Around The Outside #1
Do You Know This Feeling?
Curated by Sebastian Henry-Jones
12-4pm Saturday 23.02.19
Around The Outside #1 provides an opportunity to expand upon the themes of Firstdraft’s current exhibition ‘Do You Know This Feeling?,’ curated by Sebastian Henry-Jones. There will be a screening of Trinh T. Minh Ha’s cinematic work Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989), with contributions by Jake Atienza and Chi Tran. Sebastian will assist his mother Carol Henry with catering for the event.
Firstdraft’s Around the Outside events are creative research forums dedicated to fostering informal, non-institutional learning and creative criticality. Comprising talks, screenings, readings and discussions they create a platform for exploring current issues in contemporary art – bringing together artists, writers, academics and researchers to share and debate ideas.
Do You Know This Feeling? is an exhibition, broadly concerned with strategies of communication that transcend inherited difference. Poetic contributions to the show open up a moody margin and a collection of attitudes that instruct us as to how our own story may intersect unexpectedly with another’s.
Central to the exhibition is the transformative power of perceiving and expressing one’s struggles, one’s freedoms, and the new identities that may grow around shared knowledge and experience. Do You Know This Feeling? considers how we can articulate our experiences from within uneven power relations to one another, and asks in whose interest it is to suppress such activity. In identifying something that is familiar in another’s circumstances, our own may be powerfully reshaped. Common to the practices of participants in the show is a considered and deliberate use of language. Contributions index courage, tenderness and the transformation of shared affliction as access points to empathy and empowerment. And so, the exhibition seeks simply to render palpable a feeling, that may draw us each to one another within a shared understanding of collective narrative.
Do You Know This Feeling? features work from Arben Dzika, Athena Thebus, Cee Powell, Chi Tran, Cristine Brache, IchikawaEdward, JD Reforma and Trinh T. Minh-Ha.
Images
Jake Atienza, Aotearoa, Our Islands project
Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Surname Viet Given Name Nam, 1989, courtesy of Women Make Movies