Keith Piper Artist Commentaries

k e i t h p i p e r /artist commentaries


	Robot Bodies: Artist Commentary An examination of the project ‘Robot Bodies’, an interactive gallery based installation exploring themes of racial metaphor within popular science fiction. This project is part of a body of research expanding the scrutiny of popular science fiction into the fields of post-colonial studies and developing discources around ‘Afro-futurism’, encoding and ‘CyberEbonics’.

	Passing the Cricket Test A Video Essay looking at issues of sport, race and national belonging. Looking at Cricket in the mid 1970s and early 1980s, and Athletics in the 1990s, Piper conjures with ideas raised by historian CLR James and cultural theorist Professor Stuart Hall to examine shifting notions of identify and identification. Produced for the panel discussion ‘Thinking with Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues on Art and Culture’ curated by Layal Ftouni at the Beirut Art Centre, March 2015.

	Antebellum Acts: Trickster Depictions and the American Plantation This paper was first presented at the International Symposium ‘Art Across the Black Diaspora: Visualising Slavery in America’ at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, on the 29th May 2013. It explores depictions of the ‘trickster’ figure in a range of popular ‘slavesploitation’ texts.

	Coming Up in the Black Moment This is a personal commentary on the development of the Blk Art Group, a small association of young black British artists who were active from 1979 to 1984. It was produced as part of a longer commentary entitled ‘Pathways to the 1980s’, which proposed a historic and theoretically framing of the development of Black British cultural and political activities in the run up to the 1980s.

	Pathways to the 1980s An Illustrated Paper examining some of the historical, cultural and political influences which informed the development of the British Black Art Movement of the early 1980s. Specifically, this paper engages in a close examination of the archival memory of 'The Blk Art Group', a small association of visual artists active from 1979 to 1984, who existed as part of this wider art historical moment.

	Lost Vitrines An artist commentary examining the research and production of a site specific art work commissioned by the Victoria and Albert Museum, and located amongst the permanent collection in their Eighteenth Century British Galleries. It existed as part of an exhibition entitled ‘Uncomfortable Truths’ (2007) and was commissioned in a response to the bicentennial of the abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade.

	Ghosting the Archive An Artist Commentary examining the background, development and research idea's informing the work 'Ghosting the Archive', a project created as part of a residency undertaken in the Archival Spaces of Birmingham City Central Library in 2005.