'n-1' Li-E Chen’s Work-in-progress Presentation #2: thinking. time. silence

About

Book via email: rsvp@liechen.com
Location: Senate House, Room 261, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
(nearest tube stations: Russell Square, Tottenham Court Road)

London-based interdisciplinary artist/director Li-E Chen will talk about her artistic project as it reaches its final stage: the 2015-2017 experimental site-specific art project, 'n-1'. She will relate it to some of the key figures that have inspired its artistic development, including Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Tehching Hsieh, Improbable Theatre Company's Open Space: Devoted and Disgruntled, John Cage, Robert Wilson, Samuel Beckett and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Throughout the talk, she will aslo present some of the project’s digital and participatory experiments. ‘n-1’ involves Li-E Chen's visits to 168 locations set out as numbers on a Google map of Greater London, using the city as a stage and open space for the execution of her experiments. The numbers are associated with the 524 propositions of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ‘Tractatus Logico Philosophicus’, whose account of logical structure and the limits of language inspired the project.

Chen’s work investigates the condition of 'nothingness', and draws on the notion of silence and on non-representational forms of expression. This project develops further her ideas about 'thinking posture', a term she uses for the disposition of mind and body that affects one's ways of living, thinking, and artistic making.

“‘Give me a body then’: this is the formula of philosophical reversal. The body is no longer the obstacle that separates thought from itself, that which it has to overcome to reach thinking. It is on the contrary that which it plunges into or must plunge into, in order to reach the unthought, that is life… Life will no longer be made to appear before the categories of thought; thought will be thrown into the categories of life. The categories of life are precisely the attitudes of the body, its postures. ‘We do not know what a body can do’: in its sleep, in its drunkenness, in its efforts and resistances. To think is to learn what a non-thinking body is capable of, it capacity, its postures.” Gilles Deleuze

For more detail about the project, please visit http://www.liechen.com
For further enquiries please email li@liechen.com