As Fellow at the Bauhaus Foundation Dessau (2008) and Singapore (2009), Les Joynes (US) conducted Artistic Research inverting the utopian vision of Le Corbusier in his Ville Contemporaine.
Culture and the Disappearing City Joynes explores local identity in Singapore’s historic Queenstown neighborhood visited by what one resident called “the last place in Singapore which seems familiar.” In his interview with Sam Basu (UK) Joynes discusses FormLAB’s performance project that explores the erasure of sites which are intrinsically linked to memory.
Trace: An Investigation in the Invisible and the Transvisible, Singapore (2011) published in OctopusJournal for Visual Cultures at University of California Irvine presents the project narrative as an interview exploring site-specific performances and photography in collaboration with Bauhaus researchers, La Salle College of Art and Nanyang Academy of Art in Singapore. Each performance used long duration photography to explore the body in site in between the visible and the invisible.
Les Joynes (US) is a multi-media artist working across performance, installation, site, and new media. He is visiting professor of experimental art at Renmin University in Beijing and researches contemporary visual cultures and the future of museums in the Department of Art History and Archeology at Columbia University.
Les was 2015 Fellow on site specific performance at the Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN) at University of the Arts London (UAL); Japan Ministry of Culture (MExT) Scholar in contemporary art in Tokyo; and recipient of the US Fulbright-Hays Awards for Mongolia and China. He recently lectures at the Cambridge University Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), Columbia University, Peking University, University of California Santa Barbara, and The Bard-Smolny Curating Program in St. Petersburg. He is a Fellow of both the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Royal Geographical Society, London.
Les has contributed to Art in America, Flash Art, Springer and is author of “The Artist-centric model in museums” in Looking to New Institutional Models: China’s Cultural Landscape by Mid-Century(Long Museum, 2017). His work has featured in ArtMonthly (UK), Commons and Sense (Japan), Sculpture Magazine (US) and NHK Television (Japan). He is now reviewing new research on artistic research for the Journal for Artistic Research (JAR) in Bern and is a co-editor for ProjectAnywhere, a journal at the New School for Social Research and the University of Melbourne, Australia.
Specialized in artistic research he completed his BA (cum laude) in History, Boston University; BA (Hons) Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design; MA Fine Art, Goldsmiths, University of London; Masters in Fine Art, Musashino Art University, Tokyo; M.Sc from Boston University and the Vrije Universiteit Brussels Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences; PhD from the the Faculty of Art, Environment and Technology, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK and Post-Doctorate from the School of Communications and Arts (ECA), University of São Paulo, Brazil. He was a scholar in the department of Sculpture at École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, Paris. A US Department of State ZERO1: Art and Technology artist, Les is recipient of the 2020-2021 Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award for his research on contemporaneity in ritual at the Department of Art and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.
