9 Events: Saturday 5 March – Friday 25 March 2016
PV Friday 4 March – 6.30-8.30pm at the RCA Dyson Gallery
From the 10th of March, more will be in view at StudioRCA – One Riverlight Quay, Nine Elms Lane, London, SW8 5AU
On the 23rd March from 4 to 7pm the RCA School of Fine Art Special Projects Coordinator Anne Duffau will present the work at the StudioRCA.
Through 2015/16, the School of Fine Art at the RCA will invite collaborating curators and curatorial agencies to present projects at StudioRCA Riverlight, in Nine Elms and in the Dyson Gallery, Battersea, relating to the themes of the Visual Cultures Lecture Series, Rise Up & Envision – (to develop a cultural and contextual awareness of global transformations.)
Tina O’Connell and Neal White present 9 Events, a series of experiments and observations, talks and films drawn from their on-going artistic interest in the raw resources that are a key index of wealth in a market based society – from oil to diamonds and gold. The work is made in the context of emerging ideas of environmental and geological change within the flood of unchecked global capital.
As with other works and projects undertaken by the artists, the space is used as a platform through which temporality can be explored. In this sense, the use of the RCA’s Dyson exhibition space and its wider context for the presentation on objects or artefacts is reconfigured through perspectives of energy, action and reaction, collapse and control, via simulation, derivation, extraction and exchange.
The structure of the proposal is based loosely on 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, a series of performances held at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York in 1966. 9 Evenings is remembered as a pivotal moment in the history of art and science, bringing together artists and engineers who later become involved in Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), including Billy Klüver, David Tudor, Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman.
In the spirit of 9 Evenings, 9 Events will bypass the display of static objects, preferring instead a collaborative format where art, experimentation, performative and epistemic objects, and discourse come together over a period of two weeks. Each of the nine events is part of a developing project to map an anthropocentric table of basic elements on which humans are dependent, for energy or culture, and the variation in these needs.