Donx Dialogues

ArtBomb 22 is Doncaster’s experimental arts festival designed to provoke debate across

current environmental and ecological thinking.

In the lead up to the festival, in collaboration with Yorkshire Wildlife Trust’s reserve,

Potteric Carr, ArtBomb presents a special forum with international artists and

environmentalists.

Donx Dialogues also coincides with the launch of a new video artwork, Full Circle, by Yu-

Chen Wang.

Donx Dialogues explores the relationships between: fossil fuel; global climate justice and

the interaction between our local, natural and historical environments and our relationship

to transport.

Dialoguists include: educationalist and curator, Meena Vari; artists, Antony Hall and Yu-

Chen Wang and Chair, author Rob La Frenais.

Newly commissioned artwork Full Circle by Yu-Chen Wang explores Doncaster’s industrial

heritage, where nature and technology collide.

Creating an immersive cinematic video installation, Yu-Chen Wang takes railwayana as a

starting point for exploring Doncaster’s relationship to coal. With the support of local

historians, geologists and environmentalists, this collaborative inquiry into regeneration

and rewilding looks at the landscape surrounding South Yorkshire in the context of two

major crises we are facing: inequality and environment.

Full Circle, although composed of images and places captured locally, asks us to consider

how Doncaster sits within a broader international landscape as we did once before.

Yu-Chen Wang said:

“My work is largely informed by the history of places, collective memories, individuals’

stories, and the relationships I have established with these places and people. Various

methods, including undertaking artist in residencies, conducting field research, developing

collaborations and site-responsive projects across the UK and internationally have served

as important processes for connecting places and people, whilst exploring and

reconfiguring my own evolving cultural identity.”

Andy Dalton, Operations Manager at Potteric Carr added:

“Yorkshire Wildlife Trust is delighted to host the ArtBomb festival at Potteric Carr nature

reserve, our green oasis on the fringes of Doncaster. We are excited to welcome friends

old and new – to visit, take a walk, and enjoy the surroundings of our gorgeous reserve:

the perfect backdrop to a celebration of local arts, renewal and the environment.”

Doncaster Creates, creative director, Mike Stubbs added:

“ArtBomb is a necessary catalyst for change and the way we engage with environmental

issues, this event shows that Doncaster and its environs are leading us in a new dialogue

in the race to engage the public and influence the change in habits needed to challenge

the status quo. As a precursor to the ArtBomb festival, Donx Dialogues will introduce the

threats and opportunities as we discuss alternative ecologies in the stark landscape of the

reserve at Potteric Carr.”

Find out more at www.artbombfestival.com

For further information, photos and interviews please contact Antony Pickthall:

antony.pickthall@btinternet.com +44 (0)7809 672452 or artbombuk@gmail.com

Ends.

Editor’s Notes

About the Dialoguists:

Meena Vari is an educationalist, consultant and is curator for Contemporary and New

Media Art Practices. Meena Vari is both Dean of School of Media Arts and Sciences and

also Dean of Contemporary Art and Curatorial Practice at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art,

Design and Technology. Meena also coordinates the activities of the Center for

Experimental Media & Arts (CEMA) and works closely with artists to develop the practice

of Contemporary art practice in Srishti and outside. Since 2004, she has been curating an

annual curatorial project called ‘Srishti Festival of Ideas and Performance’ by inviting

contemporary artists from around the world.

Meena Vari presents: Future of Transportation; an experimental media project at Srishti

Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore, India, conceived with Dr. Rob

La Frenais. In its three editions, the lab was a collaboration between artists and

undergraduates of art and design. They co-created and developed resolutions, artworks,

manifestos, interventions, and concepts about changing our ways of thinking about

transportation as our climate is rapidly changing, unlearning and rewiring torestructure

existing narratives reflecting upon their own and their communities and experiences.

