A l a n a  J e l i n e k



art as philosophical praxis








Click for ongoing and upcoming events

*All text, images and logos on this website under 'creative commons licence'

Formerly, www.alanajelinek.com was exclusively used as the portal for artwork:
a   d i a r y   o f   r a c i s m
me - you - them



CURRENT
Tall Stories: Cannibal Forks
Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology,
University of Cambridge. 25 May 2012-2013Detail of Tall Stories: Cannibal Forks 2012

Click for more




A bit of contextual info:

Recently I've been asked about the range of my artwork. Not only do I use a wide range of media including performance, collaborative, novel writing, painting and site-specific interventions, but I explore a wide range of seemingly unrelated subjects. For me, they're not unrelated, but it is true, for an artistic practice, it is a wide and relatively disparate range of interests.

This is a brief attempt at an overarching theme:

Art, for me, is a philosophical praxis. What I mean by this is that, for me, art is a philosophical enquiry using materiality to explore, interrogate and enact ideas. All of my work explores mechanisms of power and an individual's relationship to these. This includes the historical, colonial past, with its legacies in the present and the present within neoliberalism. 

 
I choose the medium to best explore an idea. I was trained as a painter (1987-90) so I've been drawn to the language and implications of oil paint; the medium of oil paint as motif for traditional power structures,
but I also have a deep ambivalence towards stuff, making yet more stuff in a world with too much stuff in it and perhaps with too great a preoccupation with stuff. So I am drawn to types of practice that avoid this problem - ephemera, or giving away stuff, or performance, or sharing in collaborative events

A bit of biog info:

  • Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
    Creative Fellow, Museum of Anthropology and Archeaology, University of Cambridge, 2009-2014
  • PhD at Oxford Brookes University 2004-2008. 50:50 History of Art: Fine Art Practice,
    'Art as a democratic act: the interplay of
    context and content in contemporary art' AHRC award
  • MA (Gender,Society, Culture) Birkbeck college, University of London 1992-4
  • BA (Fine Art - Painting) Victoria College, Prahran, Melbourne, Australia with modules in Philosophy and History and Philosophy of Science, University of Melbourne 1987-90
    chronological CV link

see below for art and exhibitions info

Published first novel 2007 'Ohm's Law' with terra incognita
(terra incognita link) ISBN: 978-0-9535045-3-4

Visual Art Exhibitions across England, Australia, France, Japan, and Bangkok, Thailand; Poznan, Poland; Moscow, Russia; Dniepropretrovsk, Ukraine.

Curating, art project management and exhibition design for various institutions since 1997. Co-founded terra incognita arts organisation 1997

Education work since 1993, including schools, museums and galleries, further and higher education.

Contact :
(If you have JavaScript turned on, an e-mail address should appear above)
It should read: info [AT] this URL

Search via subject

n e o l i b e r a l i s m

colonialism

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painting

performance

collaborations

interventions

w r i t i n g

online






neoliberalism




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performance

  • BLACCXN (2004-ongoing)
    • PR guru #6 for BLACCXN
      Whitechapel Art Gallery (2006, 2010), Edinburgh Fringe Festival (2006), Citigroup Tower, London (2008), Tate Britain / Arts Catalyst (2009), Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, University of Camrbidge (2009), August Art (2011)
    • corporate sponsor
      EAST INTERNATIONAL (2005)

colonialism

  • Arts & Humanities Research Council Creative Fellowship (2009-2014)
    Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, University of Cambridge
  • detail (2006)
    Jim Thompson House
  • me - you - them (2001 - 2004)
    a diary of racism as victim, bystander and perpetrator


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writing

  • The Fork's Tale, as narrated by itself (2013)
    • novel a novel written from the point of view of a cannibal fork in the museum's collection. Published by chapter on a monthly basis throughout 2013, published by LemonMelon. Subscriptions from LemonMelon. Complete bound books available from 2014
  • This is Not Art : activism and other not art (2013)
    • published by I.B.Tauris
  • Ohm's Law (2007)
    • novel: 'the relationship between power and resistance', published by terra incognita

collaborations

  • The Field (2009-ongoing)
    experimental artwork
    • ongoing, collaborative project sited in a 13 acre field and woodland near Stansted Airport, Essex aimed to making connections between art and science, making and doing, theory and practice, knowledge and 'knowledge', human and non-human, urban and rural
    • wiki for participants
  • Tall Stories: Cannibal Forks (2010) 
    video and objects
    • collaboration with staff at Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology carving cannibal forks using traditional English carving techniques and indigeous English wood, retelling the various stories promulgated about nineteenth century Fiji and cannibalism.
  • Details (2006)
    paintings
    • collaboration with Ban Krua community, a traditional silk weaving community in Bangkok, Thailand to inform site-specific intervention at Jim Thompson House, Bangkok. Members of the community were asked to take photos of everday objects or their homes from the outside. These were translated into oil paintings, done on the back of Jim Thompson silk stretched like canvas. They were placed throughout the museum, disrupting the view of the museum's version of authentic Thai life. The intervention was censored after a few weeks.

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painting

Capital Growth (2009)
6 x paintings as site-specific interventions
floor based oil painting x arrangement 3mx3m

Details (2006)
24 oil paintings on silk as site-specific intervention 20cm x 20cm

collaboration with Ban Krua community, a traditional silk weaving community in Bangkok, Thailand to inform site-specific intervention at Jim Thompson House, Bangkok. Members of the community were asked to take photos of everday objects or their homes from the outside. These were translated into oil paintings, done on the back of Jim Thompson silk stretched like canvas. They were placed throughout the museum, disrupting the view of the museum's version of authentic Thai life. The intervention was censored after a few weeks.

Europe the Game (2003-4)
interactive game/painting
panels each 36cm x 36cm
54 oil painted panels, floor-based, rules of the game
Players are invited to choose which of the 54 birds eye view landscapes shoud fit into a frame that can contain a maximum of 36 panels

56°N 1°W (2000-1)
floor-based, oil painting, 3m x 3m
A small piece of England at home in any part of the world.

Shooting the Natives (2001)
life-sized oil painting of a tourist taking a photograph placed and left in the Pilbara region, Western Australia, opposite Aboriginal Land

Ayers Rock (Uluru) (2000)
floor-based, oil painting 40ft x 12ft
tempting visitors to step on the canvas depicting tourists walking on the sacred site, Uluru, despite the requests not to climb it







online

online work 1: BLACCXN
online work 2: me-you-them
online work 3: Corporate Sponsorship
online work 4: The People's Vote
online work 5: Europe the Game
online work 6: The Guidebook

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interventions

  • Tall Stories: Cannibal Forks (2010)
    site-specific intervention, made as collaboration, Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, University of Cambridge
  • BLACCXN sponsorship of Archaeology Gallery (2009)
    site-specific intervention, Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, University of Cambridge
  • The Field (2009-ongoing)
  • Capital Growth (Mayday 2009)
    • 6 x paintings as site-specific interventions
      floor based oil painting x arrangement 3mx3m. Paintings of Board room interior of London Stock Exchange, Computer hub of London Stock Exchange, Foyer of London Stock Exchange, London Metals Exchange, Lloyds of London interior, BLACCXN board room placed and left at Canary Wharf, Lonodon, the Ministry of Defence, London, Tate Modern, The Science Museum, the Olympic site, Unilever Building University of Cambridge
  • BLACCXN AGM, Citigroup Tower, Canary Wharf, London (2008)
    • site-specific intervention
      Major shareholders wined and dined as they were taken through BLACCXN's profitable year and strategies to secure a profitable future
  • Details (2006)
    • paintings
      collaboration with Ban Krua community, a traditional silk weaving community in Bangkok, Thailand to inform site-specific intervention at Jim Thompson House, Bangkok. Members of the community were asked to take photos of everday objects or their homes from the outside. These were translated into oil paintings, done on the back of Jim Thompson silk stretched like canvas. They were placed throughout the museum, disrupting the view of the museum's version of authentic Thai life. The intervention was censored after a few weeks.
  • Trickle Down + (2006)
  • Sponsorship (2005)
  • @Tate Modern (2000-2005)
    • 2004/5 and 2005/6 'Inter-gallery educator's course' aimed at addressing the under-representation of non-'white' artists employed by Tate Modern and other London galleries (with South London Gallery, Horniman Museum, Whitechapel Art Gallery, British Library, Hayward Gallery) Course and paid placement for 8-10 participants per year
    • 2003 and 2004 'Ghetto Superstar' Course for young people (Raw Canvas programme) exploring history of Black artists and interrogating current issues of representation at Tate Modern
    • 2001 'Working within and against Tate Modernism', Third Text, Winter 2001/2
  • & many interventions as guest speaker at talks and conferences, where necessary, including 'Ethics of Encounter' workshop, Stills Gallery Edinburgh 2011, ' Recessional Aesthetics', James Taylor Gallery, London 2010, 'Good Business is the Best Art', Tate Modern, 2009




