A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences Compiled upon a New Plan
(Unisa Gallery, 2021)
A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences Compiled upon a New Plan: Introduction (2021).
Digital prints on Felix Schoeller True Rag Etching 305gsm.Triptych.
Dimensions: 310 X 260 mm each.
A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences Compiled upon a New Plan: Fig 1 Balena or Great Partitioning (2021).
Digital print on Felix Schoeller True Rag Etching 305gsm. Triptych. Dimensions: 340 X 260 mm, 340 X 185 mm, 340 X 280 mm
Inscription:
From Capital and Ideology:
According to Thomas Piketty, the Euro-American Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution coincided with extremely violent systems of property ownership, slavery and colonialism, which attained historic proportions in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries
A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences Compiled upon a New Plan: Title Page or A Downhearted Journey across Divisions and Categories (2021). Digital print on tracing paper. Dimensions: 297 x 420 mm.
Artist Statement:
Annotation for A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences Compiled upon a New Plan – exhibited as part of the Unisa Staff Exhibition “Uncanny Stories”:
The series of artworks, A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences Compiled upon a New Plan interrogates Western epistemology’s overreliance on categorisation and reacts against framing and hierarchical approach to the world at large. It expresses doubts about the activity of framing and reframing of humans, plants, animals, and all matter as demarcated and categorised specimens.
Although this project is rooted in Foucault’s insights about knowledge and power relationships, and his insistence that the former is not simply reducible to the later, as well as his observations about reproductivity of knowledge through power, its emphasis is on the relegation of life entities to specimens, generalisations, and hierarchies. The installation examines and subverts 18th century encyclopaedic illustrations where representations of life and the world served to formulate power systems justifying dominion and colonialization. Theoretical research for this exhibition is underpinned by insights about categorisation systems in Lakoff’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: what Categories Reveal about the Mind (1987) and by subversions of the traditional linear narrative of human “development” in Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything (2021).
A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences Compiled upon a New Plan, overview (2021).
Photographs by Lisa Hnatowicz.
The artworks stem out of personal anxiety about the seemingly ‘impartial’ knowledge systems, especially the Eurocentric view of the world where simplifications of complex phenomena were a thriving ground for creating categories and hierarchies. This truly uncanny ability of our species to give rise to narratives justifying hierarchies and assignation of value is explored in this project.
As Western epistemologies and knowledge about the world have traditionally been reproduced and distributed in a form of books and dictionaries, I decided to use encyclopaedias as a vehicle for visual commentary and have reworked some pages of 1771 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica to reflect the last 250 years of Eurocentric leanings towards categorization.
The conceptual strategy used in this project was to employ a variety of visual interventions while ensuring that the references to encyclopaedic imagery stay recognisable and the aesthetics of history of knowledge remain “preserved”. Intermixing, rescaling and recontextualizing encyclopaedic images and intersecting them with drawings of dissection instruments for cutting and dismemberment, were some of the visual methodologies applied. Images of tools of “enquiry” like scalpels, surgical scissors and blades are used as metaphors pointing to domination and subjugation of the world (A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences Compiled upon New Plan: Introduction – triptych). Text interventions were also used. Insertions of ironic text into the artworks aim at additional impact towards dismantling the superiority of Western epistemologies. A mocking inscription emulating 18th century language incorporated into the text of Title Page, reads as follows:
A Downhearted Journey across divisions and categories.
A Part of the Anthropocene Book of Trees and Fossils as told by the Dead; Supplemented by the Author, drawing from the Illustrious Dictionary of Arts and Sciences compiled by a Society of Gentlemen in Scotland in 1771 for the Teaching of the New Order and the Elevation of Man. For instruction and reflection on the systems of hierarchies for profit and inequality. For the wise that they have it for a record, for the laypersons to gain some understanding, and for melancholy souls to obtain some slight enjoyment.
A Case Against Anthropocentrism as aided by Empathy and Imagination, the which being the Greatest Natural Gifts of any Person.
A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences Compiled upon a New Plan, overview (2021).
The artwork, Fig 1 Balena or Great Partitioning is divided and framed into a triptych suggesting butchery of whales into “digestible” partitions while at the same time it subverts the practice of framing and fragmenting knowledge. The use of butler trays (Chapter 2) to display folded sheets of intermixed encyclopaedic images, speaks directly to the idea of knowledge as something to be served and satirically exposes the colonial mindset of masters and servants. The installation takes form of a dismantled book with pages spread across the gallery wall; some artworks are framed to emphasise the practice of framing in the Western epistemology. All titles of the artworks stress and correspond to contents of a book: Preface, Chapter 1 or Title Page. The installation consists of eight works including two triptychs and one five-piece work.
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The exhibition is situated within colonial, postcolonial and decolonial discourses. By exposing the hierarchical mechanisms of Eurocentric epistemologies, it addresses the strategies of subjugation; by visually revealing, subverting, and questioning them it contributes to the current decolonial debates.
A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences Compiled upon a New Plan: Chapter 1 (2021).
Digital print on Felix Schoeller True Rag Etching 305gsm. Displayed on butler tray.
Dimensions: 530mm x 590mm.
A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences Compiled upon a New Plan: Chapter 2 (2021).
Digital print on Felix Schoeller True Rag Etching 305gsm. Displayed on butler tray.
Dimensions: 530mm x 590mm.
A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences Compiled upon a New Plan: Chapter 3 (2021).
Digital print on Felix Schoeller True Rag Etching 305gsm. 5 prints.
Dimensions: 425 x 225 mm each.
A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences Compiled upon a New Plan: Preface (2021).
Digital print on Felix Schoeller True Rag Etching 305gsm.
Dimensions: 800mm x 380mm.
A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences Compiled upon a New Plan: Fig 2 Elephas or A Comprehensive Designation of Value (2021).
Digital print on Felix Schoeller True Rag Etching 305gsm.
Dimensions: 770 mm X 380 mm.
Some Preparatory Work:
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