson imagines the symbolic repatriation of a mosaic through its identical reproduction, a Byzantine work from a sixth-century church near Gaza with animistic iconography, carried off and sent to Canberra by Australian soldiers during World War I, Alexandra Pirici offers a gesture of reparation that could be likened to Nicholson’s, but in an immaterial form. Through the bodies of performers, she brings to life the Parthenon Marbles and the complexity of their history, looted by the British from Greece, and still held today in the British Museum in London. These works, by means of copies or reproductions, allow these objects to come to life while also highlighting the ruptures of meaning they underwent as a result of their various displacements. By extension, they reveal the underlying political and economic stakes, and the mechanisms of power on which imperialist countries have been built.
The artists conversations are available on streaming — see links below. Please use earphones in order to access via the right or the left earphone to the discussion in English or Japanese.
Artists conversation with Dale Harding and Asako Iwama
On Friday, September 25th, 8—9.30pm JST, 1— 2.30pm CEST
The conversation will focus on how to reestablish possible anchors, by emphasizing the trajectories of objects — whether natural or human made — and their intangible inheritance.
Asako Iwama deploys research around methods of pine resin extraction, in an attempt to trace human activity toward nature as a resource.
Harding engages with inherited objects, for instance by depicting them on the wall through a mouth-blowing process of mark making inherited from his ancestors. In doing so, he performs a healing and reparation, rehabilitating the objects’ meaning or use assigned by their original communities. They both explore in their practice how an object, be living or non-living, could have the capacity to transmit another type of knowledge — tactile, emotional, or interpersonal — by engaging with it in a performative way, in an attempt to free it from the colonial and official history into which it was transplanted.
The artists conversations are available on streaming — see links below. Please use earphones in order to access via the right or the left earphone to the discussion in English or Japanese.
About the artists: