Archived exhibition

Figuring Space

Figuring Space
Interviews, auditions and rehearsals
John Dummett

to abstract is always to mutilate
Gilles Châtelet

Taking its title from Gilles Châtelet’s book (1993) of the same name, this body of work interrogates writing as a studio practice. Starting with the title pages of key historical works of political philosophy, architectural drawings and images of ‘lay figures’, Figuring Space dissects and jumbles the mechanisms and technologies that exorcise contingent subjectivity in favour of the ideal citizen.

Integral to the expansive and discursive register of writing invoked in this exposition is the idea of a ‘diagrammatic writing’. Referencing Diagramming the Common by artist and writer Patricia Reed, Figuring Space cites Reed’s “plotting out of speculative trajectories for inexistent territories” as a method of writing. In contradistinction to Reed’s focus on ‘the Common’, the ‘inexistent territories’ for Figuring Space are the discourses and modes of representation that institute ‘the public’.

For daily documentation visit: twitter.com/dummyPublic

Centrespace, Visual Research Centre,DJCAD, located on the lower floors of Dundee Contemporary Arts, 152 Nethergate, Dundee.