FTHo

The title of the exhibition, First Hand, refers to John Latham’s naming of his artist studio as the ‘Hand’ and the fact that this exhibition provides the first opportunity for the group to work together in person after three years online. The show includes installation, photography, video work, sculpture, digital work, painting and book-based pieces which have been developed in partnership through close discussion. Over the course of their digital placement /origin\forward/slash\ have become focused on issues of dwelling, thinking, materiality, the questioning of the domestic sphere and the objects or words we produce.

/origin\forward/slash\have used two written documents as stimulus for First Hand, both included in the show. The first is John Latham’s permanent ‘book’ sculpture, cantilevered through the facade of FTHo, which they weild as an integral aspect of the exhibition. The second is the key philosophical essay by Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art (1950) which the group use as inspiration to move through, with and against, to locate a dialogue between members of the group. The exhibition includes contributions from dance artist Marie Hay working in collaboration with philosopher Sacha Golob, artist Mark Titmarsh with art and critical theorist Johanna Malt, artist Hester Reeve whose work has been informed by conversations with philosopher Georgios Tsagdis, and a digital contribution by artist, writer and technologist Jan Hopkins.

/origin\forward/slash\

/origin\forward/slash\ formed out of a one-off event at Flat Time House at the end of 2018 organised by Hester Reeve and Sacha Golob. Thinking through, with and against ‘The Origin of the Work of Art was a one-day research event based at Flat Time House where invited artists and philosophers exchanged what was at stake for each of them in Heidegger’s philosophical text. After this event a small nexus formed who wanted to continue meeting to explore the issues that had arisen. Initially invited to create an exhibition at Flat Time House in 2020, the group used the hiatus of the Covid pandemic lock down as a rare opportunity to spend time online, ‘inhabiting’ their interests and friendships together. 

Since formation group members and contributors include: Steven Claydon, Sacha Golob, Marie Hay, Johanna Malt, Hester Reeve, Mark Titmarsh and Georgios Tsagdis.

The /origin\forward/slash\ project is lead by Hester Reeve, Reader in Fine Art, Sheffield Hallam University in association with the Centre for Philosophy and Art, King’s College London. The group are grateful to artist Jan Hopkins for assisting them in the build of their Other Hand website and for ongoing site maintenance. 

/origin\forward/slash\ digital residency at FTHo:

Between 2020 and 2023, the /origin\forward/slash\ group undertook a digital placement at Flat Time House. Their central activity has been convening in 'The Other Hand' (their virtual extension to John Latham's original layout plan for Flat Time House via their website). The online room, The Other Hand, randomly presences-sequences small segments of Heidegger’s Origin of the Work of Art essay affording an architectural reading-experience of his ideas. The website also houses an archive of documents and video documentation and can be accessed at originforwardslash.com 

Other group activity by /origin\forward/slash\:

Alongside group discussions via zoom, members of /origin\forward/slash\ have been working in pairs through a process of open-ended collaborative production (artistic practice and philosophical thinking). Initial works were discussed and demonstrated at Dust Jacket for an Exhibition Postponed, an online public event which launched their website, The Other Hand,  in July 2021. The title of the event derives from the idea that a dust jacket promotes, promises and protects ‘the book’, and the book in turn forms an abode for the ‘work.’

Two further online events to share ideas with the public were organised:

For Show and Tell in the House of Art in July 2022 where the group shared current work and ideas in relationship to Heidegger’s essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking.’

In July 2023, the group hosted Hiding Out – Reading Philosophy in the Studio/Seeking Conversational Sustenance, an online conversation with ‘Art & Language’ (Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden) joined by two important figures linked to Art & Language’s collaborative process, Michael Corris (artist and author of upcoming publication Inside Art & Philosophy: An Artist’s Point of View) and Paul Wood (painter and author of many publications, notably with Charles Harrison, Art in Theory 1900-1990 (1992), new ed. as Art in Theory 1900-2000, (2002).

Biographies

Sacha Golob

Sacha Golob is Professor of Philosophy at King’s College London and Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Art (CPA). He has published extensively on modern French and German Philosophy and the Philosophy of Art. His current research explores moral progress and decline. www.sachagolob.com

Marie Hay

Marie Hay is a dance artist working with the rhythmic performance of contemporary dance and speech. Along with Louise Douse and Martin Leach, she convened the international From Heidegger to Performance symposium in 2018 and is co-editor of the upcoming publication of the same name (to be published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2024). Hay is Senior Lecturer in Dance at De Montfort University.

Johanna Malt

Johanna Malt is widely published in Surrealism and on various aspects of modern and contemporary art, theory and text-image relations. She is currently finishing a book provisionally entitled Image/Vestige: Casts, Imprints and Traces in Modern and Contemporary Art. Malt is Professor of French Literature and Visual Culture at King’s College London where she is also a board member of the Centre for Philosophy and Art.

Hester Reeve

Hester Reeve is an artist working across a variety of mediums including site-specific live art, drawing, sculpture and photographic documentation. She was active as an artist in the environmental movement of post revolutionary Czechoslovakia, co-authoring an oral history Libkovice: Zdař bůh in 1997. She has worked with physicist David Bohm’s radical model of Dialogue for over 20 years, convening events in a variety of contexts. She collaborates with Olivia Plender under the banner of The Emily Davison Lodge and in 2013 they were invited to curate an exhibition of Sylvia Pankhurst’s artwork at Tate Modern. The first monograph on her work, Ymedaca, was published by the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2015. Reeve is Reader in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University and is the project lead for /origin\forward/slash\.

Mark Titmarsh

Mark Titmarsh is a visual artist working in painting, video and writing. In Australia he was a significant contributor to the development of the postmodern debate in the visual arts in his role as co-editor of the Visual Arts magazine, ‘On the Beach.’ In the 1990s he co-founded the Sydney based artists group ‘Art Hotline’ that exhibited ephemeral works in non-gallery everyday sites. His book Expanded Painting was published by Bloomsbury in August 2017. Titmarsh is a lecturer in Design Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) in Australia.

Jan Hopkins 

Jan Hopkins, born 1963 in Barnsley, is a late-emergent visual artist, writer and technologist, only now surfacing after a long career teaching art, technology and mathematics. Her work muddies the waters of the ‘authentic’, the handmade and the technologically produced and investigates the cybernetic feedback loops between humans and technology. She often works with machine generated text and images, expanded by the evolving collaborative relationship between herself and her devices. Jan graduated from a Fine Art MA at Sheffield Hallam University and recent shows include Soft Loop - Site Gallery, Sheffield, andThe prism of the feminine: machines, oocytes, wires, potions - Drawing Now Art Fair, Paris. From her studio in Sheffield, she continues to ask how an art practice working collaboratively with machines can rethink our future relationships with technology and everything else.

Hester Reeve, Friend of the House, digital photograph (lead pencil on painter’s canvas), documentation: John Hartley 2023