Concept

Engagement is a way of capturing attention, a way of alluring and a way of enticing to possess ownership. We could implement this as a way of attracting an audience, being drawn into a system and in turn be captivated. Such methods can include smoke screens, masquerade and stings.

We can be engaged in political upheaval and in contrast engaged to be married. Either way if one shows the willingness to engage then they are seized, arrested and caught, through an innocent human desire to absorb and be engrossed.

What happens when this engagement is done in a malicious, unlawful and corrupted way? When does the real become hyper-real? Entrapment is the process of this transition to occupy whether through political, artistic or personal systems.

What is the ethical concern over this? Is the viewer guilty for being engrossed in a piece of work that is deemed vulgar or inappropriate; a guilty pleasure? Is the accused guilty until proven innocent? Is the artist wrongly committed for a self-indulgent expression? Does this polarity repel or assist the convicted?

International artists have been invited to submit work which explores a subversive engagement, use tactics and trickery to captivate and which contests rules and laws of a system. Aesthetically, artists works entices the audience, engages them in viewing and ultimately entrap them into the work. Will the viewer be engrossed, cheated or convicted?

Works featured include traditional art forms of photography, painting and sculpture but also the contemporary processes of interventions, installations and new media.

Flyer

Flyer

Tracey Holland





Sheffield, UK


'Huldra'

Film triptych (made in 2013 for Magnetic Atlas Exhibition)
8.30"

This film was inspired by the story of the Huldra. Found in the folklore of Northern Europe and Scandinavia, it’s a tale about a female spirit called Huldra who inhabits the inner reaches of the forest, seen only by the unlucky few. She has various guises, sometimes having a long cow’s or fox’s tail, and appearing during violent whirlwind or deep fog or snow. One constant is that she is two distinct and different things expressed through her visible face and invisible back. 

He follows her song until deep inside the forest. As the woodcutter approaches she turns away, he sees she has no back; it is instead a star-filled infinite blackness. Now lost, he dies alone and frozen.

Here is a cautionary tale about searching for the elusive and insubstantial until lost for ever. The woodcutter follows the illusionary, echoed in the work by the mirror; we look through this to some other concurrent reality. The world is about what we can and what we can’t see, and the Huldra is a bridge between what we see and know for certain, and the unseen psychic reality or intuited truth of a situation – which is perhaps a definition of myth itself.