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Please join us on Saturday 5 July for a Celebration of Life for Terry Brooks (1951-2024), Wysing Arts Centre’s co-founder and longest-standing Trustee. The event will follow Wysing’s annual Open Studio event, which Terry loved to attend each year.
Archive
2025
Terry’s contributions to Wysing were immeasurable, and his kind, supportive presence is deeply missed. This day will mark his life and celebrate his legacy. We welcome those who knew Terry and worked with him over the years – please share if you know someone who might like to come.
The celebration will take place from 5-7pm in Wysing’s courtyard, after our Open Studio event. Food can be purchased from VG Coffee and we’ll be running an informal bar.
You are invited to bring thoughts, memories or something else that you would like to share, quietly or out loud. This could be from your own experience, a short poem, a song - or any other tribute that feels meaningful to you.
For more information and to register for this event, as well as information on transport, please click here.
Wysing Open
Join us from 12 - 5pm on Saturday 5 July for Wysing Open Studios, an invitation to experience Wysing’s artistic community and rural site.
You can meet artists, visit open studios and encounter a variety of works-in-progress. On the occasion of our Open Studios, Wysing's Studio Artists present a special one-day-only exhibition in Wysing’s Project Space.
You can grab a delicious vegan lunch and refreshments from VG Coffee, or bring your own picnic to enjoy in our outdoor spaces.
Following the Open Studios, from 5-7pm, we will be holding a Celebration of Life for our co-founder Terry Brooks who passed away earlier this year. A donations bar will be available during the celebration. If you would like to attend this as well as the Wysing Open, please book your free space here.
Free parking is available onsite and Tiger on Demand can be used to book bus transport to and from Wysing’s virtual bus stop.
This event is free but ticketed, please book to join us here.
Participating Artists
Beverley Carruthers
Emanuela Cusin
Bettina Furnée
Sophie Hill
Rohini Kapil
Penny Klein
Georgina Manning
Isobel Meredith-Hardy
Josh McCormack
Shawn Stipling
Throughout the Day | 12-5pm
Studio Artist Exhibition in the Project Space
Wysing's Studio Artists will be sharing a special one-day-only exhibition in our Project Space, including work by David Bradley, Beverley Carruthers, Emanuela Cusin, Bettina Furnée, Sophie Hill, Rohini Kapil, Penny Klein, Georgina Manning, Isobel Meredith-Hardy, Josh McCormack, Emma Smith, Shawn Stipling and Caroline Wendling.
Open Studios
Meet artists, visit studios and discover works-in-progress across our rural site.
VG Coffee
Serving delicious vegan food and refreshments throughout the day. Bring a blanket and enjoy a picnic in our grounds.
A Celebration of Life for Terry Brooks | 5-7pm
Join us in celebrating our cofounder, Terry Brooks, who passed away earlier this year. A donations bar will be available for the Celebration of Life. Please book your ticket to join us here.
Planning Your Visit
Accessibility
Accessible parking and accessible toilets are available onsite. A quiet space will be available in the stable block office. The outdoor grounds at Wysing are uneven and have varying surface textures, which may cause some difficulty for unaccompanied wheelchair users.
Food and Drink
Grab some lunch from VG Coffee. On-site throughout the day.
Parking
Free parking is available on-site.
Photography
Be aware that photography will be taking place throughout the day. If you do not wish to be included, please let a member of staff know on the day.
Spring Celebration: An Afternoon with C&G Artpartment, Elsa Prudent and Alexi Marshall
1.30pm - 3.30pm, Saturday 26 April
Click here to book your ticket.
Wysing Arts Centre invites you to a special afternoon of art and conversation reflecting on community building, migration and decolonisation with artists C&G Artpartment, Elsa Prudent and Alexi Marshall. Celebrating the culmination of their year-long residency at Wysing, C&G (Artists Clara Cheung & Gum Cheng Yee Man), will share new work and host a panel discussion with artist Phoenix Tse, political cartoonist Justin Wong and academic Jesse Ng to discuss artistic practice and community building during ongoing personal and political transition.
Artist Elsa Prudent opens up her studio in Wysing’s sun filled Window Room to visitors, sharing a new series of painting-in-progress that grapples with inheritance and the colonial histories of the Caribbean. Guests will also be the first to see a new mural created collaboratively by Alexi Marshall with Wysing’s Creative Youth Council that brings flora and fauna from across Wysing’s site to life across the walls of Wysing’s Stable Block. Hong Kong milk tea brewed by C&G will be served during the afternoon.
Biographies
C&G Artpartment are an artist duo from Hong Kong comprised of Clara Cheung and Gum Cheng. Founded in 2007, their artist-run space engages with social and cultural issues in Hong Kong through exhibitions and operating as a space for the exchange of ideas. On June 30, 2020, the People’s Republic of China imposed National Security Law onto Hong Kong and, thereafter, started political persecution that further destroyed free speech and civic society. In August 2021, C&G Artpartment had to end its space in Hong Kong and move to the UK. C&G have continued their practice and reopened in Sheffield.
