Olga Bennett

Fraying, dissipation, divination, and talking to moths: notation as a salve for unmanageable vulnerabilities or historiography of creative hermeneutics.

The works included in the exhibition respond to a constellation of heterogeneous episodes and artefacts linked by a common thread of vulnerability: the artist’s memory of her grandfather’s silence that followed his work as a Soviet spy and his slow weathering; a conservation x-radiograph of a Female Portrait by an unknown artist circa 1500; and art historian Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, along with his personal diaries kept while recovering from a mental collapse during the 1920s.

While the works test a range of approaches to notation, the accompanying exegesis develops an understanding of notation as methodology that foregrounds the multiplicity of possible readings and privileges imaginative interpretation and can be utilised beyond the context of performance.

Responding to omnipresent exclusions and omissions within personal and collective histories, the research proposes a speculative historiography that enables the recovery of experiential dimensions and affective registers within these histories. It considers how narrative as a dominant genre that privileges cohesion, transparency and conceptual foreclosure conditions the suppression of certain affects within discourse and proposes notation as a more flexible alternative.

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