Another Reality: lecture Mike Cooter

Wednesday 13 April 2016, 20 hrs
Location: Hogewal 1-9, The Hague
Language spoken: English
Admission: free
RSVP: reserveren@stroom.nl or use form at bottom of this page


Part of the 'In Progress' phase during which the exhibition Display Show gradually transforms into Another Reality. After Lina Bo Bardi.

In his lecture Putting it in the window. Some thoughts on display mechanisms and enclosure the artist Mike Cooter will look at the intertwined relationship of art, design and architecture with regards to display strategies, the structured encounter and acts of enclosure. Mike Cooter is an artist, occasional curator and current Goldsmiths PhD candidate. For the exhibition Another Reality. After Lina Bo Bardi he will build a concrete stage based on anthropomorphic window holes.

The lecture will be preceded by the performance String Too Short To Be Saved by Martin la Roche >> read more.

Taking the works and research material contained within Display Show as a point of departure, Mike Cooter's densely illustrated talk charts the idiosyncratic path from the 1851 Great Exhibition to the present day, looking at how objects and artworks are articulated, presented and choreographed, and how architects, designers and artists have explored the co-dependency between artefact and environment. How, for example, Frederick Kiesler's writings on department store display in the 1930s can be seen to structure Nathalie Du Pasquier's recent campaign for American Apparel.

Mike Cooter's work investigates the structural agency of objects, be they sculpture, cinematic props or other anthropological artefacts - objects co-opted or created to drive narratives, fictional or otherwise. Interdisciplinary research is resolved into audio, film, text and layered installations that incorporate correspondence, interviews, loaned and re-fabricated artefacts and archival material. He is currently post-producing a six-part radio drama about an object, Dingus, to be released in late 2015, and writing a PhD on the MacGuffin at Goldsmiths in London, where he lives and works. In 2013 he curated In form express and admirable (in a sense lying, in a sense not).

www.mikecooter.org

Mike Cooter during the installation of his work at Stroom
photo: Eric de Vries, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
Another Reality. After Lina Bo Bardi
photo: design: Studio Manuel Raeder
Mike Cooter, 'MacGuffin: some archetypes towards a definition' at Swiss Institute, NY, 2016
Performance Martin La Roche
photo: Eric de Vries, courtesy Stroom Den Haag