- Venue
- Bradford College
- Location
- Yorkshire
Review by Bhavani Esapathi.
Bradford School of Arts & Media – that’s what it’s called, simple and neat. Entering the Lister Building, which looks nothing other than a monument by itself you realize the magnitude of using the words ‘arts’ and ‘media’. The school as a whole consists of 17 individual programmes but felt like a hundred thousand coming together; perhaps that was a hundred thousand ideas merging.
The Lister Building opens up and quietly unravels the familiar aesthetics of Fashion Design, Special Makeup Effects, Contemporary Surface Design and more. By placing all the courses, and works together this degree show broadens the conception of ‘art’. In this building visitors could choose to climb up the stairs, go down to the basement or just walk left, right or straight ahead into a magical colourful door. The options seem innumerable and I liked that; the portal that I chose to enter was splintered with colours, spots and shapes that don’t have names.
The exhibition was a culmination of all the students’ years spent in the studios. As I walked in the rooms to discover artworks, installations and videos, I wasn’t only invited to appreciate the works but also build a relationship with the artists themselves – you could read about their work, about themselves, about their practice in that particular year and so on. The artworks’ presence came with a history; a history of the work, a history of the artist, a history of thought that existed from the artist and gave rise to the product in front of your eyes.
Stories were told, stories that did not quite qualify as stories – they aren’t supposed to be real. What this degree show achieved was to bring to life stories you couldn’t imagine were real. In fact, it was not just storytelling that made this show intriguing but storytelling in different mediums, from digital videos to screenings to tiny texts that explain the journey of the artist throughout the production of every specific work of art in display.
A quite surreal viewing experience such was made accessible to everyone in print; if you liked a particular work more than others and wished to possess it you could take it away in printed form. Tangible works of art were transposed as little cards for viewers to take away.
I experienced ‘the substance of dreams’, as was written on one of the walls in the exhibit; I could see, feel and even touch the substance as I moved through the portals and saw objects, moving images and huge parts of installations that called out for us to play with them.
Maintaining a balance between abstract and real, the works leaped between dreamy images and everyday objects, yet almost all the works were rooted deeply within their time. Many even dealt with real life events, with meaning to the artists that had never been properly articulated before.
The show was a coming together of not just different mediums, different artists and very different minds, but also a standing example of how artists break the boundaries of what is considered art itself. If you thought a video could not be art, this exhibition broke that rule; if you thought wallpaper could not be art, this exhibition broke that rule. From every mundane object to objects I had never seen before – fundamentally the only question I could ask was: what is art? But, by making you ask this very question, the Bradford show also revealed that we have not even begun to understand this word.
If people from so many different courses using so many mediums could create works that aesthetically made you feel in the presence of art, that liberates not just art but us, as individuals. The innumerable beautiful ways through which expressions are made accessible to us has to liberate us as humans and as history has defined us over the years.
With the problematic of modern day man’s fear of being dislocated from his roots, his culture, his arts due to intense technological invention and isolation from himself, the Bradford show responds by integrating new technologies right into the core aesthetics of artistic expression. Mediums, technologies and ideas from traditional art to redefining artistic practice in the new era were shown; it was a show that not only pushed aesthetic borders but added a new element of theatricality to art with new media.
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Bhavani Esapathi graduated from Christ (Autonomous) College, Bangalore University, India with an undergraduate degree in Journalism, English Literature and Psychology along with English language and French. She is currently studying for MA Cultural Studies, School of Fine Arts, History of Art & Cultural Studies, University of Leeds. Bhavani is currently undertaking two placements at the Theatre Royal, Wakefield and the Art House, Wakefield, and is interested in photography, Derridean philosophy and language.
http://bhaesa.wordpress.com/
