Tania Kovats (ASSOCIATE)

Recent exhibitions and publications:

• 2006 - Meadow. Bath School of Art and Design. Supported by Henry Moore Foundation and Arts Council. Link to Meadow website
• 2004 - Offshore. Newlyn Art Gallery, Cornwall. And Oriel Mostyn Gallery, Llandudno, Wales.
• 2004 - Bad Behaviour. Arts Council Touring Show. Group exhibition
• 2002 - Slip. Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

 

2004/5 Henry Moore Drawing Fellowship, UWE, Bristol Critical Topology of Landscape.

Reflecting a growing interest in artworks that interpret and define site and place, the symposium will discuss how visual art practice questions geo-political space. The symposium will provide an opportunity to interrogate and situate the various spatial discourses that have emerged in the general engagement with the space of the world and its surface. Contemporary subjectivity is itself ‘spatialised’ by information and leisure technologies. Everywhere is a place to visit and in modern liberal democracies artworks become prized as spatial reference points, as destinations on a global map. The way in which visual art is both practiced and consumed is now very much a question of placing, of where it is put and how it situates the viewer and the space between. Recent exhibitions such as the Berlin Biennale (2006) testify to this in the sense that they are places of history and identity as well as 'containers' of events and the meeting places for the globally migrating republic of art.

The Critical Topology of Landscape proposes a pause for thought in this celebration, a chance for reflection and debate. The symposium invites those interested in the visual and conceptual spacing of objects and sites, of viewers and subjects, to raise questions about the aesthetics, philosophy and politics of spatial practice. Our contention is that art is a great ‘user’ of space, that even if the content of a work is indifferent to the political, its placing in a particular space is not. Space, as practiced by artists, is actual as well as imagined. We choose to cite the topology as a model of a space whose lack of an obvious centre is intended to encompass these weaves and warps in a creative and intelligible manner.

Below we suggest three possible themes, intended as guidelines rather than as a proposed structure or timetable. We want delegates to submit papers with an open mind as to how the subject can be discussed.

 

EMPIRE: The aesthetics of politico-spatial theory, raising questions of what visual art represents in the age, referred to by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri as 'Empire'. If this understanding of spatio-political currents defines a space of ‘the world’ how can such a structure be put to use by visual artists whose relationship to the ‘global’ appears either too comfortable or inherently problematic? How can the cosmopolitan visual artist practice politically without being drawn into the aporia of ‘political’ art?

 

SUBSTRATE: Relates to the ground, actual and imagined, on which spatial practices establish their conditions of possibility. Investigating the ways practice can relate to objects or systems of power that affectively control the use of ground-space and its representation. How do artists comprehend annexation and partition in what Giorgio Agamben has described as the ‘state of exception’? If the state of exception is now the norm, and thus the only legitimate boundary of space, how is the artist able to forge an opening in this edifice and deconstruct the ‘necessary’ un-freedom of practice and reception?

 

TOPOLOGY: Surfs the waves between media technologies and place. Topology is also the conceptual horizon of the near and far. If the topology is a parting from the outside to the in, what does such a figure bring? Hitherto unheard voices to communicate their messages? Are we then confronting an incipience of the heterotopia, in this intrusion? Do the new technologies simply make apparent the 'extimate', that which is spatially outside of us but also within?

Critical Topologies of Landscape Symposium

Friday 20 th April

Michael Tippett centre

Bath Spa University

 

Call for papers

Papers are requested from researchers and practitioners in the areas of art, architecture, geography, new media, art historians and cultural theorists.

Abstarcts should be a maximum of 500 words and will be reviewed by an international panel. Images (jpegs and quick-time) are welcomed. Full papers are required for viewing before the symposium.

Abstract deadline 1 st November 2006 to c.tol@bathspa.ac.uk