In Practice: Other Objects
2019
In Practice: Other Objects presents new work by eleven artists and artist teams that probes the slippages and interplay between objecthood and personhood. From personal belongings to material evidence, sites of memory, and revisionist fantasies, the artists in Other Objects highlight curious and ecstatic moments in which a body becomes a thing or a thing stands in for a body.
The works in the exhibition address the capacity for objects — personal, collective, ambiguous, or arbitrary — to assume the body’s agency to testify about experience, recollect the past, mediate intimacy, and move politically. Rather than understanding the body as a stable figure or coherent whole, Other Objects proposes the body, and therefore the person, as a fluid and fragmentary medium — one materially contingent upon the objects with which it shares space.
Recurring throughout the artists’ works is a concern for how the oscillation between body and thing demands a revised understanding of both. The works in Other Objects attend to other categories of objects, and objects of the Other, which trouble the limits of personhood and reveal our dependence on objects to enact collectivity, forge intimacy, challenge the visual, and spur new political imaginaries. While seemingly passive, inanimate, and silent, objects stir with the ability to agitate, speak, remember, and rebel. They serve as surrogates for bodies denied social agency and as talismans for playful and radical reimaginings of the present.