[ONLINE] ‘Travelling Taxonomies’
30 April 2024, 3:30 pm–4:45 pm
Sloane Lab and HDSM Darmstadt are pleased to welcome Dr Gayle Chong Kwan, award-winning multidisciplinary artist and academic and Sloane Lab Community Fellow.
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
Marco Humbel, UCLDH Associate Director (ECR)
‘Travelling Taxonomies’ focuses on Sloane’s ‘Miscellanies’, objects that by their very designation were considered to sit outside clear categorisation, and Sloane’s changing display of objects, the movement of these between cabinets, and the different configurations in which he presented and performed them to visitors. A new data set was created by 'tabulating' objects from Sloane’s ‘Miscellanies’ that moved between cabinets. A selection of these objects, listed in catalogues as title, textual description, and pencil markings alongside the entries, were the starting point for open-ended physical and discursive sessions with movement practitioners, including a dancer, drummer, actor, dance journalist, gardener, and art therapist. In resistance to the tendency to classify, categorise, and record, these sessions were not recorded nor were material or physical outputs created during them. Outputs: a data set of objects that moved between cabinets; Miro Board mind maps of engagement sessions; and a ‘Proposal for a Ballet’ set in the Enlightenment Gallery of the British Museum – part script, movement notation, images, and sound piece this work recognises how objects were brought into European/Western framing, categorisation, and reference. The research explores and creates choreography of movement in which objects, meaning, and taxonomies travel as creative resistance to hierarchies of confinement and control.
Register for the Zoom event and view the full seminar series programme: https://critical-creative.eventbrite.co.uk
The Sloane Lab Seminar Series is convened by Marco Humbel (Sloane Lab & UCLDH), Nadezhda Povroznik (TU Darmstadt), Julianne Nyhan (TU Darmstadt & UCL) and Andrew Flinn (UCL). Administrative support is provided by Lucy Stagg (UCLDH & UCL IAS).
This joint virtual seminar is co-hosted by University College London, TU Darmstadt, the British Museum and the Natural History Museum.
The symposium is funded by the Towards a National Collection programme (Arts and Humanities Research Council) as an activity of the Sloane Lab Discovery Project.
About the Speaker
Dr Gayle Chong Kwan
Dr Gayle Chong Kwan is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist and academic whose work is exhibited internationally in galleries and the public realm. Her large-scale photographic works, immersive installations, and sensory ritual events act within and against histories of oppression and positions the viewer as one element in a cosmology of the political, social, and ecological. She has a PhD from the Royal College of Art on ‘Imaginal Travel: political and ecological positioning as fine art practice’ (2023). Exhibitions: ‘Cyclops’, Fondation Valmont, Venice (2024); ‘A Pocket Full of Sand’, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton (2024); ‘The Taotie’, Compton Verney, Warwickshire (2024); Wastescape, Auckland, New Zealand (2019). Winner of the Sustainable Art Prize (2019).