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Formerly, www.alanajelinek.com was exclusively used as the portal for artwork:

 

a l a n a j e l i n e k

 me - you - them

Original link
Situated in DearDiary.net

Calendar style link
similar to original


A record of everyday encounters with racism

June 30th 2001 - June 30th 2004
as a bystander, as a victim and as a racist.

Please click any of the side links for the racism 'blog'.

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Arts & Humanities Research Council logo
2009 - 2014 
AHRC Creative Fellowship Projects with Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, University of Cambridge
The aim of this research project is to investigate the relationship between collections, the collector and the collected.

1) Intervention
'The Archaeological Story according to BLACCXN'
 
    23 October 2009 - March 2010

BLACCXN metacorp sponsorship of the archaeology gallery aimed at investigating a relationship between sponsorship, museums display and interpretation in a site-specific intervention into the 30 year old archaeology display at the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, University of Cambridge. The original display told an already philosophically and archaeologically out-dated story of human evolution and progress, celebrating a particularly insidious version of human evolutionary theory. The BLACCXN intervention highlighted these ideas, the racist assumptions behind them and the link with neo-liberalism - it's all part of the natural order. 
The Private View happened on Thursday 22 October 2009, timed to intervene into The Cambridge Festival of Ideas and Darwin's 200 year anniversary celebrations.


2) Artwork - intervention - events 

'Tall Stories & Cannibal Forks'  

In 2010, the artwork 'Tall Stories: Cannibal Forks' was shown at the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology
University of Cambridge as a site-specific intervention, in dialogue with the museum's display and collection
of 'cannibal forks' from nineteenth century Fiji. These are a highly contested object type, embodying colonial relations
and continuing mythology about cannibalism and the South Pacific. 
The artwork is both an 8min video showing a group of people's hands carving a cannibal fork from tree branch to
decorated object accompanied by an audio track of the various knowledges and stories held by staff from the Museum.

old emac computer monitor with video of 'Cannibal Forks'

Inspiration for the artwork, which formed a turning point in ongoing research at the Museum happened whil I was pawing some elegant forms made from wood from the museum's collections, admiring their shape and the skill involved. They were being photographed by Mark Adams in my office. Eventually I asked what they were. He said, 'cannibal forks'.
I sought out more information. They didn't make sense to me as a shape and I wondered about the usual shape of the forks if these were really used for cannibal purposes. I was told a range of stories from hair-raising missionary tales of Fijian sadism and barbarity to an idea current in anthropological circles that few if any of these were made for these purposes. Many, perhaps all, were made in response to 19th century tourists like 
misionaries and early ethnologists.

This work explores stories and story-telling. Who seeks out what type of knowledge and why? Why are we open to some stories and closed to others? It is not a search for the truth about cannibal forks.

Click for interpretative text for this work


4) Participatory live art work
'Not Praising, Burying'
Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, 2012

'Not Praising, Burying' is a participatory live art work interrogating ancient Greek red-figure and black-figure pottery. On 2 November 2012, a group of archaeologists, artists and philosophers gathered at the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge and together they engaged with the history and ideas behind ancient Greek pots in a dialectic between making and thinking. Click for a pdf documenting the artwork as a set of rules, as inspired by the artists-as-rule-makers of 1960s and 70s Conceptual Art.



