Heteroglossia Press Release
This exhibition gathered the works of the 2014 MA Art & Science graduates at Central Saint
Martins, concluding two years of transdisciplinary research and practice. Somewhere between
an art studio, an academic framework and a collaborative laboratory, this unique Masters
programme started in 2011 and had established partnerships with visionary institutions such
as the Wellcome Trust, the Millennium Seed Bank, the Culham JET Fusion Reactor, Cape
Farewell, the Science Museum and the British Library. Bringing together practitioners from the
fields of visual arts, performance, multimedia, puppeteering, music, biology, psychology, and
oceanography, the exhibition reflected a diversity of research practices and departs from the
traditional degree show format. Refusing a singular vision, it aimed to question the ontology of
the artwork and explore its relationships with other forms of knowing.
In his seminal essay Discourse in the Novel (1935), Mikhail Bakhtin contrasts the idea of
stylistic unity in literature with the concept of heteroglossia, a process that subsumes a
mosaic of genres in dialogue with each other. Drawing on this understanding of the dialogical
imagination and articulated by a complex structure designed to accentuate qualities of
permeability and entanglement, the exhibition created a polyphonic process featuring artworks,
unfinished projects, notes, blackboards, diagrams, research materials, fragments, scraps,
tools, actions, experiments and events which unfolded in the space and time of the show.
These concatenated elements investigated, embodied, and sometimes criticised the mutual
fertilization of various artistic and scientific disciplines and the desire to experience the other’s
means of looking at the world. Rather than removing boundaries between languages of
knowledge, those exhibiting saught to present ways of seeing beyond their multiple
intersections. The residual tension provided the dynamics for creative experimentation in
order to expand and subvert existing disciplinary discourse.
A 3-day programme of workshops, discussions and screenings explored the position of the
artist as an active interpreter mediating the production of truth and the politics of its reception,
the role of the dissident scientist in fictionalising science and introduced ritual functions that
put forth experience as knowledge, and that of the transdisciplinary experimenter who
generates tangent narratives from the virtual universes unlocked by technology and data
networks.
The exhibition was accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with essays by Peter Weibel,
Chairman and CEO of the ZKM Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe and Matthew Fuller,
Professor of Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Class of 2014
- Jean Baynham
- Susan Beattie
- Vera Bohl
- Andy Flett
- JJ Hastings
- Sarah Hull May
- Yeonok Jang
- June Jung
- Charlotte Wendy Law
- Lingbo Liu
- Roderick Macleod
- Holly Owen
- Rebecca Price
- Kristina Pulejkova
- Boris Raux
- Brandon Ritom