Mike Cooter – The Mimic, the Model and the Dupe
From: 15th March 2018 11:00 am
To: 6th May 2018 11:00 am
Radar Loughborough
53 New Walk, Leicester LE1 7EA, United KingdomHashtag
About
From: Thu 15 March, 11:00am
To: Sun 6 May, 11:00am
Venue: New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, 53 New Walk, Leicester LE1 7EA
Free
Radar has invited artist Mike Cooter to actively engage with New Walk Museum’s collection, taking inspiration from the work of Polish artist and theatre maker Tadeusz Kantor, whose work was concerned with the role and status of the object. The Mimic, the Model and the Dupe, will draw on Kantor’s Anti-Exhibition (1963) and Leicester-born naturalist Henry Walter Bates’ (1825 -92) research into a form of mimicry that would take his name. Working across holdings from fine art, natural history, industrial design, decorative arts and material cultures, the exhibition will look to explore how the objects in the collection both perform and reproduce themselves through their own agency and in symbiotic relationship with organisations that host them.
Kantor has been extensively researched by Dr Dan Watt, Senior Lecturer in Drama, Loughborough University. The exhibition is part of a wider programme, entitled ‘The Object is Alive’, that has invited artists to develop new exhibitions in response to the work of Kantor and their own interest in the agency of the object. The exhibition will be accompanied by a major symposium on the influence of Kantor taking place at Loughborough University on the 28th April 2018.
Image: Research photograph (with thanks to Michael Asher), Mike Cooter, 2017. Boiler heating the Abbey Pumping Station, home of Leicester City Council’s Industrial History Museum.
