EVENT-GEYER-DURHAM.jpgView All Images

Gasworks

Everything has a name, or the potential to be named
1 May-21 June 2009

Gasworks
155 Vauxhall Street
London SE11 5RH


Everything has a name, or the potential to be named is a group exhibition that focuses on how European colonial powers during the 17th and 18th Centuries appropriated the natural environment in the Americas. The exhibition features works which address how organisms, land and people have been respectively classified, renamed and dislocated by generations of explorers and colonisers, as a consequence of economically and scientifically motivated expeditions by European empires to the Americas. These forms of cultural domination – from the re-naming of a region, to the classification of a medicinal plant – have left lasting legacies, which remain in common use today.

In reconsidering this history many of the artists in the exhibition critically re-appropriate such colonial interpretative systems. By examining the relationship between land, language, botany and colonialism, they reveal the imperialist quest to produce a universal index with which to perceive and tame the other and the ‘unknown’. They do so through research, documentary, film and mapping practices; via text and outdoor interventions; and by using tactics, which are often humorous, to evade or overcome determinism.

www.gasworks.org.uk



Comments

Be the first one to comment...


You must be logged in to leave comments.

Sign in using the form below.

Username
Password
 

RSA-Respond-logo_FIN2F6DE6.jpg

Subscribe to the Respond! newsletter

Respond! blog posts

Openings! And a survey for you to do.
The Bash Sustainable Arts Awards and the Barbican's Radical Nature are both holding their private views tonight so it will be a bit of a dash from one to the other.This is the mid-point in respond! We're conducting a piece of research to evaluate whether this has been a valuable ...

How the arts came together over climate change
With over 60 events in Respond!, it's clear that there is a huge amount of activity going on in the arts which tackles the environmental agenda.A few key players helped nudge the arts scene towards this subject matter. In a new interview for the Respond! site, Judith Knight, co-director of ...

Best responses on You Tube!
Check out my rundown of some of the best You Tube footage from artists responding to the environment, where amongst others you can see footage of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. Some of you may be aware of the recent headlines related to this significant work when in 2008 the Canadian ...

Over 250 years of responding
As part of Respond! we invited the RSA Archive Team to put together a display of archive material that will be on show throughout the RSA House in June.   However, there was so much material that we don't have enough space to show it all at the RSA! So, to ...

Respond! map is now live
The Respond! map is now up and running. The exclamation marks show where events so far confirmed are happening and click through to events in the UK. Let us know if there are any glitches.