Conceptualising painting as a research intervention into commoning endangered choral performance archives
🗓️ Wednesday, 24 June — 5:10pm
- 6:30pm
(80 mins)
Presenters
Image
Abstract
This presentation centres around the performance history of the choral work of Nigerian composer and leprosy patient activist Ikoli Harcourt Whyte (1905-1977). Harcourt Whyte wrote a huge number of hymns in the Igbo language, fusing Nigerian and UK Methodist musical modes, for performance by patients and fellow former patients at the Uzuakoli Leprosy Centre in southeastern Nigeria. Here, I develop a conceptual armature for the deployment of a research painting practice, in revisiting documentary and artist collaborations around Harcourt Whyte’s work.
The painting practice in question uses a mix of physical and digital processes to interrogate the role of machine learning algorithms in knowledge production, preservation and storage in relation to artistic performance practices, and in mediating access to, and custody and legibility of archives of practice. I investigate how we can use such practices, deriving from relations around painting, to prospect for ways to insinuate minoritised histories/heritage, community practices, and archives-at-risk into the evolving algorithmic landscape, without reinforcing existing harms or rendering new axes of vulnerability. To evidence this potential, I revisit my own collaborative work with composers, academics, medical workers, and patient activists to recover, reinterpret, perform, and share the work of Harcourt Whyte.
The painting practice in question uses a mix of physical and digital processes to interrogate the role of machine learning algorithms in knowledge production, preservation and storage in relation to artistic performance practices, and in mediating access to, and custody and legibility of archives of practice. I investigate how we can use such practices, deriving from relations around painting, to prospect for ways to insinuate minoritised histories/heritage, community practices, and archives-at-risk into the evolving algorithmic landscape, without reinforcing existing harms or rendering new axes of vulnerability. To evidence this potential, I revisit my own collaborative work with composers, academics, medical workers, and patient activists to recover, reinterpret, perform, and share the work of Harcourt Whyte.
Biography
In my work as an artist, I am interested in how we make sense of the records of our past, how we build, share, and contest histories, how we understand the hold that storytelling has on us, and how we shake it loose, even if only for a moment. To help shake the hold of narrative, I make art across a variety of media, including video and sound work, painting and drawing, sculpture, and photography. My works layer and braid audio and visual material, together with the marks made over years of drawing, and the offcuts of an academic career as a historian and anthropologist.