Artist and Research
Ryan Gander
I'm never coming back to Oslo again
2020
I... I... I…
2019
Ryan Gander is a cultural collector. In his work, he specialises in dismantling and reinventing popular ideas. Language and 'storytelling' play a central role in Gander's work.
Through a series of divergent thought processes, Ryan Gander's work connects every day with the profound, the neglected and the mundane, interrogating language and knowledge, and reinventing patterns of appearance and art.
Those imperceptible beauties are the source of Ryan Gander's inspiration. "The hidden beauty is an otherworldly, uncanny phenomenon in every corner of society, on the fringes of social institutions and systematisation. I have to have this otherworldliness in my artwork. Otherwise, I would soon get bored. I am constantly trying hard to satisfy my thirst for freshness." Ryan Gander combines seemingly disparate things, actions and words into his narrative structures, blurring the line between reality and fiction. The precision of concept, simplicity of appearance and allegorical text are the hallmarks of his work. Ryan Gander's practise involves a lot of playful games, cultural collisions and realities.
Through Gander's work I see his combination of language and knowledge, and his reinvention of appearance and artistic creation.
He uses creative and connected methods to combine lifelike language with esoteric and mysterious topics, bringing the neglected into the daily perspective.
I intend to use the synthetic installation as the next stage of my unit3 work. I once wanted to recreate the vision of a tree hole in the gallery, but Gender's idea reminded me that I need to make my work more expansive and diverse, by capturing the details of life, so that the idea and intention of art can be more closely connected to life, rather than being confined to appearance.
So I abandoned the idea of making a real tree hole to hide the secrets I had collected and instead intended to place the secrets I had collected in more ordinary elements, such as in a wall or a letterbox. I still need to think about it.
Shilpa Gupta
Sun at Night
2017-2018
Sun at Night is a sound installation for poets imprisoned for their literal or political stance, the theme of which is the fragility of the right to freedom of expression.
Alternating between languages, the work includes poetry from the 8th to the 21st centuries. Through each poem, Gupta draws attention to the wider stories and experiences of global histories and gives a voice to those who had been silenced.
I was struck when I entered the gallery: a hundred microphones were suspended, each one corresponding to a piece of paper with a poem written on it.
I think there are some similarities between my collection of secrets and hers - they are all from different people, and I chose to record them in text form in Unit 2, and I think that perhaps I could also use sound to show them in Unit 3. As the people I interviewed are also from different countries and speak different languages, the voices represent individual differences more.
Also, my topic is tree holes and secrets. As a secret keeper, my task is to listen. If I were to edit these recordings of secrets into an audio clip, play them on a player and put them in a hole so that someone would lean down and listen to them with their ears close, the process would be both confiding and listening.
I'm going to start with a few recordings as an experiment.
Pierre Huyghe
Exomind
2017
Many of Pierre Huyghe's works incorporate a range of biological elements such as insects, animals, plants and humans as a means of exploring their behaviour and interactions with each other. These works serve as a laboratory for Huyghe's elaboration of complex social phenomena and contemporary belief systems.
That is why the artist has always sought to find space for his work outside the museum - to find a coherent place and to emphasise the importance of 'presence'. In his view, exhibitions should not exist for a predetermined model but should be independent and in flux.
In his work, I can always see an initial environment that he creates without too much human intervention, leaving this environment open to the possibility of what happens next.
So I hope I can learn from his "natural" way when doing the tree hole project. For my Unit 2 project, I chose to go to the park and find ten different tree holes to put the "secret QR code" in. The combination of the modern, technological QR codes and the original tree holes was a great way to create a new and exciting experience.