RE-NEGOTIATE
STUDENT EXCHANGE SEMESTER // ASSEMBLAGE
FOUND OBJECT ARCHIVE
UTRECHT, NETHERLANDS
MAY 2017
FOUND OBJECT ARCHIVE
UTRECHT, NETHERLANDS
MAY 2017
Assemblage Re-negotiate is the outcome of a four month long project at the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht (HKU), Netherlands under their Fine Arts Department. Executed during my semester as an exchange student, this project takes the shape of an archive of objects gathered over the four months I spent in different parts of Europe.
When we are placed outside of a familiar environment (a different continent, in this case), we begin to look at our new surroundings with the perspective of a visitor. We pick up on certain visual, aural and even olfactory cues / indicators and try to match them to an event / time / place in our existing sphere of learned systems as a means to process these cues and gauge the ideas of 'home' and 'culture' that they might suggest. As a short-term resident in the Netherlands, I began documenting a few such cues in the form of photographs, notes, drawings, audio and video recordings and collected objects. The relationship between the artist and the object (a parallel to the tool and the canvas) and the spectator is what I have tried to understand through this experience.
To further elaborate on this exercise of decoding such systems of representation and the layers involved in it, I tried to look at the found objects as systems themselves, each having their own layers of past, memory, culture and purpose that can be added to by my interference, despite having being ‘discarded’ by another. Physically organising this archive led me to look at the technique of assemblage as I would not have done before - as a method to build an archive within an artwork, with a process that is additive and consciously subtractive. A process in where we are always picking up these cues / objects but we as the 'artist' are the decision-maker that negotiates whether or not to adopt this new object as part of our personal archive.
In May 2017, Re-negotiate was displayed as a part of exhibition Compression, alongside the work of five other exchange students from the Fine Art department, hosted at Tuub, Pastoe-Fabriek in Utrecht, Netherlands.
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