FTHo

Hester Reeve, Homage to Robert Smithson – Plasticity and the ontological form of artist substance (still from live art lecture action), 2017

/origin\forward/slash\ is a group of artists and philosophers who are investigating the mutual implications and challenges of art and philosophy and how one practice can bear on or question the other. Open-ended dialogue in-between the two disciplines forms the mainstay of the group’s internal activity. Of equal priority is material manifestation, thinking in collaboration with relevant theorists and artists and establishing innovative public platforms to share research. 

/origin\forward/slash\ is affiliated with Flat Time House, London, and The Centre for Philosophy and Art, Kings College, London.

/origin\forward/slash\ presented the exhibtion First Hand at Flat Time House between 29 September and 5 November 2023. More information about the group can be found on the exhibition webpage here.

Andrew Benjamin is currently an Honorary Professor in the School of Communication and Cultural Studies in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. He has held posts in a number of UK and Australian universities. He is a graduate of the Australian National University, the University of New England, Université Paris 7 and the University of Warwick. He edits the series Walter Benjamin Studies for Bloomsbury and his most recent book is The Art of Gesture. Renaissance and Classical Expressions. Edinburgh University Press. (2026). He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2005. 

Sacha Golob is a philosopher who has published extensively on modern French and German philosophy and the philosophy of art. He is co-director of the Centre for Philosophy and Visual Art (CPVA) which aims to bring together academics, artists, curators and gallerists to explore the connections between philosophy, theory and the arts. Golob is Professor in Philosophy at King’s College London and before this he was a Fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge.

Marie Hay is a dance artist working with the rhythmic performance of contemporary dance and speech. Along with Louise Douse and Martin Leach, she convened the international ‘From Heidegger to Performance symposium’ in 2018 and is co-editor of the upcoming publication of the same name (to be published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2024). Hay is Senior Lecturer in Dance at De Montfort University. 

Johanna Malt is widely published in Surrealism and on various aspects of modern and contemporary art, theory and text-image relations. She is currently finishing a book provisionally entitled Image/Vestige: Casts, Imprints and Traces in Modern and Contemporary Art. Malt is Professor of French Literature and Visual Culture at King’s College London where she is also a board member of the Centre for Philosophy and Visual Art.

Hester Reeve is an artist whose practice is invested first and foremost in the task of thinking and thinking’s entangled relationship to the body, creative labour and matter at large. Composed of a considerable body of live art actions and associated drawings, sculptural objects and extended documentation experiments, her artworks function in co-relation to a complex, evolving array of conceptual priorities arrived at through extensive philosophical reading. The first monograph on her work, Ymedaca, was published by Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2015 and she has been working with the physicist David Bohm’s radical model of ‘Dialogue’ for over 15 years. Reeve is Reader in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University.

Mark Titmarsh is a visual artist working in painting, video and writing. In Australia he was a significant contributor to the development of the postmodern debate in the visual arts in his role as co-editor of the Visual Arts magazine, ‘On the Beach.’ In the 1990s he co-founded the Sydney based artists group ‘Art Hotline’ that exhibited ephemeral works in non-gallery everyday sites. His book Expanded Painting was published by Bloomsbury in August 2017. Titmarsh is a lecturer in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney.