Parking available on Joubert and Pritchard streets and the Ansteys building is 2 blocks walking distance from Gautrain Park Station
Publications will be made available for free at the launch and will subsequently be available from the Point of Order Gallery, Wits School of Arts, or on request.
11-12: Ethiopion coffee with light breakfast
12:00: Short introduction by Uriel Orlow and Bettina Malcomess
12.15: Live readings by Abri de Swardt and Mbali Khoza
‘Relation struggles and states itself in opacity.
Relation contaminates, sweetens, as a principle, or as flower dust.’ Édouard Glissant
‘Poetics of Relation’ has been a collaboration between Uriel Orlow and Bettina Malcomess with 16 artists and postgraduate students from Work.Master program at HEAD, University of the Arts, Geneva, and the Division of Visual Arts (DIVA) at the Wits School of Arts (WSOA), Johannesburg.
This is the launch of the publication that is the result of this year-long process that started in 2015, involving an exchange program and exhibition.
The project took Edouard Glissant’s book, The Poetics of Relation as a starting point to work with the aesthetics and politics of movement, exploring relational and errant forms of identity, language and image making. Poetics of Relation began with a week of events in Johannesburg in February 2015, including a workshop on phonetics, a jamming session with censored records, lectures on mapping and communal walks, experiments and presentations. The exchange continued over email, Facebook, Dropbox and Skype over the last few months, producing several collaborative projects and intersections. Finally this culminated in the exhibition, Poetics of Relation/Slippery Sessions, at LiveInYourHead, Geneva. Here the collaborations were opened up to further dialogue with invited artists Érik Bullot and Nicoline van Harskamp.
The publication is not a record of the exhibition and exchange, but rather an evocation of the slipperiness of relation. It suggests the elusiveness of closure but also the continual evocation of potentials and possibilities for identity, becoming, connection and language, as well as inevitable gaps and distancings.
Artists
Simon Acevedo, Denise Bertschi, Antonia Brown, Érik Bullot, Nolan Dennis, Leonard de Muralt, Abri de Swardt, Ravi Govender, Paul Guian, Ciel Grommen, Mbali Khoza, Murray Kruger, Bettina Malcomess, Nare Mokgotho, Michelle Monareng, Uriel Orlow, Philip Pilekjaer, Nathalie Rebholz, Julie Sas, Tali Serruya, Mounia Steimer, Nicoline van Harskamp
This project was made possiblewith the generous support of Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council, HEAD – Genève, Geneva School of Art and Design; Wits School of Art, Johannesburg.
