Operational Aesthetics

This platform marks Lucy Orta’s twenty years of practice as a contemporary artist covering the evolution of her career from leaving the Paris fashion industry to the inception of Studio Orta in 1991 with her husband, artist Jorge Orta, tracking its expansion into a large studio complex of interdisciplinary artists and theorists committed to creating and communicating with an artistic format that is both “representational” and “operational”; Operational Aesthetics (Aesthetic en Fonctionement), as coined by art theorist, Nicolas Bourriaud.

Her work is multidisciplinary utilising a range of techniques and media from drawing and printing to architectural carpentry, couture and embroidery, performance pieces and large installations. She has exhibited widely in galleries and museums across the world striving to create artistic formats that ‘speak’ different visual languages for different contexts and audiences, whether within the confines of the white cube, the wider community, the intimacy of the home, or the playground of the public space.

This Professorial Platform will address key issues regarding how art practice can play a new critical role in light of the growing problems in the world, how contradictions can be erased between aesthetics and social function, and the contributions that artists can make to environmental sustainability.