Open Residency: Duncan Higgins
23 October - 04 November
Free & open to all
For Open Residency, Higgins will be utilising Bloc Projects as a space ‘between the studio and museum’ to further explore how to articulate the on-going responses to the past 14 years of artistic production carried out by Higgins in north Russia, in particular the Solovki archipelago and subsequent associated inter-related narrative episodes.
The aim of Open Residency is to allow Higgins to further address how the parameters of image production and forms of exhibition can construct or provoke a dialogical and discursive space for shared negotiation around highly contentious or problematic themes inherent in the representations explored through Higgins’ work.
Higgins asks; how the ‘image’ and the act of ‘making images’ combined with ‘where the image performs’ can offer ways to discuss or contest specific cultural narratives and the subsequent tension between conflicting ideas.
The whole process is expressed through Higgins’ production of paintings, photographs, cinematography, texts, publication, sound works and sculpture, further developed through lectures, teaching, interviews, workshops and distilled from testimony literature, archival material and autoethnographic fieldwork.
Throughout Open Residency Higgins will be forming and re-forming exhibitions within the gallery on a day-to-day basis drawn from the large body of his artworks. Alongside this there will be both formal and informal conversation and discussion through initiation with the public and students.
Higgins’ activity will be documented throughout the residency and uploaded to a new Instagram account @downonthefarmdh
Duncan Higgins is Professor of Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University and Professor of Fine Art at The University of Bergen, Norway. In 2006 Professor Higgins was awarded a three year National Endowment for Science Technology and Arts (NESTA) fellowship. Most recently Higgins has had solo exhibitions at The Bag Factory Johannesburg, M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art, Kaunus, Lithuania; South Bank Centre and Royal Festival Hall, London; Czech Cultural Centre and Russian Centre for Art and Science, Prague; Solovki State Museum Reserve Russia; Academy of Arts in Warsaw, Poland and Rm8, Bergen, Norway.