Curating Contemporary Art (MA)

Jade Barget

In recent years, the development of media has transformed the way we experience moving images. Sets and Scenarios explores our heightened proximity to images and what it means to live under their influence. The online programme is composed of moving image works, text and performance that unfolds in three acts.

Commissions by Eva Gold and Adam Christensen delve into notions of control, perversity, desire and heartache. Through text and repurposed film footage, Eva Gold devises scenes of obsessive voyeurism, unravelling how film permeates our dreams and the depth of our psyche. Adam Christensen invites the audience to a performance for the camera in his house-cum-baroque-theatrical-stage, obscuring distinctions between on- and off-set.

In times of reduced mobility, commissions by Aaron Ratajczyk and Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi find motion between images. Aaron Ratajczyk stages a one-to-one rehearsal via video call – the screen as proxy to corporeal normalcy – while movements in time and history are proposed by Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi’s multi-layered films. Presented through a fictitious map, the works expand into a rhizomatic network of different media.

For its inaugural week, Sets and Scenarios presented screenings of moving image works that expand our exploration of the relationship between viewer and screen as images penetrate retina and ear, before creeping beneath the skin, toward the flesh, muscles and viscera. The screening programme featured works and contributions by James Richards and Steve Reinke, Cerith Wyn Evans, Deborah Stratman, Shahryar Nashat, Mary Helena Clark, Sidsel Meineche Hansen and others.

Sets and Scenarios is curated by Jade Barget, Angela Blanc, Panos Fourtoulakis, Charlotte dos Santos, Sha Li, Yi-Ning Lin and Lindsey Wiercioch as part of the MA Curating Contemporary Art Programme Graduate Projects 2020, Royal College of Art, London, in partnership with Nottingham Contemporary

Contact

ku.ca.acr.krowten@tegrab.edaj

https://setsandscenarios.co.uk/

https://jadebarget.com

Degree Details

School of Arts & Humanities

Curating Contemporary Art (MA)

Jade Barget is a curator and cultural worker based between London and Paris. Her research centers on the sensuous exchange between viewer and film, embodied spectatorship and affect. Jade holds a specific interest in moving image and performance practices.

At the Royal College of Art, in partnership with Nottingham Contemporary, she co-curated a programme titled Sets and Scenarios. Framing our emerging media regime as post-cinematic, Sets and Scenarios questioned our heightened proximity to moving images, and what it means to live under their influence. The programme featured new commissions by Adam Christensen, Eva Gold, Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi and Aaron Ratajczyk, as well as existing works by Mary Helena Clark, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Shahryar Nashat, James Richards and Steve Reinke, Deborah Stratman and Cerith Wyn Evans.

Jade’s graduate dissertation delved into the practice of listening framed as a direct, sensuous, embodied experience, holding the potential of subverting the despotic quality of speech and the dominance of the gaze; of shifting the focus of the curatorial from discourse production to attunement and study.

Jade has worked for established contemporary art galleries, private collections and developed an independent collaborative practice with XING, a research platform centered on the poetics and politics of Southeast and East Asian cinema and visual arts. Jade has written for a number of publications including AQNB, Unseen and Untitled-Folder.

Eva Gold, For Your Discreet Viewing Pleasure, 2020, film still, courtesy of the artist.

Aaron Ratajczyk, A Hole in Space ATH-BER, 2020, film still, courtesy of the artists.

Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, Syncrisis, movement II, 2019, film still, courtesy of the artist.

Adam Christensen, Death by Mystery, 2020, still, courtesy of the artist.

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Sets and Scenarios

Eva Gold, For Your Discreet Viewing Pleasure, 2020, film still, courtesy of the artist.

Aaron Ratajczyk, A Hole in Space ATH-BER, 2020, film still, courtesy of the artists.

Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, Syncrisis, movement II, 2019, film still, courtesy of the artist.

Adam Christensen, Death by Mystery, 2020, still, courtesy of the artist.