Led by David Blandy & Larry Achiampong
Also contributing: Jeremy Bailey
Residency dates: 26 March - 25 April 2016
Held in partnership with PNEK, Atelier Nord, and Notam, NEW TECHNOLOGY AND THE POST-HUMAN brings together a multidisciplinary community of international and Oslo based participants at varying career stages to explore and discuss issues of identity in contemporary culture.
The Lead Residents
The residency theme has been selected by collaborators David Blandy and Larry Achiampong, who will lead the month long residency. Through their work, Blandy and Achiampong examine ideas of communal and personal heritage, using performance to investigate cultural hierarchies and the “fiction of the self”.
Blandy and Achiampong have exhibited extensively in the UK and internationally, both individually and as a duo, at venues including Tate, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai; and MOMA PS1, New York. Their 2014-15 hip-hop-inspired collaboration Biters was funded by the Arts Council of England and is “unique, in that it unifies both appropriation as a methodology and “biting” [the stealing of taggers’ or hip-hop artists’ personal styles] as an existential state”, critic Morgan Quaintance has written. “Biters…is a project about attraction and repulsion, and in hip-hop Achiampong and Blandy have recognised a musical genre pulsating with all the contradictory energies of hierarchical value systems, based on race, privilege and subjection”.
Blandy & Achiampong, preview for Finding Fanon, 2015
Jeremy Bailey, The Web I Want, 2015, online performance for the Southbank Centre, London's Web We Want Festival.
Canadian new-media artist Jeremy Bailey will be resident in Oslo for two weeks in April 2016.
Self-styled “Famous New Media Artist” Jeremy Bailey’s inventive and endearingly self-deflating performance practice collides the vulnerabilites and embarrassments of physical embodiment with the tricks of internet marketing and digital imaging’s sleek pictographics. His work has featured in an international roster of venues and festivals, including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Liverpool; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Transmediale, Berlin; Museums Quartier, Vienna; and the New Museum, New York. Via his project The You Museum (2015-ongoing), Bailey’s displays – individually tailored to suit the viewer’s personal tastes – can be accessed globally online: see here.
The Residents
Alongside David Blandy and Larry Achiampong, one international and five local residents have been brought together through open call:
Maren Dagny Juell Kristensen (NO), Eli Maria Lundgaard (NO), Tonje Alice Madsen (NO), Martina Petrelli (CA/IT), Marit Silsand (NO), and Gary Zhexi Zhang (UK).
What’s been going on?
BLANDY AND ACHIAMPONG WORK WITH Mennisker i Limbo
During their time in Oslo David Blandy and Larry Achiampong worked with paperless migrants to the city, supported by Oslo-based computer programmer Jonathan Ringstad, in the production subverting the computer game Grand Theft Auto V. The Oslo participants, from the organisation Mennisker i Limbo (People in Limbo), engaged with huge generosity in discussions of sometimes extreme and traumatic personal experience. On the basis of these discussions, the artists worked with individual group members to develop written scripts, synthetic voiceovers and character avatars for a new film: Finding Fanon Gaiden: Delete, a complex tapestry of stories of identity and migration, cultural history and social change.
PRAKSIS's launch featuring a performance by Bland and Achiampong
David Blandy and Larry Achiampong's performance of Media Minerals at PRAKSIS’s launch attracted a large and enthusiastic audience, while Dani Burrows’ (Director of Strategy, Delfina Foundation, London) presentation offered an insider view of the dynamic impacts of research based residency programmes internationally.
Meet the residents Q&A Session
In Meet the residents events, residency participants briefly introduce their individual practices and perspectives, followed by open discussion about their work and the themes of the residency.
Daily activity & around town
The residency group have been incredibly proactive during their time in Oslo, as well as committing themselves to events, internal critiques, and general daily activity at PRAKSIS, they have also been exploring Oslo; touring galleries and museums together, joining exhibition openings, taking the ferry to outlying islands, visiting Ekerbergparken and Frogner sculpture parks, as well as bonding over some late night karaoke.
New Technology and The Post-Human Seminar
Postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at UiO's Department of Media and Communication, Steffen Krüger moderated a seminar with PRAKSIS artists-in-residence David Blandy, Larry Achiampong and Jeremy Bailey. The panelists discussed the residency theme in relation to their artistic practices and cultural/sociological interests, using to screenings of their work as catalysts for discussion.
Drop in crits
At the Drop in crits Oslo based artists Ayatgali Tuleubek, Hanan Benammar, and Unni Gjertsen discussed their work with PRAKSIS's residency community and visitors.
Screening - John Akomfrah - The Unfinished Chronicles
Jeremy Bailey (CA) arrived for his 10 day research visit just in time to join our screening of John Akomfrah’s The Unfinished Chronicles.
Oslo Open
During Oslo Open PRAKSIS presented a selection of residency results alongside artists from ORP2 and Janne Talstad’s Video Open show real. We were very pleased to have over 500 visitors during the course of the weekend.
PRAKSIS dinners
Residency dinners proved a fertile ground for furthering the conversation and bringing others into the dialogue. Eight residency dinners were held throughout New Technology and the Post-Human.
Reading list
How We Became Post-Human, N. Katherine Hayles, 1999, University Of Chicago Press; (February 15, 1999)
Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Donna Haraway, 1991, Routledge (May 13, 2013)
Eroticism, Georges Bataille, 1957, Penguin Classic (July 31, 2012)
We have never been modern, Bruno Latour, 1993, Harvard University Press (October 15, 1993)
The Wretched of the Screen, Hito Steyerl, 2013, Sternberg Press (January 1, 2013)
News
KUNSTKRITIKK's Stian Gabrielsen interviews PRAKSIS Director, Nicholas John Jones
During the first years of their careers, before reaching the rather more well-greased echelons of the global art machine, artists can often be found on budget flights headed for more or less comfortable lodgings made available by more or less affluent organisations in more or less peripheral locations – so-called residences. Even though the resources on offer vary in scope and scale, such residencies are nevertheless important stepping stones and aids to professional growth for many artists. Oslo has hardly been teeming with such offers, certainly not any very high-profile or notable ones, and few have been open to a wider circle of not-yet-established artists. That era officially ended on Monday 21 March when Oslo-based PRAKSIS began its first batch of residencies.
Apr 4, 2016
