Gaze: Oral/Written

Gaze, a project by artist Jennifer Martin, queries 'the site where epidermis, vision and apparatus meet', and encompasses a series of workshops which directly engage with histories of racialised representation.  

The Oral/Written workshop focuses on the oration of ancestral narratives and exercises in writing self-reflexively about others subjectivities. Utilizing a range of materials and tools, participants are prompted to navigate the ways in which ancestral knowledge is passed down and how information can be mutated over time through multiple iterations.

Within the writing exercise, participants must find strategies of capturing or characterizing a person without falling victim to assumptions on that individual's subjectivities or falling into the traps of language, which inherently has problems with gendered and racial representations. Works generated from this session will be presented during the public talk and discussion Gaze: Utterance on 29 November at the ICA.  

Please note that workshop participation is for individuals identifying as persons of colour. Workshop participation is limited to 12 individuals; we will try to accommodate those who would be most suited to join. Workshop participants must be 18 and over. 

*Filming will take place during the workshops and will be incorporated within the final outcome of the project for the Durham Wharf Foundation Residency 2017. Filming will focus on the main activities of the workshops and participants will be made aware of the specified times in which they are being filmed. Additionally, rushes will be presented back to participants in the concluding session, allowing insight and access to the material, as well as, opportunity to voice any concerns or feedback of what has been shot.  

Gaze is generously supported by the Durham Wharf Foundation through ReachOutRCA, the Royal College of Art engagement programme.  

Jennifer Martin is a London-based fine artist and writer. She is a graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art and currently studies MA Photography at the Royal College of Art. Martin is keenly concerned with the potential and potency of photography, as well as the dupable expectation for accuracy and neutrality.

Martin’s recent work centres primarily on photography’s role in the construction of race, which she explored through her master’s thesis One Drop, One Touch: What if Means to Burn, and the critical disarming of nostalgia found in audience-geared photographic staging, approached in the project Full of Loops and developed during the Chisenhale Art Place’s 2017 Studio4 Summer Residency.