CYCLE I: PUBLISHING ARTISTIC RESEARCH
7 books launch
Documenting, archiving, and publishing are intrinsic to the ongoing practices of a.pass. They are seen as tools for research and enable critical reflections through the exposure. This kind of “performative publishing” opens to other forms of doing and reflects the speculative attitudes of artistic research as a witnessing process of creation, contextualization, and doubt.
With these concepts in mind, the a.pass Research Centre opened a new program that hosted in Cycles I (2018-19) six Associate Researchers as a platform for exchange. Isabel Burr Raty, Adrijana Gvozdenović, Antye Guenter, Sara Manente, Rob Ritzen and Sina Seifee contributed to that platform the perspectives and practices inherent to their research through individual publications.
6 publications plus one Annex will be launched
27th February 2020
@ Level5 – Rue Paul Devauxstraat 5, 1000 Brussel (5th floor)
Doors open at 18:00
we will read, perform, discuss and open the famous bar of Level5
The rile* bookshop will open its doors in parallel to that launch.
Sara Manente is a performance artist, dance maker and researcher born in Italy and living in Brussels. She is interested in narrowing the distance between the performer, the audience, and the work. Her research starts from a dance practice that problematizes perception, translation, and ways of doing. Her work comes out in hybrid forms: book launch, 3Dfilm, written text, interview, choreographic piece, workshop, telepathic experience, collaboration, et al.
ROT is the publication for “Wicked technology/Wild fermentation:” artistic research focusing on forms and practices of fermentation as ways to rethink bodies and their making – as much as wilderness and domestication in art. Not asking why do we ferment today, but where does it stop? The glossy magazine performs the research by wanting to infect the reader, while at the same time, it’s questioning how to spread, publish, and make the work survive.
Rob Ritzen works as a curator with a background in philosophy. His curatorial practice is focusing on self-organized and cooperative formats. Consciously positioned at the margins of established institutions and outside of market-oriented spaces, his practice is placed in close association with communities of cultural practitioners. His initiatives are attempts to reconfigure the politics of making art and alternative forms of production and presentation.
FORMS OF LIFE OF FORMS artistic research into form – not merely as an aesthetic question but as a social and political one. Indeed, there is no politics without form! Concerned with forms everyday, artists can bring the kinds of forms into being that generate (un)foreseen effects on those forms dictating our everyday life. With Forms of Life, Rob Ritzen curated several Moments that assembled works, collective readings, and other references into one single installation. This publication reshuffles the documentations of those Moments for a visual reflection on the trajectory of this research.
SINA SEIFEE researches as an artist in the fields of narrative, performance, and knowledge production. He has been working on the question of technology and storytelling in the arts and sciences of the middle ages and the past-present of material reading practices in collective life. He studied Applied Mathematics in Tehran, received his MA in Media Arts in KHM Cologne. In 2017 he finished an advanced research program in performance studies in a.pass.
ZOOLOGICAL VANDALISM is the result of being immersed in the process of composing and compiling notes by Seifee on medieval bestiaries and putting them in sequential order. It is the first chapter of a series, to set up context or to open in small descriptive steps, towards (what Latour might call) knowing interestingly about bestiaries. It is a speculative adventure in bio*techno tales and older styles of knowing. Working out an ecology of obligation with Iranian sensuality and its ardent materiality, somewhere in the menagerie of found and feral animal videos on Whatsapp and Telegram, and Seifee’s undisciplined grounding in visual crafts.
ANTYE GUENTHER is a visual artist and artist-researcher, born and raised in Eastern Germany. Drawing from her background in medicine, photography, and in the military, her artistic practice treats themes like (non)biological intelligence and supercomputing, scientific representations of cognitive processes and mind control, body perception in techno-capitalist societies and fictionality of science. Guenther studied at the art academies of Leipzig and Karlsruhe, and at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. In 2019 she received the first Mingler Scholarship for Art and Science.
NEOCORTEX is a textile poster publication. It can be used as a head or neck scarf, a hairband, a veil, a belt, a table cloth, an arm sling, a disguise in political demonstrations, a laboratory sieve, or a tool for receiving and transmitting alien thoughts. This scarf is the second materialization of an ongoing research project on neuroscientific visualization practices and questionable conceptualizations of our brains. It features a combination of MRI data of the artist’s own brain and text fragments from science and science fiction. It refers to the upcoming trend in the scientific community to print posters on textiles rather than on paper and combines reconstructed MRI data of the artist’s brain with various text fragments from science and science fiction.
ADRIJANA GVOZDENOVIĆ has been for the last two years a researcher at the a.pass, proposing activities that push the border between research, mediation, and production and examine new formats of publicness. Naming these activities ‘Otherwise Exhibiting’, is an attempt to shift the focus from the object to relations. During the last year, her research project “Archiving Artistic Anxieties” was supported by the Royal Academy of Antwerp, which resulted in this online publication.
www.archivingartisticanxieties.me is a noisy archiving online publication that takes the form of an essay. This platform is a way to reflect and diffract from the different activities and events realized in the past year. The writing and editing processes are exposed and show the different steps of the collaboration and their constructive agencies. Researchers, friends, and family make up the editorial team: artists Goda Palekaitė, Pia Louwerence, and the linguist/political scientist Kristina Gvozdenović together with artist Sina Seifee, developer and designer of the website.
ISABEL BURR RATY is a Belgian-Chilean artist, filmmaker, and Media Art History teacher in ERG (École de Recherche Graphique), leaving between Brussels and Amsterdam. She is currently developing her second feature film, about the colonial impact on Easter Island, and creating live art and new media installations that queer production understandings, such as the Beauty Kit Project. Her works have been shown internationally.
BEAUTY KIT – AN ECO-EROGENOUS ART PROJECT is an experimental catalog that presents a summary of the research with the same name. It’s made in collaboration with dramaturge Kristin Rogghe, performance artist Gosie Vervloessem, graphic designer Pablo Diartinez, artist Tim Vets, and advised by designer Miriam Hempel. It also bestows a text contribution “Harvesting bodies – The Farm as Paradox” by Elle/Elke Van Campenhout. The researcher and the BK Patrona conduct the catalog by bringing conceptual perspectives and representing the frictions that this project entails.
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