graduate school directory 2011/12 - Camberwell College of Arts ...

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BROOKS Ethel
colleagues and graduate students who are immersed in visual cultures,
while at the same time drawing on ongoing conversations that question
dom inant notions of tradition and culture, taking movement, bordercrossing
and transnational formations as the basis for understanding identity,
cul tural production and the arts. TrAIN and CCW are the perfect
sites to carry out research that is vital to my project on Romani visual practices,
the ‘Right to the City’ and reconfigurations of productivity.
I hope to bring some of these questions into ongoing conversations
at TrAIN and CCW, and to draw from your rich intellectual and artistic
milieu. There is so much more that I could say about the vibrancy
of London, my excitement at the prospect of being part of that vibrancy,
and the ideas I have for a conceptual remapping of the city through
a centering of Romani visuality and cultural production. I look forward
to making many more connections during my time at TrAIN and CCW.
SUZUKI Hiraku
ARTIST IN RESIDENCE
Born in 1978 in Japan. Hiraku Suzuki obtained an MfA from Tokyo National University of
fine Arts and Music. His recent solo exhibitions include Galerie du Jour, Paris (2010),
Tokyo Wonder Site Shibuya, Tokyo (2008). Group exhibitions include Roppongi Crossing at
Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2010), 100 Stories of Love at The 21st Century Museum of
Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (2009), Between Site and Space at Artspace, Sydney (2009),
Redbull House of Art at Hotel Central, São Paulo (2009), and Vision of Contemporary
Art at The Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo (2009). His early works have been collected by The
21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. In 2010, his first drawing book
Genga (which comprised of 1000 pages) was published by Kawade Shobo Shinsha/Agnes b.,
and a second book Looking for Minerals was published by Beams. He is an Asian Cultural
Council 2011 grant winner, and after this residency program in London he will stay and work
for 6 months at Location One, New York. www.wordpublic.com/hiraku
I have been drawing since I was about three. There used to be a lot of
blue prints in my home because my father was an architect and I used to
draw something like a Moai (monolithic Easter Island figure) on their
reverse. I also spent a good chunk of my childhood excavating unknown
things like earthenware fragments, minerals, and fossils in my neighbourhood.
When I was ten years old, I saw a small photo of the Rosetta
Stone and came to understand the pleasure of deciphering stories on
mysterious glyphs, a pastime which completely fascinated me. At that
time I wanted to become an archaeologist.
Now as an artist, my practice, which includes works on paper, on panel,
murals, installation, frottage, live drawing, and video, references the
new pos sibilities of drawing in today’s world. The method I have in my mind
through the act of drawing, however, is still closer to ‘excavating’ things
that are hidden in the here and now, than to ‘depicting’ objects/scenery/ideas
in a traditional way.
Archaeology was an artistic activity until the 19th century, and still now
there are vast un-interpreted areas in our past. I can not help thinking
about the genesis of drawing, which is synchronous with the beginning of
language in human history. There are various hypotheses about it, but
I think that the most relevant one is the twenty nine lines that the upper
Paleo lithic people carved on common stones around 35000 years ago –
which are thought to have been recorded on the days between phases of
the moon. There were four elements that recur; light, transformation,
stone and the act of carving. These carved lines might be thought of as the
most primitive form of glyph or drawing – they function as a record of
time past and also as a signal of the future.
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