This output comprises 4 artworks, commissioned by international art quinquennial, documenta 14 (2017), and one journal article: 1) Criollo (7-min film; 15 photographs; artist’s book); 2) The Athens-Kassel Ride (large-scale public event); 3) The Transmit of Hermes (event, 3-hr film, 20 photographs, bronze sculpture); 4) The Parasite (artist’s book); 5) ‘Notes on Works for documenta 14 Athens & Kassel, 2017,’ Journal of Visual Arts Practice, 18(1), 2019.
Following documenta, the works were disseminated in solo and group exhibitions at: Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam, 2018; Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), Glasgow International Festival, 2018; Inverness Museum & Art Gallery, 2018; Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius, 2018; Rubicon Cinema, Ohio, 2020; Luxon Academy, Shenyang, 2020; Tsinghau University, Beijing, 2020; Guangzhou Academy, Guangzhou, Dec 2020–Jan 2021; Sichuan Institute, Chongqing, 2021.
The research asks: How might the figure of the journeying horse, conceived as companion-species, challenge the biopolitics of the border in an epoch of mass migration and the anthropocene?
It explores questions of posthumanism when addressed to the contemporary economic, political and ecological crises of mass migration and the Anthropocene.
Birrell’s methodology draws on critical theory, particularly Deleuze & Guattari’s concept of becoming-animal, Giorgio Agamben’s threshold moments of biopolitics and Donna Haraway’s theories of companion species. Methods include: literature surveys on the politics of human-animal relations; processes of polyphonic orchestration and delegated performance; site-specific filmmaking; and exhibition as a test bed for installation and audience response. This research sits within the fields of art as activism and art as cultural diplomacy, builds on other practice-based research that explores the metaphoric power of the animal - e.g. Snaebjornsdottir/Wilson (dialectic of domestic, pet/pest) and Tania Bruguera (the animal as state apparatus) - and contributes to understandings of the principle of free movement in the crossing of borders.