Katia Barrett & Jan Adriaans ~ Prototype-Protagonists ~ part 2
Donna Haraway adopts a kind of salamander politics, a politics based on continual mutation and regeneration, rather than the familial cry of rebirth. It is from here, this video engages and takes up the fictionality and construction of the shifting conception of the refugee in the public consciousness, not as an ambivalent abstraction, but an active agent and ontological force radically transforming the political landscape.
Rather than seek to rectify this construction, it engages fictionality as a potentially accumulative site for regeneration, co-opting artificiality as its leverage towards a mutational politics aimed at reconfiguring the very constraints at play.
Katia Barrett is an artist based in London currently completing an MA at the Dutch Art Institute. Her recent research and practice draws upon developments in interdisciplinary theoretical biology in which the subjectivisation of nature corresponds with a naturalisation of subjectivity. From this she explores questions of agency, reason, consciousness and will. Recent exhibitions include Homeworks 7, Beirut, 2015
Jan Adriaans graduated from the Dutch Art Institute in 2015, he mainly works in video. In his recent work he explores the borders of subjectivity, the possibility of altering consciousness, and a neuroscientific move away from individualism as the core of society.