embodied-entanglements/entangled-embodiments-Origins Museum

Bev Butkow embodied-entanglements/entangled-embodiments Immersive installation Origins Centre Museum, Wits University, Johannesburg November 2021

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Dear Tandazani I’m very excited to show you the immersive installation titled embodiedentanglements/entangled-embodiments that I produced for my MFA show at the Origins Museum, Wits University.

Eessential features of the installation are its tactile and immersive qualities that create an experiential and bodily encounter for the viewer. I’m interested in how embodied sensorial experiences can create a space for human connection.

Creative practice brings the real possibility of re-looking at the way we engage in the world––the logic/illogic of how our world is structured––by creating embodied connection between people that allow us to experience each other as real bodily humans with feelings and emotions. Possibilities arise through this bodily connection to reconsider the logic through which we make sense of the world and to find ways to re-balance and restructure how individuals fit within societal structures in tandem with Mother Earth and all earth-beings.

Things happened within my exhibition space that I can’t explain. There was something unexpected, something ‘more’. The space and the activations I put in place (performances, sound bath immersions and ‘mind-decluttering’ experiences) precipitated a number of cathartic/releasing/energetic/healing experiences for different people. I can’t explain what this energy/force is, but I believe that creative process can be used to “activate” constellations of materials, made forms, the performance of past creative labour, shadows, movement, ideas and theoretical concepts to have a performative effect on their viewers.

I want to explore this performative power further.

I’m attaching images and a video of the immersive installation. Thank you again for sharing my space.

All the best Bev

Wall text “I invite you to experience this space with a childlike curiosity.

Immerse yourself in the tactile sensory dimensions of my uprising of textures, colours and materials.

Perceive a bodily connection that occurs beneath the radar of language and rational thought.

I entangle material, personal and social metaphors. In this place of alchemy, things and ideas are a performance that brings to life my creative labours. My nurturing of entangled form manifests an aliveness that expands into the world-flows with an anthropomorphic defiance. Space is unsettled as constellations dissolve and then solidify again.

I want to challenge the logic of how we make sense of the world. I elevate the intuitive perceptive body as the primary source of human intelligence. Human connection, full of raw emotion and dazzling complexity, becomes possible. Creative practice is mobilised to undiscipline, de-discipline and destabilize.

Please share your immersive sensory experience with me.”

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Technical specifications

Material list includes: Wood/plastic/glass beads, imitation pearls, string, dishcloths, scrap dressmaking fabric, wool, baking twine, glitter, hangers, plastic mesh, copper wire, repurposed painting stretchers, wooden frames, repurposed oil paintings, fabric, ribbon, fabric cord, fishing gut, rope, feather duster, lawnmower cord, air-conditioning duct, plastic sheeting, metal stoppers, plaster of paris, expanding foam, galvanised wire, aluminium bars, resin, hessian, acrylic, silver/copper/gold/bronze leaf, insulation tape, cable ties, metal washers, plastic cord, oil paint, ink, encaustic wax, graphite, embodied traces of time/labour/exertion/conversation/instruction

The installation embodies approximately 6 years of combined work: • Bev Butkow - 3 years (ongoing) • Heidi Stroh – 1.5 years • Sharon Maxinyane – 1.5 year

Detail. embodied-entanglements/entangledembodiments. 2020. Site-specific installation. © Bev Butkow. Photo: Anthea Pokroy

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Technical specifications The installation comprises approximately 40 artworks, including: • 1 ‘explosion’, comprising weaves, wooden frames, wooden bars, string, ribbon, air-conditioning duct • 6 unstretched paintings • 10-12 free-form suspended woven forms • 10 framed weaves • 1 metal/woven sculpture with a plaster plinth • Multiple entangled sculptural constellations • Expanded foam ‘rocks’ • 1 film piece accompanied by a sonic piece, projected through a screen of woven pieces • Vinyl window • A selection of screenprints

Detail. embodied-entanglements/entangledembodiments. 2020. Site-specific installation. © Bev Butkow. Photo: Anthea Pokroy

Untitled Oil paint, encaustic wax, glitter on Belgium linen 2021 200 x 300cm

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Untitled Oil paint, encaustic wax, glitter on Belgium linen 2021 200 x 300cm17

Oupa Sibeko durational performance at the exhibition opening

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Activations My process is a meeting of forces between artist, body, materials and creativity.

I invited four creatives, whose processes hold deep resonance with mine, to entangle their energies and creativity with my mine in order to activate the experiential space.

Oupa Sibeko is an award-winning performance artist who foregrounds his physical body in performing his experiences with brutal honesty, authenticity and humour. His durational performance revolves around what education in arts means to creative practice.

Wendy Leppard’s Crystal Alchemy Singing Bowls generate deeply resonant sound vibrations. The indescribable experience of sensations is felt deeply within the body, activating playfulness and laughter as modes of healing, liberation and renewal.

Niki Mowbray, the mind freedom fighter, considers the way we knot and entangle ourselves into stories that create their own life. And how these shape our lives. By reframing our assumptions, we untangle and unknot, and are able to weave together new stories and new realities.

Shanti Govender conducted deep breathwork.

On the last day, I opened up the space, inviting members of the public to go beyond touching, immersing and feeling the energy of the installation. I invited them to come play, to make-unmake-arrange-rearrange-curatere-curate the installation.

Vinyl window Sculptural constellation on expanded foam rock Galvanised wire, beads, string, dishcloths, scrap dressmaking fabric, wool, baking twine, repurposed canvas, fabric, ribbon, feather duster, fabric cord, fishing gut, lawnmower cord, expanding foam, insulation tape, cable ties, plastic cord, embodied traces of time/labour/exertion/conversation/instruction 2021 200 x 270cm

Constellation of oil painting, weave, expanded foam rock 2021

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Film piece, on screen of weaves 2021

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Artist My immersive installation functions beyond the white cube’s conventional state of quietude, activating the space with the movement of people, sound, light, and encouraging viewers to touch, engage, and experience.

