The Artes Mundi 10 journal consists of a series of eight newly-commissioned texts organised by writer Dylan Huw. Moving between Welsh and English, and from criticism to fiction to visual essays to dialogues, together, they draw out some of the thematic and formal throughlines of Artes Mundi 10, informed by the ongoing research-based practices of contributors, who work in diverse contexts and disciplines in Wales and internationally.
#1
In the first instalment, the series’ editor Dylan Huw playfully situates some ideas and questions that are further drawn out by the following seven texts, looking bilingually to two films by Alia Farid and paying particular attention to the suggestive language-games of their presentation at Amgueddfa Cymru in Cardiff.
#2
The second instalment is by the writer and curator Taylor Le Melle. Departing from a close reading of a pivotal passage in Sylvia Wynter’s The Hills of Hebron (1962) – the anticolonial philosopher’s only novel, set in Jamaica in the period before its liberation from British rule – Le Melle evocatively poses and provokes questions around our understandings of art-making and mis/recognition in conditions of precarity and capitalist exchange.
#3
At the core of Catrin Menai’s practice is a search for “a language that falls more freely, like rocks or dust.” In ‘ALAW TU HWNT I NI²’ (which continues the inquiries of Catrin’s contribution to TROI, TROSI, a collective research project organised by series editor Dylan Huw) she layers poetic fragments, correspondences and archival materials to perform a series of call-and-responses: between languages, eras and geographies, and between Taloi Havini’s Artes Mundi 10 exhibition at Mostyn and Catrin’s own ongoing project of excavating familial memory and ‘knowledge-holding’ across generations.
#4
“Many things happen concurrently,” begins the fourth text in the series by Sophie Mak-Schram, a primarily Cardiff-based artist and researcher. Drawing on queer theorist Elizabeth Freeman’s notion of “temporal drag” and past encounters with the work of AM10 artists, this polyvocal contemplation on how systems of recirculation produce our embodied, sited encounters with artworks seeks to “talk honestly of how things get to where they are, and what epistemologies […] looking sustains.”
#5
For the fifth commission, we present a fragment from a developing body of memoiristic fiction by Steffan Gwynn, informed by Naomi Rincón Gallardo’s film trilogy at Chapter. Like previous texts in this series, ‘Penillion Rhyddid’ combines the mining of memory and personal experience with an emphasis on the political histories embedded in specific landscapes, in what is also a trance-like narrative of queer nightlife, protest and grief.
#6
Speaking with rocks is a recurring fascination in the work of Rebecca Jagoe: as an act and a methodology, a vehicle for speculating upon the simultaneity of ancient and present-tense feeling. Their explorations across a range of writing and time-based projects of the interrelations of language, land and communally-minded strategies of existing-otherwise made them a natural fit for the Artes Mundi 10 journal. Allusions to Naomi Rincón Gallardo’s films at Chapter, Empedocles’ fragments and south Wales geology make up just some throughlines of this richly rewarding and poetic essay.
#7
“The body is a weight although it’s also lightness,” writes Aaditya Aggarwal in the penultimate text, quoting Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart. The Toronto-based writer and programmer continues the restless, breathlessly allusive tenor of much of this series with a sparklingly poetic essay on the image of the resting or reclining female figure, who turns away from the spectator’s gaze. Aggarwaal’s is a criticism which seeks the production of new, inherently comparative expressions and poetics from looking indiscriminately across media; an apt mirror for the mission of Artes Mundi, and of the writing produced for this journal.
#8
Processes of extraction and exploitation are as ubiquitous in the systems and technologies which produce our visual culture as they are in the machinery of war and colonisation. This idea recurs in the presentations of the Artes Mundi 10 artists, and nowhere moreso than in the work of Taloi Havini, the recently announced winner of the AM10 prize. As the final instalment of the AM10 journal, we present a text by Ynys Môn-based documentary filmmaker and researcher Joanna Wright, for which she initiated a dialogue with Havini, having been struck by her work at Mostyn, a gallery Joanna grew up going to. Their conversation is far-reaching, illuminating both artists’ long-term engagements with ethically explosive questions of seeing and being seen – visualising and being visualised – and both the difficulty and necessity of maintaining your own communities, artistic and otherwise, when the paths presented are so often insufficient.