Kirsty Hendry
~ self ~ storage ~
–start–
~self~storage~
Structural and systemic conflation of being and body.
Falsely pinned down by the perceived solipsism of being a body –
– as if being a body isn’t political
– as if being a body can ever be an individualistic pursuit
– as if ‘I’ must always be confessional
For anything afflicted with such a filthy pronoun could never have socio-political resonance
The personal, performed politics of gesture is not a quantifiable data set, and as such, a ‘useful tool’ for engraining ‘P’olitics as something happening elsewhere. Beyond any-body but through the sprawling and expanded bodies of power. Corpulent forms grossly inflect the shape of social structures – their dominance derived from their agency to define (and thereby confine) others corporeally.
Ever suspecting of pseudonyms, anonymity, guises – for identity is useful collateral. Be yourself becomes a soft command that is both affective and linguistic, as if a knowing presentation of self can ever be authentic. Through a veneer of protecting and advocating authenticity, their carefully curated norms duplicitously govern the production of a subject – for the production of subjectivity is a lucrative commodity for the attention economy.
In the fallacious pursuit of authenticity, meaning is contingent on the complicity and coercion of time-sharing . . . recognising a piece of reality is engendering a piece of reality.
The body is resistant to these forms of templating – it distends its own edges by the very fact that its is incapable of rendering it’s own perimeters. It’s edges drawn by the spatial/temporal matrix that it can only ever fleetingly occupy – contributing to a rapidly changing entity.
body, bodies, <body> ~ perspectival construction of space
A future self enmeshed in textual anatomy.
Placed into abyss; the body is not conductor but aggregate accumulation, a templum that reveals a social and political shape. Not total embodiment but captured dismemberment
~self~regulation~
Reassembled it defeatedly gestures ‘I am this thing’ . . . estranged by its own recursive entanglement of simultaneous resemblance/dissimilarity.
The consumption and regurgitation of narration serves to unbind the confessional ‘I’, admonishing its demands for urgent smoothness. Untethered from the individual accountability that the market so desired, in it’s place stands a reconstituted public ‘I’ – for any-body can masquerade as ‘I’. This public ‘I’ co-opts the structures that were intended to govern it. ‘I’ becomes an algorithmic aggregator concealed within a generic pronoun, through which collective public consciousness is performed
A roaming vector of selfhood
–end–
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Biography
Kirsty Hendry is an artist and curator based in Edinburgh and is currently co-director of EMBASSY Gallery. Recent projects include a contribution to Undercurrents Issue 4 and A Romance of Zero Dimensions (The Pipe Factory Glasgow) and Generator Printhouse (Generator Projects, Dundee).