где Ленин
Indexing Monument and Memory
Les Joynes (US)
Born California, 1963. Lives and works in New York and New Delhi.
Current Research
A Fulbright Senior Scholar in the arts, Les is a writer and curator exploring monument and the Post-Soviet with the St. Petersburg Art Residency in collaboration with the Museum of Nonconformist Art and the Robert F. Byrnes Russian and East European Institute at Indiana University.
His current project Invisible Human explores the echoes of human memory reverberated in monuments both present and absent. It explores the lifecycles of human existence in sites including their remnants and residual histories as well as the transience of what it means to identify as human. As part of the St Petersburg Residency he is writing on his project which examines his own recollections at age fifteen of monuments while visiting Leningrad and his photo series "где Ленин" which examines collective memories and absence of monuments in modern day St Petersburg as part of his CEC Artslink residency in 2017. His research will be included in an essay titled “A Slipperiness of Soviet Memory: Leningrad as a Refuge or Reconciliation of Displaced Memory”.
Monumenting Absent Monuments: Image from a former site of a Lenin monument, now a hotel lobby in “Where is Lenin?” (2017) a chromogenic print series created in St. Petersburg on Monuments and their Absence. 2017 © FormLAB and the artist, ARS, New York and DACS, London. де это?
Biography
Les Joynes (born 1963) is a multi-media visual artist and writer based in New York.
He is recipient of the 2022 Fulbright-Nehru Professional and Academic Excellence Award (2022), the University of the Arts London Research Center on Transnational Art, Identity and Nation Fellowship (2015), the NKD Fellowship (2008), the Taiwan Huayu Scholarship (2016), Bauhaus Artist Fellowship (2008-2009), Edwin Abbey Fellowship, National Design Museum (2009), and the King Sturge Sculpture Prize, London (1995). In London he studied under minimalist sculptors Stephen Furlonger and David Annesley and soon began describing his practice as seeking an “exuberance of maximalism”. Graduating from Goldsmiths in London in 1997, his work has been referred to as exploring “an abject but somehow jovial formlessness which is calculated to insult every formalist sensibility available… a kind of Ground Zero of sculptural irresponsibility.” (ArtMonthly, London).
Examining new forms of experimental and collaborative art practices, Joynes began contributing art criticism in 1997 for Springer (Austria) Art in America and has contributed to Flash Art, and the Journal for Artistic Research (JAR) and his work has featured on NHK Television Japan, Art Monthly (London) and Sculpture Magazine, US and Commons and Sense, Japan. In 2018 he was invited by art critic and essayist Jonathan Crary in the Department of Art History and Archeology at Columbia, to explore power relations between the museum, the observer and the art object. He was Visiting Scholar in Philosophy at the Columbia University Visitng Scholar and Scientist Program. He served on the inaugural Taipei Biennial “Sites of Desire” curatorial team in 1997 and is one of the founding editors for ProjectAnywhere, a peer-reviewed journal on artistic research at University of Melbourne Australia and Parsons School of Design in New York.
Joynes completed his BA (Hons) Fine Art from Central Saint Martin College of Art in London and MA Fine Art (1997) at Goldsmiths where he studied under conceptual artist and painter Michael Craig-Martin and was Japan Monbusho Scholar (1997-2001) during his Masters in Fine Art at Musashino Art University, Tokyo. He was awarded his PhD (2012) from the Faculty of Art, Environment and Technology, Leeds Beckett University, UK; and Post-Doctorate (2017) in Fine Art from the School of Art and Communications at University of São Paulo, Brazil.
Video still from Shapeshifter. Northern Mongolia 2014 © FormLAB and ARS, New York and DACS, London. CEC and Fulbright-Hays US Public Diplomacy Award.
Still from Buryiat (2014) in Northern Mongolia. CEC and Fulbright-Hays US Public Diplomacy Award. 2014 © FormLAB and the artist, ARS, New York and DACS, London.
FormLAB China Performing Monuments on the Great Wall © 2017 FormLAB and the artist, ARS, New York and DACS, London