Art and science in a tangle
12 May 2009
In an essay titled 'The Ties That Bind Us', available in a free publication accompanying the exhibition, Naheed writes: "Threads, ropes and therefore, tangles have been around for thousands of years; created and exploited by mankind as a way to build, count, communicate and think. Although their importance would seem to be diminishing in today's high-tech material world of glass, steel and plastics, new kinds of tangles are emerging; not made by the hands but by our minds and bodies; present in our most internal, visceral spaces and characterised by their complexity, persistence and capacity to alter flow in the critical pathways which sustain us.
"'Threads', 'knots' and 'tangles' are terms that could equally apply to the everyday experience of materials, or indeed, thought processes, psychological states or human relationships, as they do to actual disease processes. Yet the occurrence of these phenomena in a range of enigmatic biomedical conditions is drawing increasing attention from mathematicians and scientists alike. This begs the question, what is a tangle?"
Naheed Raza's work during the residency aimed to establish a connecting thread between current biomedical research and the fields of art, literature, philosophy and myth.
As she explains in the essay, "Shakespeare used metaphors of entanglement to convey the troubled mental states of his characters and their powerlessness in the face of seemingly inexorable events. For the psychoanalyst RD Laing, 'knots' characterize the doomed nature of all human relationships which eventually collapse into predictable patterns given the slightest push from the external world…
"For scientists too, ravelled structures are increasingly relevant. Recent theories of matter postulate that everything is composed of tightly coiled and maybe knotted loops of space-time, and in biology, the essential building blocks of life, DNA and proteins, are composed of long linear strands intricately packed within the cell in dense configurations, the exact structures of which are known to be crucially important for function…In Alzheimer's, a single abnormal twist may be all that is necessary to produce a pathological protein."
The artworks in the exhibition play on the gaps, interconnections and mirroring between ancient and modern problems, real and virtual structures, and the ambiguities, contradictions and paradoxes they produce.
‘Ravelling, Unravelling’ runs at the Royal Institution, London, until 28 May 2009 and is open Monday to Friday, 09.00-21.00, free admission.
Image: 'Mile of String', courtesy of Naheed Raza.