The Institute of Beasts

Installation shot. The 'Institute of Beasts' project was initially designed as a means to temporarily house our more 'errant' thoughts and strategies into fictional 'departments' as a means of addressing what we understood to be a sense of waywardness in the practice. Inevitably, as these departments began to slide back into each other work, we realised that this effective 'collage' of approaches, tactics, images, texts and sounds was an aesthetic/epistemological force all by itself. This re-blurring of 'categories' was not a means of deliberate obfuscation, but a reminder of the mutability of knowledge and an attempt to present back to the world the aesthetic dimensions which were constructed out of the dynamics created from the tensions, breaks, failures of these so-called 'departments'. The project enables us to produce work in which we initiate a play between an elegance and a disturbance. It is not without irony that we give ourselves the title of an 'Institute', knowing that what we are attempting is actually impossible to 'house'. Thus, at the heart of this project are propositions about impossibility, the success and/or failure of 'progress' and 'knowledge' and an acknowledgment of the slippery potentials of art. The installation also housed a sound piece entitled 'three word chant'.