Touch Techne
Touch Techne is a series of visual vignettes assembled to form a network of patterns and intensifications across eight screens.
Touch Techne is an 8 channel video installation that is a minor micro-history, a speculative visual fabulation, an entangled sculptural video that describes the human impulse to image the natural world. In this work this story is told entirely through the medium of commercial stock footage.
In Touch Techne affective, material and evocative relationships unfold between textural, sensual imagery. The footage has been selected to correspond to a series of taxonomies and forces of the natural world; fire, earth, air, water; animal, vegetable, mineral. This footage is edited into kaleidoscopic, hypnotic arrays that move in and out of synchronicity. It calls for a consideration of how humans represent and image the natural world, for what purpose and for whom, how these representations are commodified and traded and how they inform our relationship to the world and the other entities in it.
Touch Techne was commissioned by VISUAL Carlow and Carlow Arts Festival for Woman in the Machine.
Barbara Knežević
Barbara Knežević works primarily in sculpture and object making, utilising complex formations of objects and moving images. These formations are an omnivorous selection of things acting together calling to mind familiar arrangements; film sets, photographic shoots, museum displays, retail displays and other staged arrangements of found and fabricated items. These concentrated sculptural arrangements aim to distil and amplify the qualities and affect of the objects they display, through repeating and calling attention to texture, colour, opacity, pattern or other haptic, sensual qualities. Barbara Knežević’s work explores the potential for artworks to create affect, produce feeling, to induce wellbeing or to generate emotive and pleasurable states. Her sculptural concentrations produce intra-relations between objects, viewer, and space and propose the potential of artworks as zones for radical joyfulness and pleasure, and as ways to reimagine and reconsider ways of being.
