Running as an artistic practice
Lunch talk with Véronique Chance (Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, contributor to The Polyphony)
TITLE Running as an artistic practice
WHEN Friday May 17 2024, 12:30 - 13:30
WHERE Stadscampus Building R room R.005
WHAT lunch talk with sandwiches and Q&A (please register with Katrien.Schaubroeck@uantwerpen.be such that right amount of sandwiches can be ordered)
Outline of talk
Over the last 13 years, I have developed an endurance running art practice as part of a larger inquiry into the performative nature of human physical activity, in the interplay between the body and technology. The runs I undertake are performed in specific places along pre-determined routes and are mediated to an audience live through mobile technology that is enabled to track my journey as it is taking place and to relay images of my viewpoint and location.
I align this work to performance art practices in the ways in which the limits of my body are tested through the physical demands of long-distance running, whilst the limits of technology are also challenged through the ways in which I communicate that experience to others. In doing this, I do not attempt to demonstrate the reliability (or not) of technology to convey a first-hand, ‘lived’ experience, but point to the increasing presence of technology in our everyday environment: to the proliferation of technology as a primary means of communication, mediating experience and self-quantification; to the ‘need’ to always be connected; to the fallibility of the human body and of technology. Rather than make claims to a ‘loss’ in visceral experience, I look to how different technological formats might constitute new ways of thinking about the experience of place, and of creating new mediated spaces in ways that counter normative corporate ‘productive’ ideologies. At the same time, I also consider how the nature of our engagement with technology grounds us in our own physicality by drawing attention to questions of presence and embodiment in the ontological and paradoxical dynamics between recording and representation.
The talk will outline how I came to running and to incorporate it as an integral part of my artistic practice; how I came to not running through injury and how I came back to running more slowly, as a means of paying more considerate attention to my body and to what is around me.
WHO
Véronique Chance is an Anglo-French multi-disciplinary artist and academic with a long-term interest in the representation of the body and its relationship to performance, documentation, technology and the embodied dynamics of spectatorship, in which the activity of running plays a key part. She is actively engaged in research through her own art practice and has an active public profile recognised nationally and internationally through solo and group exhibitions, curated events, talks and presentations at conferences and symposia and through commissions and published material.
Véronique is based in London and is a Senior Lecturer and Course Leader of the MA Fine Art course at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, where she is also a member of the Arts, Health & Wellbeing, and Sustainable Futures research groups. She studied at Manchester Polytechnic, Glasgow School of Art and the Royal College of Art, and was awarded a PhD from Goldsmith’s College, University of London in 2013. Since 2014 she has contributed to the RUN! RUN! RUN! (#r3fest) Biennale, instigated by artist Kai Syng Tan and is a member of the interdisciplinary JSIC Running Cultures Research Group. She is also a co-founder of the Running Artfully Network (RAN), a new international artist-led group, which launched in 2021, whose aim is to “reframe running as an artistic intervention to unpick our time of multiple global crises, and to create a more equitable and creative future.” More recently, she collaborated with the Moving Bodies Lab, a research platform for the Medical Humanities at the University of Durham, contributing to a publishing ‘takeover’ of The Polyphony, a web platform that aims to “stimulate, catalyse, provoke, expand and intensify conversations in the critical medical humanities.”
