RELICS OF SURVIVAL
Josephine Mead, Zoë Bastin, Kari Lee McInneny-McRae, Jazz Money, Bridget Griffiths, Katie Paine Relics of Survival
Bus Projects
August 2019
Opening Night Readings by Jazz Money and Katie Paine
Wednesday, August 7th at 6.30pm
Performance by Zoë Bastin
Friday, August 16th at 6pm
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Interested in the rituals of making Relics of Survival looks at the series of actions and types of behaviour done by bodies and material. Imprints of physical gestures become relics, capturing actions that happened before- and with them feelings once felt.
We are taught to understand feelings as happening before speech, before logic, outside and apart of talking and rationality. Feelings, apparently, live on a different domain. A plain full of opaque shapes that we don’t not comprehend but rather respond to. One that is slowly translated into words and understood through language. Relics of Survival asks how feelings become form. How rituals form relics that capture or harness affective potential.
Rituals are a set of prescribed actions, sequential, repeated. Small moments of performance enacting spiritual realities. Lighting a candle, dancing in the dark, picking flowers, breathing, scratching at the surface. The exhibition asks each artist to reflect on the processes they use, the personal rituals that have carried them through grief. The gallery becomes an archive of feelings. A collection of processes that are slowly added to and disrupted with each iteration of performance. Rituals are the actions that assist in processing emotion through material and action, rendered into something, rendered through.
Ahmed defines things human and non-human as objects. “Objects would not only refer to physical or material things, but also to anything that we imagine might lead us to happiness, including objects in the sense of values, practices, and styles, as well as aspirations.” Finding no division between thought, language, objects and bodies this exhibition considers the gallery as an archive of emotions- processes that are slowly added to and disrupted with each iteration of performance. Objects and performances become relics of gestures once made. Place holders for affectual relations once had, for feelings captured and preserved.
