Panel Statement
Panel: Hybrid Cultures
In their nine-screen digital video the Russian artist group AES+F has sought to provide an analogy for the globalised third millennium by re/presenting it through a hedonist glut in the environment- as imaginary luxury hotel resorts that operate as compound non-places of supermodernity (Marc Auge). It is a place in which the power relations between contemporary masters and slaves is re/enacted and re/affirmed through the convergence of respective historical and contemporary cross-cultural signifiers. The space-time continuum is collapsed into an ahistorical, temporary paradise made up of fragmented ,global/ised referents from fashion photography, glossy tourist magazines, leisure advertisements, broad sheet supplements and soap operas (as well as art, design and architectural history) and shaped by metonymy (rather than metaphor). Using this complex and dense work as a primary case study, the presentation explores the tensions between its foregrounded media and technological hybridity and the mapped out allegorical hyperspace, as means to critically intervene in the understanding of contemporary mediated culture under the conditions of a global flow of capital.
- Kerstin Mey graduated with an MA in Art and German Language and Literature from Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany and subsequently obtained a Dr.phil. in art theory/aesthetics and a PGDip in European Cultural Policy and Administration. After working in positions in universities in Germany and the UK, she now heads up the Department for Research and Enterprise at the University for the Creative Arts, UK, where she also holds a Professorship in Fine Art. Mey’s own research has been concerned with the situatedness of contemporary art and cultural practices. Of specific interest are: the role of art in civil society and the public domain, the construction of identities under the influence of digitisation, migration and globalisation, and the interconnections between art, documentation, memory, history writing and the archiving process. She is a peer reviewer for the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) and other UK Research Councils, international funding bodies and publishers. Mey was Artistic Director of ISEA2009 which took place under the umbrella theme Engaged Creativity in Mobile Environments on the island of Ireland. She has curated exhibitions including Bodies of Substance (2003/4) and organised international and interdisciplinary conferences with creative practices at their center. Amongst her numerous publications on contemporary art and art research are the authored book Art and Obscenity (2006) and the following edited volumes: with Morrow and Rohr, Creative Transformations (2008); with Kroenke and Spielmann, Kulturelle Umbruche: Identitaten, Raume, Reprasentationen (2007), On-Site/In-Sight, a special issue Journal of Visual Art Practice, Vols. 4.1-2 (2005), and Art in the Making. Aesthetics Historicity and Practice (2004); with Yuill, Cross-wired: Communication, Interface, Locality, (2004), Sculpsit: Contemporary Artists on Sculpture and Beyond (2001). She currently collaborates with Susan Benn on the project A Pedagogy of Curiosity which reconsiders the roles of the human sensorium, sense perception and the arts in the shaping of values that support resilient living and an appreciation of the environment, as well as their roles in in/forming self-governance and engaged citizenship.