SE Barnet
If the contemporary age is one where the fluid nature of singular remembrances easily overlaps with cultural memories, Barnet asks how we come to know each other, and ourselves, in this landscape. Her ambition in considering such questions lies in an exploration of new ideas concerning self-knowledge, learned knowledge and knowledge that is sponsored through seemingly unconnected narratives of place and time.
Barnet’s attention is aimed at the overlooked and obsolete aspects of daily life, often from her own and other collected reflections on personal experience. In her current project she engages with the archive of Mass Observation, the British movement begun in the early 20th century. Relying on randomness and association towards uncovering an experiential picture of the world, her work with Mass Observation employs the archive materials towards re-appropriation and détournement. The project also offers a look at an early complicit engagement with surveillance and the relationship between diaristic self-exposure and its resultant surfeit material. This is in light of our current experience of extensive private and state-run mass surveillance.
Biography
SE Barnet is an internationally exhibiting artist previously based in Los Angeles, now a Research Fellow at Birmingham City University and an Associate Lecturer at Central St. Martin’s in London. She completed her PhD at Kingston University in 2012 with the exhibition The Story of Elsewhere at the Stanley Picker Gallery. Barnet works across film, performance, and installations to create intimate visual essays on everyday pursuits. She is currently at work on a project with archival material from the British movement Mass Observation, the subject of two recent solo exhibitions at Five Years in London and of a forthcoming artist’s book published by the Everyday Press.