terra incognita arts organisation is a British, not for profit, visual arts and curatorial organisation, founded in London in 1997 by Juliette Brown and Alana Jelinek. Throughout its history, terra incognita have attempted to challenge both the London art world and wider society with their proposals for other ways of doing things. terra incognita projects aim at challenging audiences, the status quo, the definition of art - all things 'art' that are worth doing and that aren't being done or supported by anyone else - at least within the context of London.
Since inception, they have curated exhibitions, initiated education, community and conservation projects, published visual art exhibition catalogues and a new series of novels. Each of these projects aim to be a significant intervention into their context, though each is also modeled on small, minimal action. They take the autonomist movement as inspiration for their methodology - not being concerned with mainstream approval of their actions. terra incognita have a small but devoted fan-base.
terra incognita are guided by concepts such as praxis, where terra incognita participants consider philosophical theory, not as an exercise, but in order to understand the world we find ourselves in. According to Alana Jelinek, "By understanding our world, we therefore act positively within it."
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Where terra incognita saw a London artworld with a simplistic understanding of race and ethnicity and British colonial history, they curated Point of Entry (1997), empire and I (1999) and put the African and Asian Visual Artists Archive online (2006-8).
Point of Entry was an open exhibition, inviting any artist to make a proposal in response to the exhibition site on Cable Street in East London near the banks of the Thames River. Selected artists included Zineb Sedira, Dominique Rey, Rart and Sete and Colin Darke. For empire and I, terra incognita invited artists from diverse backgrounds and with different relationships to the British colonial project to make art in response to the theme. Artists included Anthony Key, Erika Tan, Alana Jelinek, Shaheen Merali, and Lorrice Douglas. The exhibition took 4 years to realize. The AAVAAonline project worked with an archive begun by Eddie Chambers and later David A Bailey and Sonia Boyce plus others involved in the Black Arts Movement. Slides and documents are housed in the Docklands campus library of the University of East London. The online archive and outreach projects lasted for 2 years.
terra incognita have also initiated small scale, temporary interventions like 'Racist Australia Day' (2000) on the anniversary of the Federation of Australia. In 2007, terra incognita took their activities into publishing literary fiction that, despite its excellence, would be unpublishable by a mainstream publisher. As a small press, it has published Dai Vaughan's 'equal' (not sequel or prequel, but equal) to Non-Return called, The Treason of the Sparrows. This is among other novels in a series exploring conscience and consciousness.
Taking praxis in a new direction for the loose collective, terra incognita have initiated a relational-conservation project in Essex where core values of freedom and equality are explored through art practice. Similar to Tiravanija's Land Project, terra incognita explore these ideas through practical measures and by creating a space for thought and discussion.