The 'thinking-business'

About

The ‘thinking-business’ will be an exhibition of two halves, bringing together the work of two female artists, Paloma Proudfoot and Rebecca Ounstead for the first time. Both artists have exhibited extensively in the UK, never once having met one another in person prior to this project. The ‘thinking-business’ acts as an experiment that facilitates partnership, and explores the nature of collaboration; its benefits and its difficulties. It has been the intention of the exhibition to initiate a semi-collaborative and discursive practice through long distance conversation between the two artists, which will culminate in a display of work at The Royal Standard.

 
“It’s not so much that we think alike, but that we do this thinking-business for and with each other.’[1]  Hannah Arendt
 
The ‘thinking-business’ aims to explore the enabling power of collaboration and the potential that partnership can provide towards production, and more specifically in art-making. The exhibition aims to create a transgressive and immersive space where objects, performance and costume will come together to straddle the opposing forces of instinct and reason, pleasure and repulsion, primitivism and intellectualism.
 
The exhibition will endeavor to bring forth the social, with its taboos and prohibitions, whilst exploring the relationship between the visual sensations and visceral reactions. Within these themes, materiality provides a discourse to aestheticize the idea of humanity's obsession with the forbidden, and the anxiety that is stimulated through disturbing against identity, system and order; leading to feelings of perversion and fetishisation.

As part of the exhibition programme, Aniela Piasecka and Paloma Proudfoot will host a newly commissioned performance event on Saturday, 13/05/17.
 
Illustration and publication by Sumuyya Khadar.
 

[1] Carol Brightman (ed.), Between Friends : The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1945-1975 (Harcourt Brace, 1995).