CuratorSpace Artist Bursary #11: Gudrun Filipska

Gudrun Filipska is an artist and researcher living in the Fens, UK. She is of Welsh and Polish descent. Her work is concerned with the cultural and literary associations of walking and journeying and seeks to re- configure them to include, feminist and 'other' itinerant practices. She also facilitates the artist-led collective 'Arts Territory Exchange'.

"The Arts Territory Exchange is a collective and network which seeks to explore ideas of digital and postal connectivity and relationships across distances. Active since 2016 we have brought artists together from all over the world who have created long distance postal and digital projects with out meeting in person and exploring ideas of remoteness in all its forms (whether through rurality, disability or agoraphobia). The work produced by our members has accumulated into a large archive of letters, images, texts, objects and digital content. Material from our archive has been exhibited at Queens Museum New York, Today Art Museum in Beijing, Flux Factory New York and the Westminster Arts Library.

I have in past years organised a members show which this year didn't feel appropriate and have instead organised a travelling exhibition in a box; The mobile exhibition titled 'UN-BOXING will travel across continents to be opened and displayed in a number of intriguing domestic and alternative locations, posted across a network of curators, artists and archivists.

The exhibition takes its name from the pleasures and excitements of receiving postal mail and packages; opening, tearing, ripping and rifling through contents and the Youtube ASMR world of opening and unwrapping through which many people receive sensory comfort. Through Un-boxing we play with the ideas of gifting....receiving....waiting and excitement...each recipient will curate a mini show from the material they receive and then add something to the box before posting it on. The audiences for the work may be families, children, pets, or neighbours peering through windows...

We plan to develop series of films documenting the process of opening the box - the pleasures and desires in receiving postal packages and how opening and unwrapping is experienced by digital audiences particularly as sensual pleasure by those in the ASMR communities. Inside the boxes will be wrapped notes, photographs, books and small objects carefully labelled and coming from the Arts Territory Exchange archive. The work feeds on the themes of postal exchange that are familiar to us as a method of disseminating our archive (and in the histories of Mail Art) as well as the themes of desire for order and safety that wrapping and unwrapping represents within psychoanalysis."

You can see more of Gudrun's work here and find out more about Arts Territory Exchange here

Image credit: Photograph taken by the collective Without Appeal, showing photographs from Antony Lyons and Zoe Galinsoga.

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