Been there, done that: nomadism in contemporary art practice

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Copyright: Dillon, Beth
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Abstract
This practice-led research project examines the virtues of freedom, mobility, and resistance that have become central to the emergence of nomadism in contemporary art practice and discourse since the 1990’s. Through a combination of artistic and scholarly research, this project pays particular attention to the material conditions and social relations that impact and inform artists working in nomadic, travel-led, and site-specific ways. The resulting research paper analyses a range of practices and theories that help articulate the complexities of artistic mobility in the global contemporary art circuit. Heroic figurations of nomadic artistic strategies in the writing of Nicolas Bourriaud and others are discussed in relation to the more ambivalent analyses of Miwon Kwon, James Meyer and Marcus Verhagen. The paper also contextualises artworks by Francis Alÿs, Walead Beshty, Renée Green, Richard Long and Rirkrit Tiravanija to consider how artists materialise and dramatise their experiences of mobility in relation to a range of social and cultural contexts. This research project also explores nomadic, travel-led, and site-specific approaches through my own artistic practice. The lived experience of two international artist residencies, a long-distance romantic relation, and a cross-country journey on foot have been important aspects of the research methodology, allowing me to simultaneously inhabit and interrogate conditions of nomadic art making. The resulting body of work and final exhibition use sculpture, performance, video, text, and installation to explore and stage my own ambivalence towards the pleasures and frustrations, the productive possibilities and limitations of artistic nomadism. In doing so, textual experimentation, performative fieldwork, and self- implicating humour have become important creative and critical strategies for engaging with the nomadic impulses of contemporary art practice.
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Author(s)
Dillon, Beth
Supervisor(s)
Stevens, Grant
Bacon, Julie Louise
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Publication Year
2018
Resource Type
Thesis
Degree Type
Masters Thesis
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