Overview

Through art and writing, Crystal Bennes’s practice examines suppressed histories, knowledge systems and power structures. Using a method that often begins with feminist reinterpretations of archival traces or myths, her ways of working make essential, often surprising, connections between science, history, capitalism, colonialism, gender and political power. Her practice is committed to the essai (n, French: try, attempt, trial) form in thinking, writing, making and doing and seeks to reveal artistic and other forms of knowledge production to be fragmented, contested, situated, contingent, subjective, and in constant negotiation.

Bennes works across a wide range of media including tapestries, soap sculptures, photographs, publications, performance lectures, prints and meadows. Her interests include knowledge-making practices and empire, gender histories, sites of scientific research, archives, libraries, migration of plants and people, nuclear culture, language and translation, the subversion of academic methodologies, and the politics of art practice.

Bennes’s publications, artworks and installations range from Jacquard textiles woven with computer punch card programmes to photobooks knitting together links between early computing, nuclear weapons and women computer programmers. They include the pseudo-archaeological recreation of a nineteenth-century Roman hay meadow, a story of unintentional plant migration; a wide-ranging investigation of one of the only human-made chemicals that both nourishes and destroys us: fertiliser; and a performance installation featuring a Pythia-like oracle that speaks of corrupt global commodities traders.

Visit Crystal Bennes’s website here