Recent curatorial projects include Am I A Ghost? Singapore Biennale (2019); The 24901-mile-wide Red Line, Bloc Projects, Sheffield (2022); Iron Barricades - Cable Ties – Hope, C&G Artpartment, Sheffield (2024).
Alexi Marshall is an artist living and working in Hastings. Recent projects include Under the Pomegranate Moon, Flatland Projects, Bexhill (2023); and Cursebreakers, De La Warr Pavillion, Bexhill (2021). She was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2018 and was shortlisted for the Arts Foundation Futures Awards in 2024. She has worked with the Creative Youth Council at Wysing since 2023, delivering workshops and creating a series of artworks in collaboration with its participants.
Jesse Ng is a PhD candidate based in the English Faculty at the University of Cambridge. She researches the intersection of decolonisation, cosmopolitanism and migration by examining an arc of visual, literary, cinematic and cultural texts about postcolonial and cultural Hong Kong.
Elsa Prudent is an artist living and working between Bordeaux and Paris. Select projects include Phantom Itineraries, CAPC, Bordeaux (2024); Don’t Feed Your Ghosts, They’ll Come Back Hungry! Driftproject, Marseille (2023); and Enjoy the Silence, Eliane Project, Bordeaux (2022). In 2022, she was artist-in-residence for The Astéries* Project, a research residency looking at the colonial history of Bayonne, Bordeaux and La Rochelle.
Ngo Chun Phoenix Tse is an artist living and working in London. Recent projects include Transforming: Here and Now, University of Warwick, Coventry (2025); Through a Glass Darkly, Metroland Cultures, London (2024); and Here, There and Everywhere: Encountering Ghosts, Forests, Axis, Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2024). In 2025, he received a grant from the Freelands Foundation to support his practice. In 2024 Tse was a part of Peer-to-Peer, an artist support programme convened by Metroland Cultures.
Justin Wong is a London-based comics artist and political cartoonist. He is known for his political cartoons in Hong Kong’s Ming Pao newspaper. He taught at Hong Kong Baptist University (2008–2021), and in 2022 founded Skip Class, an online platform for independent art education. Wong’s work explores resistance and identity. Recent projects include several graphic novels, including Lonely Planet, Hello World, New Hong Kong, and Je préfèrerais ne, which have been published in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and France.
Join us for Wysing’s Creative Youth Festival, a celebration of creativity in all its forms!
Meet artists, make friends, and take part in hands on, creative workshops.
Have a go in our sound recording studio, experiment with makeup, create your own marbled paper, or try out making with clay... With even more workshops soon to be announced, there will be lots to choose from.
Get curious and be inspired – we'd love you to come along!
Full Schedule
Mural Stencils with Alexi Marshall
Contribute to Alexi Marshall’s major new mural project, developed with Wysing’s Creative Youth Council. Create a leaf stencil that may make its way into the final design!
Pumpkin Carving with Sean Roy Parker
Join Wysing residency alum artist Sean Roy Parker for a pumpkin carving workshop with a twist. Learn about the folklore behind carving, the life cycle of a pumpkin and the ways you can use or compost what’s left over after carving.
Creative Makeup with Jack Oliver
Join makeup artist Jack Oliver (as seen on BBC 3’s ‘Glow Up’) to explore makeup as a tool for creativity. Join one of Jack’s amazing demonstrations to learn more about makeup as a tool for self-discovery and self-expression followed by the chance to experiment and play with makeup yourself!
Who is it for?
This festival is for young people aged 12 – 18.
Young people can attend independently, subject to parent/guardian permission. You can also attend with your youth group or organisation, or with your family.
The festival has been co-designed with Wysing’s Creative Youth Council, especially for other young people. The CYC are a group of young people who meet regularly at Wysing to work with artists and develop creative projects.
Why should I come?
Do you enjoy being creative? Do you like making things, or trying stuff out just for fun?
Maybe you want to make new friends and meet other people like you, who share your interests?
Or maybe you want to find new ways to develop your creative portfolio, expanding your skills with a new technique, a different material or process?
Would you like to meet and work with professional artists and find out more about what they do?
The youth festival is a space to be playful, it will give you the chance to explore and experience different kinds of art and share your creativity.
Plus, being involved in the arts has been shown to have a positive impact on wellbeing. Creativity enables people to have a sense of belonging, and the youth festival at Wysing is a great opportunity to enable you to feel connected with your own creativity, nature, and other people.
Access & Reasonable Adjustments
A calm, quiet room is available onsite.
Accessible parking and toilets are available.
Please get in touch if you'd like a site visit prior to the event.
