Images Must Be Explained or Told
Joke Robaard
How to properly grasp the material consequences of textile metaphors? In language we pretend to execute a material act; in reality we execute a technological instruction. Somewhere between fabricated language and the haptic sense of real fabric there’s a tear, a hole. And yet this “distressed”gap is desirable inasmuch as it’s the very essence of weaving. Knotted networks offer ways of thinking that are flatly pragmatic.The fabrication of textiles and textile vocabularies are both useful exercises in iteration, because they can both be undone. In this audio-visual presentation concepts of Bruno Latour (networks)and Vilém Flusser (gestures, surfaces), will be tested and questioned while projecting image material from sections of her archive.
Joke Robaard Joke Robaard (1953) is an artist/researcher and a lecturer material culture at the TXT department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. In 2016 her video, Small Things That Can Be Lined Up was presented within the program Event and Duration by If I Cant Dance, Amsterdam, (http://www.ificantdance.com/pdf/robaard_preview.pdf) She collaborates with art-historian Camiel van Winkel in a long termproject, opening her extensive Archive Intersections collection, an inquiry into the representation of ‘clothes bodies’ in print media since the 1979’s. The book Assemblage; Bodies, Habits, Practices will be released in 2018 by Valiz publishers. Recent exhibitions include: Mind Fabric, Institut de Carton, Brussel (2016), Assemblage, Het Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam (2016)