‘I’m in the bath on all fours…’ is a 3-phase visual art exhibition and interspersed series of talks, performances, workshops and screenings curated by Well Projects and artist Flora Parrott. Its premise stems from a research trip, undertaken by Flora Parrott, to learn about a recently discovered cave dwelling fish, the Cave Loach, that inhabits a labyrinthine cave network. In each phase of ‘I’m in the bath on all fours’ a pair of artists, artist-groups or researchers are invited to collaborate and consider the life of the loach; to explore notions of the subaqueous, and engage with the nature of water, embodied experience and the deep dark in relation to community and commonality.
Phase 1 consisted of an exhibition of new works by Flora Parrott and Lindiwe Matshikize produced through long-distance conversations between the pair. To unpack wider programme thematics and the content the first phase of the project, Flora Parrott and Well Projects organised the ‘EVENING LOACH SEMINAR’ (details below). The seminar brought together a range of speakers to each give their perspective on the Cave Loach, and the conceptual premises of the project.
In Phase 2 the work of Hannah Rowan and SHELL LIKE came together to explore bodily responses to deep, watery spaces. Thinking through technological apparatus, neoprene skin and the act of descending into water that necessitates a restructuring of the senses. You are always touched and touching the liquid volume, a three hour long slime hard squeeze marks a stuttered path down through twenty thousand years – further into the subaqueous towards a phenomenology of immersion and deep time.
In Phase 3 artists Korallia Stergides & Raphael Schulenburg (in conversation with Dr Rachael Squire) developed a site-specific installation and series of performances under the guise of their collaborative character ‘Deep Love’. Entering into a cave system or a body of water reorients your relationship to the cartographic. The usual fixation on a determinable two-dimensional map is exchanged for a volumetric axis in which distinct entities such as temporality, relativity and materiality become entangled into a new thought space. Floating down into this space we meet Deep Love; “You are an ephemeral bubble of time just waiting to be popped”.
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Im in the bath.. is 3 visual art exhibitions that include both online and offline content, a series of 5 live/online events and workshops and a publication with contributions from 22 artists and academics.
The title for the project, ‘I’m in the bath on all fours’, is derived from a text of the same name by Lindiwe Matshikiza.
