The key work in the exhibition is a film essay also titled Report to an Academy that explores an art school as a Kafkaesque, neoliberal workplace, where language is a tool of conflict. Report to an Academy is a reworking of the Kafka story of the same title. In the original story, an ape delivers an address to a gathering on his transition into human life. Within Report to an Academy the protagonist is an octopus who tells us of her motivation to escape her human form and transform herself into an octopus in the search for new forms of expression and physical agility.
Report to an Academy builds on Browne’s and her colleagues’ experience of working within a university. A series of workshops with staff and students at the Royal Institute of Art and the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design explore different ways of responding to institutional language through activities such as constructing poetry from graffiti within the art school, and materialising spaces of non-complaint through basic mouth-casting techniques. The workshop and film hope to articulate, share and re-imagine bodily experiences of work within institutions of knowledge production.