3) Publication
'This is not art'
published by IB Tauris, 2013

This is not art: activism and other 'not-art' is the product of an ongoing philosophical and practical concern with the definition and value of art informed by close proximity to the disciplines of anthropology and archaeology as well as a brief stint with some activists in 2009.

The publication blurb puts it like this:

Art is not political action. Art is not education. Art does not exist
to make the world a better place. Art disrupts and resists the status
quo, and if it fails in this prime objective it serves only to deaden
a disenfranchised society further.

So argues This Is Not Art, a radical and vigorous critique that debunks myths about art in order to celebrate it. With the
postmodern deconstruction of now-outdated shibboleths, new and neoliberal myths about art have arisen to take their place: that art’s value is primarily monetary, or that art is important because it
ameliorates social problems. This Is Not Artdraws on Foucault and Marx to uncover an artworld obsessed with profit and from which diversity, individuality and freedom have been erased.

Alana Jelinek returns to the question of ‘What is art?’, retelling the
history of art practice and exposing the ways in which neoliberal norms and values have seeped into every aspect of our lives. From the author’s unique perspective as a practising artist and theoretician, This Is Not Art offers a new way of understanding and practising art –
as the embodiment of power and agency within us, the possibility of thinking and acting differently, of finding new stories to tell.
 
It's not how I'd put it, but it's close enough I guess...






5) Publication
'The Fork's Tale'
published by LemonMelon, 2013

'The Fork's Tale' as narrated by itself is a novel with drawings to be created and published on a monthly basis throughout 2013.

It is narrated from the point of view of a cannibal fork in the museum's collection.

Starting on January 15th, each new chapter is available on the 15th of the month. Throughout 2013, it will only be available through the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology or by subscription through the publishers, LemonMelon.

From 2014, all the chapters will be bound and sold in book form.

To purchase a subscription, any single chapter or advance purchase the complete project, please go to the LemonMelon website
The Fork's Tale has been published with the assistance of an Arts Council England Grant for the Arts
















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'The Archaeological Story according to BLACCXN'
can be viewed online as a blog:
wordpress link



'The Archaeological Story according to BLACCXN'

booklet as PDF to download containing images of the labels and exhibits
First Pages
Middle Pages
Last Pages













'Tall Stories Cannibal Forks' (2010)
as intervention into then current Fiji display

15 September 2010 - October 31 2010

Museum vitrine with newly carved cannibal forks

Tall Stories: Cannibal Forks, installation view

Cannibal Forking - a distributed protocol
To accompany the Museum intervention, a 'distributed protocol' was initiated in order to replicate the myths and knowledges around cannibal forks, foregrounding the continuation of the construction of cannibal forks. English green woodworking skills form part of this protocol. This was repeated for the Economic and Social Research Council Festival of Social Science 2011.
Click here for more



Tall Stories: Cannibal Forks (2012)
As part of 'Gifts & Discoveries' temporary exhibition at Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, 25 May 2012 - January 2013.
The new cannibal forks made by colleagues at the Museum and during 'cannibal forking' events have been accessioned as part of the museum's collection and are displayed with the original collection of late C19th and early C20th 'cannibal forks'.
tall stories cannibal forks 2012


tall stories cannibal forks 2010
A poor quality copy of the film can be seen on vimeo 










































































Capital Growth
MayDay 2009 intervention

In various sites across London and Cambridge, on the first day of my post-doctoral Fellowship in the Creative & Performing Arts (arts & Humanities Research Council funded), 1 May 2009, a series of exquisite oil-paintings were placed for Mayday. The six paintings are birds-eye views of specific corporate sites including the boardroom of the London Stock Exchange and the foyer, the floor of the London Metal Exchange and the Lloyds building and the fictional BLACCXN boardroom.The paintings are comprised of 9 canvases and measure 3sqm in total. They were placed in an x-mark and left to the elements, the police, art-lovers..

image of intervention at canary wharf londonThe above image is a birds eye view of the BLACCXN headquarters, linking 'Capital Growth' to the wider BLACCXN project. Image by Kristian Buus.