This installation is multi-layered and opaque to the rational mind, removing the viewer from daily reality and consciousness, immersing her in a world that hinges on fantasy and otherness.

My particular interest is in the kind of painted surface that has a propensity to grow out of its frame, expanding into three dimensions. Through my installation practice, I paint in space, viewing the labour-intensive act of weaving as an act of painting with materials and colours. I use weaving to challenge painting, breaking the painted surface so that painting becomes the support/loom that I weave into. Weaving in an everexpanding and fluid interpretation of what it means to ‘paint’, my practice is centred by notions of the decolonial and feminist material object. I de-discipline my forms, disrupting the Western canonical category of ‘painting’ and reclaiming my ancestral technology.

I call the free-form, dimensional, constellated forms that I make embodiedentanglements/entangled-embodiments, or eXe. These are layered moments of interconnection between the material, personal, and social. eXe entangle deep experimentation with materials and the rhythmic gestures of my artist body. They are nurtured in wandering, questioning, embattling, loving and motherly acts. Through the labour and time invested in them, they transform into multi-layered sculptural masses that celebrate the small, ordinary, and even mundane. eXe never settle into solid reified form: they are ephemeral, unable to be captured or tied down, yet they are grounded in physical materialities––my artist’s body, the materials and physical making practices.

statement eXe expand dimensionally into the flows of the world, asserting my right to claim space as a woman while questioning my accountability to space and context within the complex network of roles and positions I assume as an artist-wife-mother-woman-student-global citizen in South Africa in 2021. I am grounded by responsibility as I juggle my life’s obligations. Yet I seek to liberate and unbound by un-disciplining knowledge and destabilising flattened representations and identity markers, as well as expectations on me as a woman. This co-existence––grounded and unbound––informs my inhabitation of eXe. My process is less concerned with finished artworks than with exploring the performative power of the creative process, my gendered labour, and sedimented life experiences – and those of the people who have helped to produce this work with me.

In this place of alchemy, things and ideas are a performance. The gendered nature of this performance element is critical to gaining an understanding of my complex hybrid process. eXe are made through the small routine habitual gestures of my body. The ritualistic acts of weaving give eXe a sense of pattern, repetition and human touch. Past creative activities are brought into the present, remaining active as they are felt viscerally today. eXe capture autographic traces of my gestures and of my entangled life in imprinted traces of enforced constraint and the intensity of gendered work. I view my body as a multi-dimensional information field that extends way being its physical form. Its accumulation of experiences and embodied sense of things in the world leads the intuitive creative process in a manner that is organic, fluid, reflexive, messy and spontaneous.

I build eXe to an intensity. Their out-of-control heavily-worked heavilylayered heavily-sedimented material surfaces envelope the viewer in their unruly profusion of material presence. They are at once sensitive and delicate, unruly and disruptive.

Defiant.

Weaving gets corrupted.

It becomes a rebel.

Unsettled, eXe teeter in a fragile equilibrium between holding together and unravelling. Mine is an ongoing process of unravelling order and then attempts to make sense of disorder. I make-unmake-learn-unlearn-arrangerearrange, using the gestural rhythms of weaving to un-discipline and destabilize the multiple life-roles I assume. My installation juxtaposes contradictory elements that are forced to co-exist: the tiny and insignificant are monumentalised; flat rhythmic woven planes contrast dimensional forms. Through these contradictory practices, I explore alternate states of my sedimented body––the disciplined socialised worker in contrast to the intuitive innate creative, suggesting an expanded body originating in performative making practices, materials and social relations.

Perspective and relationships change constantly, depending on where you are looking from.

The space is embodied. Beyond being seen, eXe are felt. Their intense vibrational aliveness stimulates an embodied encounter within the viewer. eXe bestow a performative power on the viewer. They entice viewers to touch them. Even in the making, they seem to meet me half-way, the forms developing under another form of ‘guidance’. When humans reorient from being central actors in the universe to a player at the same level as other actors, there is a corresponding relaxation in fixed boundaries and hierarchical structures between subject and object. The multi-layered multidimensional complexity of the installation sits at odds with a world looking for simplistic answers to complex issues. It is simultaneously of our times, its detritus and chaos mirroring broad challenges to established structures and social formations.

Biography Bev Butkow (b. Johannesburg 1967) started making art in her mid-40s and is now a full-time artist grounded in the seriousness of her responsibility as a maker, communicator and social actor. Passionate about life-long learning, she is pursuing a Master of Fine Arts at Wits University, Johannesburg on a scholarship from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. To this challenge she brings a diversity of perspectives from her varied life experiences, like corporate and artistic careers, community involvement, academia and role as a mother and wife. Deeply committed to social engagement and education, she co-founded a library in rural Limpopo and works actively on the board and management committee of 11 schools.

Butkow will exhibit at the 2022 Dakar Biennale and has exhibited at 1-54 London, Cape Town & Joburg Art Fairs and Wits Art Museum. Curated exhibitions include Tactile Visions-Woven at Turbine Art Fair, and The Art of Lithography: a collaborative expression of LL Editions at Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg. She is represented by Guns & Rain and her work is housed in local and international collections.

Butkow has presented at numerous academic conferences, participated in academic workshops and is published in the digital journal [...] Ellipses Journal for Creative Research.

Her creative home is the Bag Factory Artist Studios, blocks away from where her grandfather sold eggs at the Fresh Produce Market in the 60s. Inspired by the only city in which she has lived, Butkow lives with her husband and four children in Johannesburg, South Africa.

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Curriculum Vitae

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Curriculum Vitae - cont

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