A Map of Misreading
Master Fine Art
Eleven international artists working across a range of media present their graduation projects and a program of performances. This exhibition, which borrows its title from literary critic Harold Bloom’s book, A Map of Misreading, is an investigation of the genealogy of poetic influence.
Bloom suggested that all poets struggle (consciously or not) with the influences of their precursors. His analysis of poets’ rebellion against the overwhelming presence of respected luminaries and literary works starts from the act of creative (mis-) interpretation or misreading in order to create a productive relationship with texts. For Bloom, influence accrues through the critical misreading one undertakes while striving to translate influence into one’s own work. This graduate exhibition misreads Bloom’s line of thought and further displaces it into the field of contemporary art. Setting aside the dominant revisionist and referential tendencies that have recently emerged, it asks: how does one situate one’s own artistic voice amongst a myriad of influences and sources, both past and present, which are instrumental to one’s own artistic formation?
This exhibition attempts to chart the convergences and bifurcated pathways of these artists, and highlights how both mutual and personal artistic influences shape their artistic realities. In addition to individual artistic investigations informed by personal histories and biographies, events, symbolic structures and mass culture, the graduating Master of Fine Art students at the Piet Zwart Institute share a strong collaborative ethos that could also be interpreted through the lens of Bloom’s thesis.
Curated by Christina Li
Exception Handling
Master Media Design and Communication
The show brings together the previously distinct disciplines of Networked and Lens-Based digital media and presents work across an expanded range of disciplines. To reflect this new breadth or media practice within the department, the graduation show is an ambitious co-operation between TENT, V2_Institute for the Unstable Media and WORM: showcasing work that ranges across a triptych of short films to radio broadcasts of encrypted narrative, to steam powered analogue ‘holograms,’ with many other media-hybrids in-between.
Exception Handling is a term for a particular procedure in writing computer code: Wikipedia defines it as, “The process of responding to the occurrence, during computation, of exceptions – anomalous or exceptional situations requiring special processing – often changing the normal flow of program execution”.
It is the recognition of the anomalous and exceptional, and the devising of a ‘special processing’ that becomes the theme that threads through the work of the artists exhibited. In each case the artists seek to create a media language that allows situations ranging from the most personal and intimate to the most widely political to be researched, explored and embodied in a media object that addresses the uniqueness of the topic. These projects all seek to “change the normal flow of program execution,” and avoid mirroring the deafening barrage of cliché that forms our media landscape.
Performances in TENT
Saturday 7 july, 17.00 uur: The Chronicles of the Blue Crab, Catarina Oliveira
Saturday 14 july, 17.00 uur: The Chronicles of the Blue Crab, Catarina Oliveira
17.30 uur: ORALS TV – Episode 2, Olivia Dunbar en Deniz Unal
Saturday 21 july, 17.30 uur: ORALS TV – Episode 3, Deniz Unal
The winner of the Promotieprijs 2012 is Fran Meana. The Promotieprijs is a monetary award designated for the production of new work. Members of the jury this year were: Rachel Carey, Peter Haasbroek, Melvin Moti, and Melanie Post van Ophem.