Peer to Peer – Karin X Christian
Let us introduce you to the second Peer to Peer collaboration as part of Art et al. X Ketemu. We have commissioned UK-based artist Christian Newby to collaborate, have conversations with, and be creative with artist Karin Josephine from Indonesia.
KARIN
For years, Karin has cut, torn, rip and peeled off discarded papers for her collages. The underexposed surfaces composed with colours or other objects are often resulting in open-ended artworks. They have their own distinctive look and unpredictable beauty for it.
By delving through the layers and rips of discarded papers, she found out that it heals and is therapeutical at the same time. Karin views her works as a way to entangle minds as well as depict the chaotic world inside one's mind beyond words.
Being a person that is Hard of Hearing (HoH) and with Tinnitus (constant ringing inside one’s head), doing collage now helps Karin more than ever; to train the mind, manage expectations and accept things as it is—as well as advocate for herself.
Projects and exhibitions include: group exhibition with STEM Project under Srisasanti Syndicate, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (ongoing until 11th December 2022); Re-archive, a mini residency by IVAA (Indonesia Visual Art Archive), Yogyakarta, Indonesia; DICE (Developing Inclusive & Creative Economics) x Ketemu Project; Unknown Asia 2018 Art Fair in Osaka, Japan; group exhibition in Stein Egerta, Liechtenstein.
CHRISTIAN
Christian Newby is an artist and researcher whose work includes ways in which the conventional implementation of applied arts and design techniques can and are being resisted and recast; subverted away from hierarchically adverse roles of artist, designer, publisher and fabricator. What new idioms can we devise from conventional tools and techniques by misusing, re-wiring—by the experimentalism of the amateur’s hand, and by the terminus of the finished artwork? What can we learn from textiles as a form of activity rather than as decorative artefacts? How can DIY publishing further elucidate this formation through a diverse register of voices, stories and didactic instruction? He draws a first-person line around the jetsam of art and craft production. His work summons the role of the mark-maker, the textile fabricator, the diarist, zine-maker and hobbyist. It is a practice that integrates personal conflicts with material experimentation and plots a course of reflective experimentation, encountering tools and techniques rather than simply applying them.
He received his B.A. in Sculpture and Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2002, an M.F.A. at the Glasgow School of Art in 2009, and in 2022, completed his PhD at Kingston University’s Contemporary Art Research Centre.