Thursday 7 September 2017

Newcastle University MFA and PhD Summer Exhibition - Sabina Sallis



"Our destiny is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. Essay: "A New Refutation of Time," Jorge Luis Borges.

I have a multifaceted approach to arts provision- as a researching, collaborating, exhibiting artist and as a curator. I use video, drawing, performance, sculpture and narrative in a multimedia transdisciplinary approach that interweaves fact and fiction.

I use poetic, spatial, aesthetic language to explore and present visions of possible sustainable futures and examine what the aesthetics of sustainability might encompass. Using eclectic research themes as a vehicle to promote humane, ecological concepts such as evolutionary transformation, resilience and adaptability, I explore the human embodied potential and complex, transformative aspects of sustainability.

My current practise investigates an entanglement between human knowledge and the environment and speculates about an evolving aesthetics of embedded sensitivity towards life. My project introduces the Infectious Agent- Source of Resilience - a virus which affects people with ineffable, trans-formative and creative ideas of resilient, just and positive attitudes.

In my work I enquire into poetic manifestations of life, metamorphosis and visions of reality and imaginary as true objects of contemplation and possible change. I am interested in imaginary as a dynamic force poetically transcending existence and bringing new questions and new solutions. I believe performative and trans-formative actions and poetic experiences to be tools for socio-political change. 



”The displacement of anthropocentrism and recognition of transspecies solidarity are based on the awareness of ‘our’ being in this together; that is to say, environmentally based, embodied, and embedded, in symbiosis with each other. Bio-centred egalitarianism is a philosophy of radical immanence and affirmative becoming that activates a nomadic subject into sustainable processes of transformation. Becoming animal/nonhuman consequently is a process of redefinition of one’s sense of attachment and connection to a shared world, a territorial space. It expresses multiple ecologies of belonging, while it enacts the transformation of one’s sensorial and perceptual coordinates in order to acknowledge the collective nature and outward-bound direction of what we call the self. The subject is fully immersed in and immanent to a network of nonhuman (animal, vegetable, viral) relations.” Rosi Braidotti

Sabina Sallis 2017

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