Shadowboxing brings together projects by four artists, Mariana Castillo Deball, Sean Dockray, Marysia Lewandowska and Wendelien van Oldenborgh, in an exhibition developed in collaboration with the graduating students of the Royal College of Art’s Curating Contemporary Art MA. Using different strategies – from tinkering to direct confrontation – each of these artists considers how the media and institutions that control our behaviour and ideology can be disrupted. The ideas behind the project are further explored in a five-part publication and a series of events.
What is an apparatus? This question, posed by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben in his 2006 text of the same name, provided the starting point for the project. Agamben defines apparatuses as: ‘a set of practices, bodies of knowledge, measures and institutions that aim to manage, govern, control and orient […] the behaviours, gestures, and thoughts of human beings’.
His text investigates structures of power, governance and knowledge, and the ways in which these cultural mechanisms can be exposed and undermined in subtle as opposed to revolutionary ways. Rather than by direct confrontation, then, it is through smaller interventions into the structure of institutions and the media that this project attempts to challenge these forces.
In November 2010 the artists were invited to respond to Agamben’s text and contribute to the exhibition, publications and events that make up Shadowboxing.
With practices that emphasise research, collaboration and discussion, the artists’ works are as much about process as any finished object. Using a range of approaches each artist considers how institutions are susceptible to infiltration and appropriation and in what ways such organisations make their methods of production accessible to the public. Through their work, the artists call into question the way in which knowledge, education, culture and subjectivities are managed.
Shadowboxing has developed as conversations have unfolded between the artists and curators. What has transpired from this approach over the past months is an exploration of the different ways in which artists enact critique within certain parameters, and an awareness of the paradox: how can one challenge forces that have become so internalised that they are indistinguishable from one’s own shadow?
The work presented here ranges from site-specific infiltrations, to project-specific installations and also includes existing work by these and other artists. The interweaving threads that have emerged through the process of discussion will continue to be investigated throughout the show, in events and in subsequent editions of the publication, whose final issue will be released in June 2011.
Shadowboxing is curated by the graduating students on the Royal College of Art’s MA Curating Contemporary Art: Antonia Blocker, Vanessa Boni, Guillaume Breton, Margarita Dorovska, Fatima Hellberg, Danjie Hu, Robert Leckie, Yung Ma, Camilla Palestra, Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, Helena Vilalta, Tyler Woolcott, Nicole Yip