On Wednesday 28 April, Peter Lemmens, artistic researcher at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, defends his doctorate to obtain the title Doctor of Arts.
14:00 screening of the film 'Reverse Engineering'
16:00 public defence 'exit strategies and a stand alone complex'
Promotors: Johan Pas (Academy) and Pascal Gielen (UAntwerp)
Jury: Julieta Aranda (chairwoman), Veerle Fraeters, Liam Gillick and Federica Martini
Live stream via https://youtu.be/uMoVDjBasns
This research aims to include a set of intangible aspects of artistic production and distribution and deploy these as critical and aesthetic moments. Borrowing from Fan Fiction, as a divergent field that relies on self-organization, I wanted to look at an artwork’s operational levels for its social, economical, political and artistic capacity. On this intersection, I question how to organize oneself as an artist as I look for unsound methods and indirect approaches. To be indirectly involved as in Fan Fiction, to be engaged alongside something else is an entry point disguised as an exit. My artworks are demarcations not only of what needs to be done differently, but also of what can be done simultaneously. In this way, I like to step away from binary thinking into the ambiguous, the superimposed and the paradoxical. I adopt a strategy of simultaneity that looks for small diversionary tactics as a permanent, fragile mode of production and distribution. The research looks for its necessity, not in depicting models for linear problem-solving within a work, but in creating interfering moments of paradoxical thinking beyond the work. In this way, I look at how to create slow, indirect narratives of involvement. Through the lens of distribution I expand the question of “what is produced” with “how it’s produced”.
The digital publication 'exit strategies and a stand alone complex’ can be downloaded at http://diversions.be/downloads/book.html