Art Metropole

#14470

The Unfinished Conversation: Encoding/Decoding

Price

$23.00

Date

2016

Publisher

The Power Plant/Autograph ABP

Format

Catalogues

ISBN

978-1-894212-47-2

Size

16.5 × 21.5 cm

Length

107 pp

Genre

Contemporary Art

Co-published by The Power Plant and Autograph ABP (London, UK), The Unfinished Conversation: Encoding/Decoding is a written accompaniment to the Winter 2015 group exhibition at The Power Plant of the same name, co-presented with Autograph ABP (London, UK) and co-curated by Gaëtane Verna and Mark Sealy. Grounded in the work of Jamaican-born cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932-2014), the exhibition took Hall’s seminal text “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse” as its point of departure, reflecting on the ways in which meaning is constructed and how it might be detached or drained of original intent to produce distorted narratives.

The exhibition included work by Canadian and international artists including John Akomfrah, Terry Adkins, Sven Augustijnen, Shelagh Keeley, Steve McQueen and Zineb Sedira, six artists whose practices are devoted primarily to commenting on recent socio-political events and situations through the use of archival material in order to better understand our contemporary world. This exhibition revealed that national identity is not an essence or a state of being but rather a “becoming,” a process whereby subjectivities are formed and marginalized people are the agents and subjects of many possible futures, imagined or real.

Softcover, colour.