Hannah Valentine
Art and physicality: On the body in the age of hyperindustrialism
If, as Bernard Stiegler suggests, we are being conditioned away from sensibility, towards consumerism, then how might we reinvigorate feeling and its importance in the way we interact with the world and each other? The gym is an antidote to sedentarization and mental overstimulation, at the same time as it feeds an obsession for tracking and calculation. I reference fitness equipment and work-out spaces to reflect on “the conscious and unconscious rhythms of bodies and souls.”*
I invite the audience to engage with the work - to bring their bodies into the space, to move, to interact and to participate. Formal concerns of line and shape ask to be understood both visually, and haptically, through an engagement with weight, surface and temperature. In use, the objects carry the potential to hold and share the heat and energy of others. Are we able to influence our physical rhythms with action and tactile sensations, creating and storing memories in and through a body? In light of the conditioning of sensibility, and of technological innovation, the rhythms of the body call to be re-energized.
*B. Stiegler, Symbolic Misery. Volume 1: The Hyperindustrial Epoch, trans. B. Norman, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2014, p.2