For images and details of the other 5 paintings before and after the intervention, click here.

    Mayday 2009
    AM:
  • 07.00 Tate Modern, Bankside - near front lawn, on the eastern edge near Millenium Bridge. 
  • Painting of London Stock Exchange boardroom

  • 09.00 Ministry of Defence, Victoria Embankment - either in the park or on the pavement. If there are major problems with police harassment we will be taking the paintings to Rt Hon John Hutton, Secretary of State for Defence as a gift. 
  • Painting of London Metal Exchange

  • 10.00 Science Museum, Kensington Gore - in the shipping innovation part of floor two, near the BP sponsored 'Energy Exhibition'
  • Painting of Lloyds building (original interior)

  • PM:
  • 13.45 Canary Wharf, Westferry Road circus
  • Painting of London Stock Exchange computer hub
  • 15.30 Olympic site, on the Greenway, nearest tube Pudding Mill Lane
  • Painting of BLACCXN headquarters
  • 17.45 Unilever Centre for Molecular Science Informatics Building, University of Cambridge
  • Painting of London Stock Exchange foyer

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A censorship log

1989 - expelled from art college for taking courses in philosophy and history & philosophy of science.

1994 - satirical icon in Russian Orthodox style of Lenin stolen from exhibition at Hall  of Architects, Moscow (destroyed?). Told by ex-KGB officer in Dniepropretrovsk that 'I must be very brave' to bring images of Western steroetypes of Russia to ex-Soviet territories.

2000 - defaced life-sized tourist figure intervention at Grizedale, plus other attempts at moving or destroying similar interventions into Lake District area

2000 - Attempts made by staff of the Australian High Commission, London, to silence and end our very small intervention for 'Racist Australia Day', calling the police on three separate occasions, ending with the riot police. There were 2 of us, flowers and leaflets one early morning ending at 11am.

2001 - Writing for a Teacher's Kit for Tate Modern's 'Century City' exhibition, sponsored by CGNU (now Aviva), where the ambivalent (though not entirely negative) tone regarding globalisation was altered without my consent and changed to a wholly positive one.

2004 - While pacing out the area of Victoria Tower Gardens, next to the Houses of Parliament, to measure it for a future artwork, The Third Wing, there was a  constant presence by secret service agents, acting in the manner of store detectives. Very close up photography in my face by an undercover agent pretending to be a tourist.

2005 - a series of interventions into the Jim Thompson House, Bangkok, which aimed at disrupting the easy 'tourist gaze' and authenticity of the museum were taken away 3 months before the end of the exhibition. All documentation of the intervention was also apparently destroyed or deleted.

2007 - engage: the journal for museum and gallery education refused to print a satirical essay about the artworld, gallery education and green-washing despite the issue on green matters being published at my suggestion.

2007-9 - tampering of the parodic website for the 'metacorporation', BLACCXN. Various links broken and redirected. This first began when the parody of prize culture with BLACCXN Prize for Culture was redirected to error pages. Continued occasional tampering of the rest of the site has occured into 2009 with other redirections to error messages from all sorts of links including plans for the new wing on the Houses of Parliament, the BLACCXN House of Corporations.

2009 - Beck's Beer, past sponsors of ICA's 'Beck's Futures' exhibitions - apparently 'one of the bolder art prizes' - censored art-intervention into open submission for 2-for-1 offer 'Do Something Different', refusing to include BLACCXN's offer to run seminars on 'How to be a Hedge Fund Manager'. The artwork was even billed as comedy to help frame the experience as ironic. Perhaps the beer company is not really all that bold...

 

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External Links : if you liked this artist, you might also like:
Links:

» Coco Fusco
» Susan Hiller
» Average Citizen
» James Accord
» critical art ensemble
» Hilary Powell / Optimistic Productions
» Marianne Holm Hansen

and the US-based Alana Jelinek, alphagrl

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