Episode

‘Episode’ is a research initiative funded by the AHRC, collaborating venues and universities, set up by Beech in collaboration with J.J. Lester (Sheffield Hallam University) and Matthew Poole (University of Essex). Working together as curators, writers and artists in order to provoke new research into how artworks both establish and interrogate our experiences of belief in western contemporary culture at large, this project brings exhibition making, art works, publishing, writing and the organizing of symposia together in three site-specific exhibitions, in addition to a final video screening, conference panel and book.

A key interest of the project was to examine the politics of experience when the orthodox distinctions between fact and fiction are broken down or are superseded by experience itself. Rather than reiterate a crisis of recognition between these categories, as many philosophical discourses and arts practices have and still do, this research establishes and identifies new findings about how these experiences reformulate and shape our comprehension of the normative and stable territories of fact or truth.

New relationships between media-culture and lens-based artwork are highlighted by this project, something that is increasingly relevant when artworks can be seen to share the same experiential field, using and producing a media-culture. This is considered not only in the curation of works, but also in the research methodology where the connections between making, discussion and writing encompass art and politics, and focuses on the experiential affect of contemporary artworks and media culture and their power to contribute to a wider production of fictions and their consequent mutation into, and reception as, fact. Four video pieces from this exhibition were presented as part of the Ubiquitous Media, Theory, Culture and Society Annual Conference, funded by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation.

Amanda Beech's art work explores the relationship between democracy and violence in neo-liberalism by scrutinising the forceful rhetoric within narratives of freedom, which play out in philosophy, politics, literature and popular culture. The work constructs narratives that take in particular biographies, sites, social mythologies and mixing them with the bounds of philosophical inquiry. Operating as a space of seductive power, will and force the work looks to a world that emphasises decisiveness as its guiding principle and that deals with our share in it. Recent work includes group show: "Greetings Comrades, The image has now changed its Status" Ocular Lab., Melbourne, Australia, 2009 curated by Bridget Crone; 'Commonwealth', MGK127, Toronto, 2009, 'Let us Pray For Those Now Residing in the Designated Area', DNA Gallery, Berlin, 2008, and 'The Institute of Pyschoplasmics', Battersea Pump House Gallery, London, 2008 with catalogue essay 'Matters of Freedom'. Other recent published writing includes 'Freedom from power; The Problem of Talking Them Down', in the book 'As If Something Once Mentioned Now Plain to See', Colony Gallery, Birmingham, 2007 ISBN 978-0- 9557411-0-4 and contributing editor of the book 'Episode: Pleasure and Persuasion in Lens Based Media', Artwords Press, with the essay 'We Never Close'. Beech was also co-organizer of the accompanying conference that launched the book at Tate Britain in Autumn 2008.

Solo projects in 2008-9 include a new video commission 'Statecraft' from Commissions East with the exhibition of the work in Harlow, Essex. Upcoming work includes Sanity Assassin, 2010 Spike Island Bristol. This solo project was supported by an AHRC research award to make a new work in Los Angeles in association with the Getty archives and Villa Aurora and was awarded the SWAC residency at Spike Island in 2009 to complete the work. The exhibition also features the book, Sanity Assassin, Urbanomic, 2010, with introductory text by Marie-Anne McQauy, curator of Spike Island as well as essays by Suhail Malik, Ray Brassier and Robin Mackay and an interview with Beech and artist and writer Jaspar Joseph-Lester.

• http://www.wimbledon.arts.ac.uk/35165.ht...