SUPERLUX Masterclass Bambitchell and Richy Carey: On Multiplicity and Collaboration

Join artist-duo Bambitchell (Sharlene Bamboat and Alexis Mitchell) and composer Richy Carey for a SUPERLUX Masterclass that focuses on the process of making their recent collaborative video Special Works School (2018). A screening of this work will be followed by a discussion about the artists’ engagement with questions around subjectivity and multiplicity as it relates to collaboration.

The discussion will also address their approach to working between the gallery and the cinema and their experiments in sound within the framework of producing Special Works School.

Special Works School was the codename used by the British War Office between 1917–1919 for a group of artists tasked with the job of camoufleur – painters, textile artists, scenographers, designers, sculptors and scenic painters who were employed by the military to work specifically on developing camouflage technology. The artist, armed with the skill of rendering their surroundings with utmost acuity, was appointed to make things disappear.

Bambitchell’s Special Works School takes its name from this military unit to investigate the connections between artistic practice and surveillant technologies. With this new body of work, the duo ask what an overtly aesthetic approach to surveillance can render visible, or invisible. By framing surveillance as an aesthetic practice, Special Works School hones in on the psychic, embodied and material dimensions of surveillance – both from the position of the surveillor and the surveilled.