One Fold, Two Fold, Ten Fold, Manifold
Exposed Arts Projects
This is the first event in Exposed Library Series, the ongoing interrogation of definitions and practices of “arts-based research” within and beyond academia curated by Sasha Burkhanova-Khabadze.
The event is based on the research by artist Gina DeCagna, mathematician Dr Mehdi Yazdi and poet-scholar Dr Orchid Tierney. To paraphrase the late-nineteenth-century British writer John Huntley Skrine, one way to define a ‘manifold’ is as a chosen abstraction that gathers into focus qualities of human duty, experience, and hope. However, the term has varied meanings across context and research discipline. An artist convenes with a mathematician, a poet, and the public to consider varied meanings of the ‘manifold’ and to understand how our internal values and external objectivities intertwine.
Through her interventionist installations of discarded cardboard, American artist Gina DeCagna employs a material and symbolic sensibility of ‘manifolds’ in building improvised organic architectures that resemble geographical strata, tree rings, and plant foliage from discarded cardboard to speculate on the forms and structures of globalised society. While in Baroque times, fabric folds were depicted to speak to a spiritual understanding of the soul, DeCagna seeks to represent the folding collapse of late capitalism, mixing indeterminacy with strength.
She brings into her orbit the topologist Dr Mehdi Yazdi, who finds similar visual inspiration to propel his mathematical intuition around questions of manifolds and foliations — research questions that ultimately could lead us to mathematically understand more structures and systems that underpin the world, including, potentially, that of the Internet and even DNA. Poet and scholar Dr Orchid Tierney brings the metaphorical world of language into researching the representations of waste and its management, most recently completing a poetic work on ocean plastic. Finally, we will critically convene these different disciplinary approaches through philosophy, starting with Kant’s ‘manifold of sense’, that of bringing particularities together through a synthetic process of understanding.