The Artists Forum, convened at the Centre for Humanities Research, emerges out a longstanding conversation between artists and academics working in and through the CHR.
Date:
Thursday 25 September
Time:
11:00am – 13:00pm
Venue:
The CHR’s Iyatsiba Lab,
66 Greatmore Street, Woodstock
(enter via Regents St)
The Forum’s objective has been to connect scholarly exploration with the CHR’s Artist in Residency programme, and to bring artists and humanistic study into a more intimate adjacency.
In this engagement, Ralph Borland will explore the entwinement of art, science and humanities in his work, from his early engagement with technology at art school, through his Masters thesis work in Interactive Telecommunications, his research into the interaction of people and designed objects across geographic and socioeconomic locations for his PhD work, and a number of postdoctoral research projects – alongside his creative production outside the academy. His process is frequently collaborative, working with musicians, filmmakers, artisans and engineers to produce socially-engaged work. He has a keen interest in popular culture, especially music from Africa and its diasporas, as well as forms of street-level art and craft. A touchstone for his work is Interventionist Art, especially its activist application in Southern locations. The art of intervention is to make everyday situations the material for enquiry and creative communication to audiences. His presentation will trace the threads of art production, critical design, and perspectives on science and technology from the humanities, through his projects. A persistent animating force in his practice is a concern with the relationships of humans and machines, storytelling as meaning-making, and multiple futures as constantly emerging.
Artist Bio
Ralph Borland is a Southern African artist who has worked at the intersection of art, design, and science and technology for close to thirty years. He studied sculpture at the University of Cape Town, and the creative applications of electronics and computers at New York University. While pursuing an transdisciplinary PhD in Engineering at Trinity College Dublin, he started working with Science Gallery International, curating public exhibitions that bring together the work of artists, designers and scientists. His recent research fellowship into emerging technologies in healthcare in Africa, at HUMA, the Institute for Humanities in Africa at University of Cape Town, centred on an artwork Bone Flute made in collaboration with an orthopaedic surgeon at a public hospital, and culminated in a public exhibition.