Sheffield Hallam Curators Forum presents
‘Defamiliarization’
The End Gallery,
Sheffield Hallam University,
Psalter Lane Campus,
Sheffield,
S11 8UZ.
Tuesday 6th May 2008 – Private View 6pm - 8pm
Wednesday 7th May – Friday 9th May 2008 – 9am – 4pm
‘The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.’
(Shklovsky 1917: p. 12)
Sheffield Hallam Curators Forum invites you to their thirdexhibition exploring the theme of defamiliarization. SHCF, all of whom are students on the MA Contemporary Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University, have used Viktor Shklovsky’s text Art as Technique* and his concept of defamiliarization to facilitate a debate of its continued relevance to artists, curators and theorists in the 21st Century.
This research has involved exploring curatorial strategies at Site Gallery, Sheffield as part of the Freedonia Salonseries and collaborating with Chelsea School of Art (UAL) and Essex University MA students at The Gallery, Wimbledon (UAL). The exhibition at the End Gallery marks the third stage in this project and will involve new work fromDavid Thomas Crawley, Diana Ali, Xin-Shu-Li and Cameron Craig in the main space and documentation and research material from the project on the mezzanine.
David Thomas Crawley
David’s project Photo Booth focuses on the rejected passport picture. Has the subject sat the right or wrong way? Have they completed the application form correctly? If identity is unique, how much of the essence of an individual do the stringent regulations of the passport office allow us to capture? The images captured sum this up in a poetic way akin to the text ‘Art is thinking in images’.
Diana Ali
Diana’s work substitutes one form for another through artist’s responses locally and globally playing with re-introduction and re-representation.
Xin Shu Li
The video work presents the curator’s own perception about alienation as one part of defamiliarization, which was extracted from her life studying abroad in Sheffield.
Alienation, 3 video screens, different countries, different cultures, Chinese artist.
Preservation
In this new collaborative work Craig and Gumpoltsberger playfully invite the Viewer / Reader / Audience of the artwork to engage with the philosophical notion of “defamiliarization”.
Felix Gumpoltsberger
Virtual rooms in my everyday life are nothing new, but it’s a new experience to use a “chatroom” as a media for artwork.
Text and language in the context of the anonymity of chatroom conversations,
offer many possibilities to play with identity and configurations of truth and exaggeration.
Cameron Craig
Technological advances offer new ways in which we humans can communicate.
At times this can provide tremendous possibilities. At others it reduces face to face contact.
This installation in a public place explores this paradox.
*Lemon, LT et al. (1965) ‘Russian Formalist Criticism Four Essays’ University Press of Nebraska (1917) ‘Art as Technique’ is arguably one century later still a key text in a debate of the role of contemporary art.