If you have other access requirements or educational needs that you would like to check with us before booking, please get in touch with Michaela D’Agati, Young People’s Programme Coordinator at Michaela.dagati@wysingartscentre.org and we will be happy to help.
Please be aware that while we try to offer access and reasonable adjustments wherever possible, we are not a specialist or alternative provision provider and do not have specialist staff to support complex needs. We are always very happy to discuss what we can make possible in our programmes and where we can work together; it is our priority to ensure the young people we work with are safe and happy.
Health, Safety and Wellbeing
We want to support young people to have the freedom to explore creativity, independently.
We ask the parent/guardian/youth worker/group lead to specify if they are happy to allow the young person(s) to explore our rural site freely.
Please be aware that Wysing is an open site (i.e., not enclosed by walls or fences). We are set in 11 acres of rural land with fields and woodland and an open entrance way onto a ‘B’ road. We ask you to take this into consideration when booking.
To help you make this decision we have provided a risk assessment that specifies what we are doing to ensure the health, safety, and wellbeing of young people at the event.
You can download our Risk Assessment here.
Wysing Arts Centre is committed to providing a safe environment for all children, young people, and vulnerable adults and their safety and welfare is paramount to the organisation when they visit or work with us.
You can download our Safeguarding Policy here.
We have an organisational Code of Conduct for you to read before visiting Wysing.
You can download our Wysing Code of Conduct here.
FAQs
Do I need to attend for the whole day?
No, you don’t need to attend for the whole day, you can stay for as little or as long as you want.
Do I need to book?
Yes, booking is required.
We are asking people to book via Eventbrite, so we know how many people to expect. Bookings must be completed by/with a responsible adult, to agree to the event details.
Do I need to have any experience?
No, you don't need to have any previous art experience. All materials for the workshops are included and you’ll be shown how to use them. Come along and try things out!
Do I need to pay for the festival?
There are free tickets available and we have a sliding scale for ticket prices that enables people to pay based on what they can afford.
Why the extra costs on some tickets?
Because Wysing Arts Centre is a charity, we need to raise money to fund everything we do. If you can afford to pay for a ticket, you will be helping us support the Youth Festival and cover the costs of running an event like this, which means we can keep tickets free for those who need them the most.
Do I need to bring lunch?
There will be a food van at the festival for the duration of the day. If you would like to buy food here on the day, please bring some cash or a card.
Alternatively, you can bring along your own packed lunch.
There will be designated areas where people can sit to eat their food, either indoors or outside.
What should I wear?
We recommend wearing clothing you feel comfortable in. Some activities can be messy, like using clay or ink, so it is advisable to wear clothes you don’t mind getting a bit grubby! Aprons will be provided for messier activities.
We also recommend sturdy, comfortable footwear as you might want to explore Wysing’s fields and woodland, where the ground can be uneven. Also make sure to bring weather appropriate clothing!
How can I get there?
Taxi travel can be provided for young people from pick up points in Cambourne, Cambridge and Huntingdon with DBS checked taxi drivers. This must be booked by 12 noon on Wednesday 23rd October.
You can select your travel options when you book your ticket.
For Cambridge & Cambourne taxi options: For 12 noon arrival - the taxi departs from Cambridge at 11.20am, collecting from Cambourne at 11.45am, arriving at Wysing for 12pm.
For Huntingdon taxi options: For 12 noon arrival - the taxi leaves Huntingdon at 11.30pm, arriving at Wysing for 12pm.
All taxis will depart Wysing at 5:15pm and will follow the same route back, arriving in Cambourne at 5.30pm, Cambridge and Huntingdon at 6pm. Timings are approximate.
Please note: if you require transport but find it difficult to attend from these locations, please get in touch with us so we can discuss potential travel options to support your attendance.Wheelchair accessible transport can be provided if needed. If you require it, please tick the box on the Eventbrite ticket checkout page and we will be in touch by email to confirm arrangements with you. Please let us know by 12 noon on Wednesday 23rd October at the latest.
How can I get there?
Taxi travel can be provided for young people from pick up points in Cambourne, Cambridge and Huntingdon with DBS checked taxi drivers. This must be booked by 12 noon on Wednesday 23rd October.
You can select your travel options when you book your ticket.
For Cambridge & Cambourne taxi options: For 12 noon arrival - the taxi departs from Cambridge at 11.20am, collecting from Cambourne at 11.45am, arriving at Wysing for 12pm.
For Huntingdon taxi options: For 12 noon arrival - the taxi leaves Huntingdon at 11.30pm, arriving at Wysing for 12pm.
All taxis will depart Wysing at 5:15pm and will follow the same route back, arriving in Cambourne at 5.30pm, Cambridge and Huntingdon at 6pm. Timings are approximate.
