| art.description.project | When Liv Emma Thorsen offered us the opportunity to work with a team of academics engaged in a research project exploring "what is an animal?" its possibilities seemed tantalizingly irresistable. Through our own work we were already familiar with a number of the participants and on familiarizing ourselves further with all the research specific to this project, the respective papers, and consequent conversation through correspondence, we found the content sitting surprisingly close to our own concerns and artwork.
As artists whose practice engages with human/animal relations and what they reveal about ourselves and our relationship to the environment, the question of representation – who speaks for whom? – is paramount. To translate a thought into an object, (and here it is hoped, objects into thoughts) and for it to carry particular meanings, also raises questions that are topical in the context of academia and artistic research. In our own artwork, relationality is of particular importance and in our contribution to this project we acknowledge and it is hoped, expose a complex web of meaning accretion. Significant resonance is present for instance within the narrative microcosm of each exhibit. In turn, it exists between all the exhibits, between the objects, the gallery space and their institutional context here and between these components and the specific wordling of the visitor to this exhibition.
Here, discrete histories well up refreshingly from ancient artefacts and are revealed as subjective, intimate. As such they remind us that knowledge is always subject to revision and history can tell us not only why we are what we are today, but how else we can be. | sv |
