Siri Hermansen: Tipping Point
Research Fellow at Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Faculty of Visual Arts
The aim of the Tipping Point project is to examine - through artistic practice – contemporary modes of adaptation and consequences generated by political, cultural and economic processes of change. The research project seeks to investigate the artistic potential that lies in the dilemma between wanted and unwanted changing processes in society.
The title Tipping Point refers to a medical term within epidemiology that denotes the moment when a virus reaches a critical mass and an epidemic starts spreading uncontrollably.
My premise is that artists has the ability to identify complex tendencies in society and can analyse these by placing them into a wider context and questioning them through the art object. I believe in the art object as a channel for interpreting and presenting complex and ineffable issues to the viewer.
Tipping Point Station
The Tipping Point project will be based on research through the Artistic Research Laboratory, Tipping Point Station (TPS). TPS is a mental and physical test base which will execute and support artistic experiments. It is the mobile basis from where I can initiate experiments and engage with situations which is related to Tipping Point situations. It will also be a production space and a meeting place for reflections and discussions. The laboratory is transportable, organic and will change through the inner processes of each project.The laboratory will among other things engage in two site specific projects; Chernobyl - mon Amour about the Chernobyl accident and Monsoon Magic about the self organised teachingprogram Barefoot Teaching in Calcutta.
Rather than conducting research and production solely in the studio, my artistic method is through Tipping Point Station to initiate Tipping Point situations or to travel to the place/area I wish to examine to gather information and active learning about the site/situation I am working on.
In this way, I create my own primary material that makes up the basis and framework around each art project. This involves the use of a wide range of artistic approaches, techniques and materials that come together as a whole in the various projects.
Chernobyl - mon Amour
“Chernobyl - mon Amour” deals with the history and the consequences of the Chernobyl accident. The fire in nuclear reactor 4 in Chernobyl in the Ukraine in 1986 was a local catastrophe with transnational effects. Today, an area around the reactor, 30 kilometres in diameter and including the town of Pripjat with its then 500,000 inhabitants, is still uninhabitable. Official, scientific investigation into the accident has never been carried out and the official death toll still only stands at 56 people. Nevertheless, it is evident that the thousands of people who were exposed to radiation immediately after the accident and the over half a million soldiers who participated in the long cleaning-up process during the first year have died of cancer. A large number of children were also born with deformities following their parents’ exposure to nuclear radiation.
Monsoon Magic
The Calcutta project "Monsoon Magic" is based on the ideology and the day-to-day running of the Loreto Day School, Seldah in Calcutta. This Christian nun school for girls has about 1400 pupils. Half the children are selected from the slums of the surrounding neighbourhood. Their lives are dramatically transformed from living in abject poverty to receiving clothes, food and an education. The wonderful thing about this school is that all the pupils have to give something back to the local community.
The Chernobyl project is a clear Tipping Point situation and the Calcutta project is dealing with a status quo of poverty in Calcutta. While The Chernobyl project points to a situation which brought deep change but which was not intentional, the Calcutta project seeks to ask whether human intentions and actions can lead to a Tipping Point situation that can lead to profound change.
The research project Tipping Point will try to develop a method of producing insights in change and adoption processes in the complex crossroads of people, cultures, politics and economy.
It is important for me that there is a transformation – both materially and mentally – within the development process, which enables ideas to germinate and gives the work of art room to alter its character. For me, it is precisely this unpredictability in the working process that makes it possible to enter into a dialogue with the work, to discover new aspects and to develop it, enabling fresh insights into the project.