Abstract Conversations
Amongst
Objects

Jussi Parikka describes the contemporary condition as an expanding ‘multitude of times that overlap and cannot be resolved into one multitemporal reality’ . In this epoch of crisis, the relevance of visual art practice- it’s role in communicating complex and multifaceted ideas is now more pertinent than ever. Exhibitions are increasingly understood as sites for knowledge production, and as having a material language. Activated by material agency, embodied installations of objects, matter, material, sound, form and light can speak when we fail to find words with the correct timbre, or connotation. These physical alterations material entanglements can speak more accurately, or with more familiarity to the space and place we occupy. An exhibition is a space where time passes strangely, where multiple histories collide, objects or images can act as displaced series of material questioning, a multisensory shape shifting space which can be read from multiple directions.

In this presentation I will speak to the importance of the exhibition as a form of complex, material communication for scholarly discourse, a space of grounded knowledge that should be considered as academic publishing- a public siting of a collision of material research, testing, conversations, place-making and materially grounded dialogue.