In collaboration with Australian artist Jan Hogan, Professor Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos has launched a virtual art exhibition entitled Tracing Submergence with the Danielle Arnaud Gallery.
The Tracing Submergence exhibition is the latest in the Gallery’s 25th anniversary virtual exhibition series. The exhibition blends video, photography and poetry to tell the artistic story of our internal and external existences. It features two longer videos, photography, text, and a sequence of six videos made by the artists during lockdown, which are an extension of their original work that was completed during Professor Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos’s artist residency at the University of Tasmania last December.
During his residency, Professor Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos collaborated with Jan Hogan to create a series of artworks which involved writing a language without signifieds - concepts that signifiers refer to - in ink on Japanese paper. The process of using sumi ink, water and their slow and spontaneous choreographic gestures resulted in the creation of a book completed with gold leaf and stitches entitled Tracing Submergence, photographs of which can be seen in the virtual exhibition.
The shorter video work featured in the exhibition were conducted through a series of video calls during lockdown where the artists replicated their tracing choreography in double screens that aimed to allude to their identity and differences. This work investigates the shapeshifting of ourselves and the elements around us, portraying a record of our attempts at permanence in a world of constant change and uncertainty.
Professor Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos is a Professor of Law and Theory at the University of Westminster and the founder and co-Director of the Westminster Law and Theory Lab. Outside of academia, he works with a variety of artistic mediums including performance, photography and text, and has taken part in a number of prestigious art shows including the Venice Art Biennale and at the Tate Modern in London.
Talking about his experience setting up the exhibition, Professor Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos said: “Nothing can replace physical presence. Yet urged by the conditions, we’ve managed to discover unexpected aspects of the creative process. Relying on technology is both frustrating and gratifying, especially because of the various new contingencies that were cropping up and which we decided to include in the final works.”
The virtual exhibition launched on the 12 August and will be available on the Danielle Arnaud Gallery website until 1 December 2020.
