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Artist Talk: THINK !N ART: What is Artistic Research?

You’re reminded that there is an artist talk to go with the current KCCUK exhibition on Thursday 31 July – a great opportunity to meet the philosopher who inspired the exhibition with his ideas.

THINK !N ART: What is Artistic Research?

Think poster

Date: July 31 at 6pm, 2014
Venue: Multi-purpose Hall, Korean Cultural Centre UK
Speakers: Hasok Chang (Philosopher of Science, Cambridge University)
Lucy Powell (Participating artist of Inventing Temperature)
Moderator: Je Yun Moon (Curator, KCCUK)

Admission is free of charge, but booking is essential.
To reserve your place, please email: [email protected] with the subject line
“RSVP Artist Talk: THINK !N ART”

A drinks reception will take place after the talk.

We are pleased to announce the forthcoming artist talk for Measuring Inventing Temperature, the inaugural exhibition for the KCC-Lab, an annual research-focused exhibition programme at the Korean Cultural Centre UK.

This exhibition was inspired by Chang’s strategic move within his renowned book Inventing Temperature, that explores how the very notion of measuring temperature was invented during the age of reason. In parallel with Chang’s specific deployment of scientific research, the curator of Inventing Temperature has investigated the power of artistic research that is not operating towards accumulating knowledge but de-constructing the knowledge, a process that disturbs the fixed points in a specific system of knowledge. However, when we go beyond the popular presupposition that artistic research is subjective and scientific research is objective, to what extent can we resist the categorization of the projects?

Inviting Lucy Powell, a participating artist of this exhibition whose practice deals with subjective scientific inquiry, and Hasok Chang whose simple but fundamental question disturbs the basis of scientific research, this talk aims to think about other possibilities of articulating complex avenues where artistic mode of knowledge production and scientific mode of knowledge production interact with each other. Especially, in the neo-liberal and post-Fordism era where the knowledge economy becomes increasingly de-materialized and art and art education has been captured within the ideologies of standardization and measurability, it aims to think the potentiality of the notion of research in our contemporary knowledge-based society.

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There will be a film screening programme (Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady) after the talk from 7.30pm

The screening presents Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s full-length film Tropical Malady (2004) – a fantastical romance drama which centers on a soldier investigating the slaying of cattle at local farms in rural Thailand. The film is in two segments – the first a story of romance between the film’s two protagonists, the second a tale about a soldier lost in the jungle, haunted by the spirit of a shaman. What appears initially as a conventional film narrative gives way to a film told twice – firstly through an observational lens and then as a kind of vivid mythic tableau. Weerasethakul’s poetic polemic serves to represent what all of the works in this film programme examine – that the visible as empirically observed no longer guarantees a form of absolute knowledge.