Abstract

This paper contextualizes two iterations of art practice performed in 2014 by Shepley (i) in the ruined catholic seminary St Peters, Kilmahew, Scotland and (ii) Connaught Place, Delhi, India. The paper examines ways in which he has sought to prolong the notion of artistic activity within the field of distribution and his efforts to disclose potential breaches in the cultural infrastructure emerging through dispersed and uncertain practices. These selected micro-encounters extend the provocation put forward by the Raqs Media Collective during INSERT2014 in Delhi. They are part of his broader practice research highlighting the potential of creative indeterminacy to restore an embodied relationship to the world. The paper explores creative work that attempts, as Marcel Duchamp once wrote, to be not of art, and to delay closure – that closure being the co-opting of art by the institutions that define art as art and that have traditionally distributed it.