Dr. Dolittle's Daughters
Friday 29 July 2016, 12–3pm V22 Louise House
Exhibition: 12-3pm
Talk: 1-3pm
Artists Bonita Alice and Fiona MacDonald share a conversation about their work in the field of Animal Studies. Both artists are preoccupied, creatively and intellectually, with the relationships between human and non-human animals. They have invited art historian/writer Yvette Greslé to talk about their mutual search for form to contain serious, revolutionary ideas about other animals.
Alice's focus lies primarily in the psychological, on the unacknowledged pain for the betrayal of nonhuman animals with whom, there is much evidence to suggest, our species cooperated on far more equal terms in earlier times. Artists render visible what we might not know that we know. Conversations about nonhuman animals are very often about concealment and denial. Animals, as we know, suffer immensely at our hands for our benefit. The way we accommodate this strange arrangement emotionally is to pretend ignorance and/or bury feelings that change us nonetheless.
MacDonald pursues a playful and intimate connectivity with beyond-human nature (animals, plants and other forces). Her feral practice leaves the containment and self-referentiality of the studio, or office, to communicate with and gather aesthetic, ethical and semiotic material from beyond the human sphere. All her work serves to show that nonhuman creatures are purposeful agents acting at the centre of their own complex, meaningful worlds.
Greslé is especially interested in narratives that are hidden, excised or buried. While working on her PhD dissertation, she began to think about the politics at play in the artist’s use of technology to render the borderlines between human and non-human animals mutable and ambiguous. She engaged the South African context and related questions of race and gender. Alice and Greslé have been talking since they migrated from Johannesburg to London in 2007.
Bonita Alice studied in Johannesburg, South Africa and worked as an art educator before moving to London. Alongside her studio practice, she reads and writes in the area of Animal Studies and is associated with the British Animal Studies Network (BASN).
Fiona MacDonald is an artist, researcher and curator whose work concentrates on the ethical and aesthetic potential of communication and relationship between species. She lives and works in Kent and London. She is a PhD researcher in Fine Art at UCA Canterbury.
Yvette Greslé is a London-based writer and art historian. She was awarded her PhD from University College London in 2015 and is currently affiliated with the University of Johannesburg as a research associate. The ethics and politics of visual images is an ongoing concern and the idea of history and its stakes is a major point of return.
Anyone under 16 years of age must be accompanied by an adult.
Venue info
V22 Louise House
Dartmouth Road
Forest Hill
London
SE23 3HZ
(Between Forest Hill Pools and Forest Hill Library)
Overground: Forest Hill
Bus: 122, 176, 197
