Hevea Act 6: An Elastic Continuum
Bethan Hughes
Free admission
An Elastic Continuum is an artistic research project developed by artist Bethan Hughes. It forms the sixth chapter of her Hevea series, which she has been developing since 2020.
The installation narrates the story of Taraxacum Kok Saghyz, a rubber-containing plant better known as the Kazakh or Russian dandelion, from the perspective of the women whose labour relates to its cultivation, transformation and exploitation.
Bethan Hughes traces the journey of this humble “weed” from the Tien Shan mountains in Kazakhstan to collective farms across the Soviet Union, greenhouses at Auschwitz to the laboratories of multinational tyre corporations in Europe.
The installation revolves around a single-channel video, constructed from fragments of archival film alongside contemporary footage, and extends beyond the screen, taking the form of a series of glass, rubber and steel sculptures that act as instruments through which audio, the work of Hughes’s collaborator Diego Flórez, resonates.
This project was developed in 2023 as part of a European Media Art Platform (EMAP) residency at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijón (Spain).
Bethan Hughes
Bethan Hughes is an artist and researcher. Born in Wigan, UK, she studied Fine Art at the Glasgow School of Art (UK) and Media Art at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (Germany). In 20220, she was awarded a PhD from the University of Leeds for her dissertation Against Immateriality: 3D CGI and Contemporary Art. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions mainly in Berlin, at Centrum Berlin and HAUNT/frontviews, and in the group exhibition Mutual Matters: Goldrausch 2021 at the Haubrok Foundation, also in Berlin. In 2019-20 Hughes was a fellow of Braunschweig Projects, and in 2021 she received a fine art research scholarship from the city of Berlin.
EMAP – European Media Art Platform is a project co-funded by the european union through the Creative Europe Programme.