Yu-Chen Wang is a Taiwanese-British artist who lives and works in London. Her work asks

fundamental questions about human identity at a key point in history, where eco-systems

and techno-systems have become inextricably intertwined. At the same time, her

Taiwanese origins, combined with a London-based career, have created a vision that is

personal and autobiographical. She has exhibited internationally, including at Science

Gallery London, Manchester Art Gallery, FACT(Liverpool), CCCB(Barcelona) and Taipei

Fine Arts Museum, and recently received the Honorary Mention Collide International

Award, CERN(Geneva).

Yu-Chen Wang: Full Circle has been commissioned by Doncaster Creates for DGLAM and

explores Doncaster’s industrial heritage, where nature and technology collide. Creating an

immersive cinematic video installation, Yu-Chen Wang took railwayana as a starting point

for exploring Doncaster’s relationship to coal. With the support of local historians,

geologists and environmentalists, this collaborative inquiry into regeneration and rewilding

looks at the landscape surrounding South Yorkshire in the context of two major crises we

are facing: inequality and environment.

Peat bogs, water, coal are dominant features within the local landscape formed through

the layering of time and compression of matter. Pitheads, slag heaps, mining subsidence

and flooding, the edgelands are still full of post-industrial scars and traces. All of which are

revealed through evocative moving images and a soundscape, which portray and reflect

on these problems within a global condition to re-imagine new routes into the future.

The artist’s research focuses on how technologies enable movement of people, goods and

information, as well as exploitation of natural resources and labour; how the land and

ecologies, even our planet, have been altered and transformed through these activities. In

this anthropogenic environment, a new version of nature is emerging—wildlife and

modernity clash, human and non-human worlds entangle—a coevolution of human

communities and their landscapes.

Yu-Chen Wang: Full Circle

2022, 4K video, 14'00"

Images: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/2/folders19vQKnsfgNnfitr53mUd4r0NyhPcZq_er

Antony Hall is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher based in Manchester. Collaborating

with scientists on long term research projects, Hall's work considers human experience

across a broad range of subjects, from communication signals of electrogenic fish and the

phenomenology of hallucination, to listening the sound of moss and ecological surveys.

Antony Hall is presenting Field Station on the streets of Doncaster and at Potteric Carr on

the afternoon of the 4th August for ArtBomb, a mobile ecological laboratory towed by a

bicycle. It will be used for a series of interventions and pop-up wildlife recording surveys

that aim to enhance perceptions and draw attention to the unnoticed and sometimes

invisible non-human inhabitants of the urban environment. Field Station set up at various

'sites of special moss interest' SSMIs (TBC) around Doncaster within cycling distance of

Artbomb. SSMIs will be defined according to their specific micro-environmental and

ecological diversity. SSMI may include pavement walls or lamp posts, for example.

Through the process, I hope to encounter incidental audiences who will help me map

these sites, collect samples and make terrariums, which will then be displayed at Artbomb.

Rob La Frenais is presenting Close to The Water - Let The Boat Sing! Art and rowing don’t

often come together but in this new aquatic performance specially commissioned by

ArtBomb, artist, curator and rower Rob La Frenais will balance a lightweight single sculling

boat (a very fast boat as rowed by Steve Redgrave in the Olympics) in the middle of the

River Don and simultaneously take the audience on a journey through the history of

rowing, class war, decolonisation, speed, gender, rowing and religion, and indigenous

technology while trying very hard not to fall in.

As a rower with 25 years experience he has been trying to bring together artists who also

row in his Wild Rowing social media group and through this he met the renowned artist

Ingrid Pollard (shortlisted for this years Turner Prize) who is not only a rower but has also

made a new video work ‘Rhythm In Hand’, with her rowing club, being shown around the

UK in various galleries. Pollard recently spoke about her experiences as a black rower in a

Guardian interview. A rare experience of a keynote lecture by Pollard, at the Unitarian

Church on Thursday August 11, moderated by La Frenais, will precede his performance

on the surface of the Rover Don on Sunday August 14 which can be seen and heard from

the shore at Doncaster Rowing Club.