Agents, objects and the art exhibition: towards the co-relational co-formation of things

At its core, my research inquiry is concerned with the expanded possibilities of things in questioning and acknowledging the relational aspects of art formation.

My research findings put forward a proposal for co-relational co-formed practice resulting from the entanglement between things. Here I have explored ways in which objects might be configured to produce an encounter which elevates the role of the viewer to a redefined role of agent. The key inter-relating things within my research inquiry are; the artist-curator, the exhibition space/ event, object-props, agents, the post-event artefact-objects and the language used to articulate these. The relationship between these things, – their flows, fluxes and their affect, is their material agency. This allows objects to shift between states of being as props, artworks and artefacts – the process of becoming, I argue, generates a trace of the co-relational co-forming act through their surface, form and matter.

In problematising modes of staging and writing about the co-dependent and coinforming elements of contemporary art practices, I question the ways in which structures of exhibition making are assumed and played out. My research re-frames the exhibition event, its objects, agents and associated language, as a new relational mode of practice that is centred around the ‘co’. These ideas are explored against a critical framework of key thinkers from the anthropological, new materialist and phenomenological fields and through my practice-research which comprises an interwoven, overlapping body of artistic stagings and multiple forms of writing.

My contributions to knowledge come through a Knowledge Mobility Framework and an ethical methodological Proposition for Co-Relational Co-Formed Practice for the artistcurator which acknowledges and works with the open-ended, entanglement of things. I also outline a revised nomenclature of some key terms presented as a Key to Key Words glossary in order to challenge and expand the critical discourse of contemporary art practices.