Robert Bean
Artist, writer and curator living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is a Professor at NSCAD University. Bean has edited books and published articles on the subject of photography, contemporary art and cultural history. He has been an active contributor to the Narratives in Space + Time art and mobility project. Bean is a recipient of grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Canada Council for the Arts. Robert Bean was the Artist in Residence at the Canada Science and Technology Museum, Ottawa, in 2010.
Robert Bean’s work is in public and private collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Canada Council Art Bank, Global Affairs Canada Visual Art Collection (ARBZ), the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie) Karlsruhe, Germany and the Donovan Collection, University of St. Michael’s College, Toronto, Ontario.
Performance: Being-in-the-Breathable: an annotated walk
Robert Bean and Barbara Lounder will present an annotated walk about breathing, the phenomenology of weather and the politics of climate change. This interactive artwork responds to the contingencies of the Sokołowsko sanatorium as a site of healing and conflict. Participants will consider the internal experience of breathing and the haptic sensation of weather through actions that utilize movement, performance, objects and sound. Allegorical references to the history of breathing, atmosphere, weather, and healing will be incorporated into the collective experience of being at the sanatorium. We will adapt contemporary strategies of psychogeography for this project. Psychogeography, theorized by Guy Debord in 1955, is the spatial and literary practice of the Situationist International for mapping emotional, psychological and political meanings of urban spaces.
We begin from the position that walking is a creative medium and methodology. The history and contemporary practice of walking assert that it is a means to generate thought and knowledge through embodied experience. An active awareness of walking and mobility as a diverse and creative act cultivates an opportunity to consider a deeper comprehension of embodiment, environment and space. Walking is a sensorial experience; the senses provide both distil and proximal relationships to the world that informs our knowledge and understanding of place. The ubiquity of technologically mediated space affects the experience of knowledge generation gained through walking. As pedestrians we are networked into multimodal sensorial experiences while walking and interacting with mobile devices.
Being-in-the-Breathable is a term that the author Peter Sloterdijk uses to describe how the atmosphere and environment were made explicit by the use of gas warfare during the first and second world wars. The atmosphere, the last common space that people share, lost its innocence when it was used as an environmental weapon.
July 23rd – Sunday
16:30 Robert Bean and Barbara Lounder
Performance: Being-in-the-Breathable: an annotated walk
Brehmer Sanatorium Park
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