Artist: Ajaykumar

Exhibition Dates Extended: 5 September - 22 October 2007 

Times: 10am-5pm Daily

Cost: Free with Entry to the Powerhouse Museum

Background 

radio play is in part a play on a radio play. It takes the form of a sound installation, an auto-ethnographic audio presentation, and is crucially experienced in a darkened space.

Blurring distinctions between practice and theory, radio play has resonances with performative lectures of John Cage, with Derek Jarman's Blue, as well as with film essays of Chris Marker, who, alongside other cine-roman directors - such as Marguerite Duras, Alain Resnais, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Agnes Varda - made 'films to read'.

Formally and thematically the work engages with the Japanese concept of Ma - signifying emptiness-presence, interval, pause, rest, a s pace in-between, in-relation, and space-time. radio play is an immersive work that elicits a particular spectatorship, facilitating possibilities of spectators as co-creators; engaging with a notion of artist as medium rather than auteur. radio play calls into question established notions of race and cultural diversity. It could be termed a work of sound art, of live art, and of new writing.

Most importantly, radio play exists in diverse formats. It will also be experienced and evaluated in an online format simultaneous to the real time exhibition.  This will be available via the Beta_Space website.  As this is experimental territory for Beta_space and the Powerhouse Museum, the data gathered during the online evaluation will feed the feasability of online narratives as a staple for narrative information for the museum on a larger scale.

Biography

Ajaykumar is an artist, academic at Goldsmiths University of London; member of the TrAIN - the research centre of the University of the Arts London, in Transnational Art, Identity and Nation; curator; and co-director of the shapes design studio: designing playful furniture, lighting, and gardens, and items that come into 'being' through the play of those who acquire or frequent them.

His art practice is trans-disciplinary, intermedia, and single form, spanning the disciplines of: internet art, video art, combined media installation, sculpture, film, site-specific art, environmental art, performance/live art, design, architecture, sound art, dance, theatre, creative writing.  This practice does not concern the art object primarily, but the possibilities of the creation of a sublime world that manifests in an ephemeral space between an art object and a spectator's experiencing of it, and the context in which it is viewed; where art works come into being through the 'play' of others. His work also deals with nature and out perception of nature. Re-conceiving classical Buddhist and Tantric art in contemporary form,

Ajaykumar's work stimulates particular ecological dynamics of the human being in relation to environment; and elicits notions of daily life as art. His formal studies have been at Chelsea College of Art and Design, London College of Communication, The Royal College of Art, and with Etienne Decroux in Paris.  Information on his recent and current projects as well as published writing are available on his website. 

While in Australia, Ajaykumar will also be presenting at the CADE conference as part of BEAP 07. 

Related Events 

Location: UTS, Broadway Campus, Bldg 10, Level 4, Room 470
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