Harriet Min Zhang

We are just animals, humans, and machines getting on together in specific lifeworlds

Breath Mark x Lisa Hall & Hannah Kemp-Welch

Breath Mark, a curatorial collective formed as part of the RCA’s MA Curating Contemporary Art programme, has commissioned sound artists Lisa Hall and Hannah Kemp-Welch for Furtherfield’s People’s Park Plinth. Furtherfield strives to produce work that gives people a shared sense of ownership of their lives and localities and in 2021 People’s Park Plinth is imagining the whole of Finsbury Park as a platform for public digital art where people can explore a range of artworks and then choose the one they want to experience more of. Hall and Kemp-Welch’s work will be voted on in August, and has the potential to be expanded into a three part listening experience that takes the themes of connection across species further.

Hall and Kemp-Welch present a listening experience taking you on a journey through the park, suggesting new ways of experiencing this vital green space. Turning up the volume on non-human inhabitants in Finsbury Park, the sonic artwork creates moments of connection between strangers of all species. You can tune into the voices of different park user groups and sounds of many species on your digital devices: scan a QR code located outside of the Furtherfield Gallery to open a sound-based navigation system, developed in collaboration with Studio Hyte. This leads you to a place where you can pause, listen and consider the social and ecological concerns of the area. The destination serves as a meeting point, forming new, shifting listening communities across the park and amplifying the voices of local park user groups.

As part of extended public engagement, Breath Mark has collaborated with design studio An Endless Supply, on a digital microsite acting as a reading room allowing audiences to further engage with the artwork’s themes.

Look for the companions around you.

Draw closer to the unheard, the silenced, the unwanted sounds.

Tune in, feel, communicate.

Extend your senses and rest in them.

Harriet Min Zhang is a curator and writer exploring approaches to cross-disciplinary collaborations, especially among socio-technical system theories, lab-based research, and contemporary art and cultural practices. As she brings the concept of anthropology as a cultural critique to the curatorial, she hopes to problematise the curatorial ecology in relation to a consideration of labour, resources and approaches. She urges the curatorial to theorise a topic of sustainable curating in which we challenge the reductionistic growth-centric mindset in our trend-watching and strategy-making, pursue our duty of care, contest the domain knowledge(s) of other disciplines, and recognise nuance.

In her graduate dissertation, Magic, conjuring and curatorial techniques in contemporary digital curating, she contested the appetite for the fictionalised aesthetics in visual communications and situated it in a contemporary magic assemblage. She explored the boundaries that materialise, technologise and psychologise the image/imagination of magic, and how the sentiment of enchantment empowers conjuring in the curatorial. While she addressed the curator as the mythmaker that regenerates aesthetic codes, she hoped to challenge the conventional tactics that mystify cross-disciplinary curating.

Harriet was part of the curatorial collective, Breath Mark, which curated We are just animals, humans and machines getting on together in specific lifeworlds for Furtherfield’s exhibition People’s Park Plinth 2021. It presented a sound-based navigation system that connected strangers of all species to share and experience the space of Finsbury Park.

Harriet is currently working as an academic support and artist facilitator in the online residency, Blue Cables in Venetian Watercourse, which is selected as part of Shanghai Power Station of Art’s Emergent Curating Project 2O2Online. The residency supports 17 groups of artists from various backgrounds, such as tech companies and scientific research institutes. Prior to her masters at the RCA, she studied Social Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies.

The People’s Park Plinth, Furtherfield, 2021 — designed by Studio Hyte

Launch Project

Voting will start soon! Stay tuned!

We are just animals, humans, and machines getting on together in specific lifeworlds, Lisa Hall and Hannah Kemp-Welch, 2021 — designed by Studio Hyte

Breath Mark Collective — Inspired by musical scores, we chose the symbol of a breath mark to represent ourselves as a curatorial collective. We understand a breath mark as an indication of a pause that reminds us to rethink the fast-paced tempo of our daily lives. Besides punctuating musical notation, a breath mark also opens up a space for critical reflection and reveals things that have been lost in the constant repetition of quotidian tasks. https://www.instagram.com/breathmark_collective/

Launch Project

Reading Room — designed by An Endless Supply

Harriet Min Zhang

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Royal College of Art