Please note: if you require transport but find it difficult to attend from these locations, please get in touch with us so we can discuss potential travel options to support your attendance.Wheelchair accessible transport can be provided if needed. If you require it, please tick the box on the Eventbrite ticket checkout page and we will be in touch by email to confirm arrangements with you. Please let us know by 12 noon on Wednesday 23rd October at the latest.
I’m a parent/guardian/youth worker. Do I need to attend/stay on site for the event?
We want to encourage young people to explore their own creative interests, in an environment where risks are managed as well as is feasibly possible. It is the responsibility of the adult (parent/guardian/youth worker) who books to ensure that they understand and agree to the plans put in place by Wysing to minimise potential risks during the event, and to undertake their own assessment of risk for the young person/people they intend on bringing to the event. During the event, there will be spaces available with Wi-Fi around Wysing for adults to base themselves if they want/need to stay on site.
For other questions, please email Michaela D’Agati, our Young People’s Programme Coordinator at Michaela.dagati@wysingartscentre.orgWith thanks to our funders for making this event possible: Arts Council, England & the John Armitage Charitable Foundation.
Club Urania is back!
This October we’re hosting open-mics, a new performance by Babeworld, and Dior Clarke presents an extract of their work This Love Isn’t Taught, a black gay love story. All followed by dancing and soon to be announced DJ’s.
Club Urania is committed to reducing barriers to access, providing pay-what-you-feel tickets, a decompression space at the venue, and live-captioning. We recommend booking to avoid disappointment.
Previous seasons have featured brilliant, queer performances by Whiskey Chow, Catherine Hoffman, Harold Offeh, Pink Suits, Symoné, Wet Mess, Rebekah Ubuntu, Nando Messias, Jake Wood, Nat Raha, Duane Nasis, Cabbage the Clown, Vidya Patel, Zaki Musa, Emily Pope, Fatt Butcher and more!
Club Urania is a collaboration between Cambridge Junction, Wysing Arts Centre, Roeland van der Heiden, Diarmuid Hester, and Celia Willoughby.
Featuring:
Babeworld are an art collective based across Stoke-on-Trent and London. Babeworld’s work entangles popular-culture inspired film, installation and sound design to interrogate themes of political and societal identity, disability/access, neurodivergence, sex work and race. Babeworlds research explores what it means to make, participate in and spectate art as marginalised individuals. Previous projects include No Sleep Just Clouds, The Art House, Wakefield (2024); Love is Real and It’s Inside Of my Computer, Grand Union, Birmingham (2024); and Voices of a Tempest, a group show curated by Anne Duffau at Somerset House, London (2023).
At Club Urania, Babeworld will present a new performance exploring the ways we obsess over choices and decision making, through the game ‘would you rather’.
Dior Clarke is an actor, writer, director and producer. They trained at The London School of Dramatic Arts, The National Youth Theatre and The Academy of Live Recorded Arts. Their first short film Batty Boy (2018) was made with Sky Arts, and their play Passion Fruit (2022) debuted at the New Diorama Theatre. For Club Urania, Clarke presents an extract of This Love Isn't Taught, a black gay love story examining identity and sexuality.
Access information:
- All acts will be live captioned, in-person at the venue and on our digital broadcast via zoom
- A decompression space is available
- All spaces are clearly signposted
- All spaces are wheelchair accessible
Club Urania is back!
This September we’re hosting open-mics, a new performance by Fatt Butcher exploring the mystic power of poppers, and work from artist Emily Pope’s film series, Poison Pen Letters. All followed by dancing and soon to be announced DJ's.
Club Urania is committed to reducing barriers to access, providing pay-what-you-feel tickets, a decompression space at the venue, and live-captioning. We recommend booking to avoid disappointment.
Previous seasons have featured brilliant, queer performances by Whiskey Chow, Catherine Hoffman, Harold Offeh, Pink Suits, Symoné, Wet Mess, Rebekah Ubuntu, Nando Messias, Jake Wood, Nat Raha, Duane Nasis, Cabbage the Clown, Vidya Patel, Zaki Musa and more!
Club Urania is a collaboration between Cambridge Junction, Wysing Arts Centre, Roeland van der Heiden, Diarmuid Hester, and Celia Willoughby.
Featuring:
Fatt Butcher is an award-winning cabaret artist, vocalist, and professional hot mess based in Birmingham. Heralded by critics as an ‘incredible vocal powerhouse’ and ‘the accelerating decline of humanity’ by trolls on twitter, Fatt has performed across the UK including at Mighty Hoopla and Latitude Festivals. They were notably the first person to sniff poppers live on national television. Fatt’s work explores fatness, care, community, and togetherness. They are interested in what queerness has to offer the world.
For Club Urania, Fatt will share extracts of newly created music & performance developed on residency at Cambridge Junction exploring the spiritual possibilities of queerness and the mystic powers of poppers.
Emily Pope is an artist living and working in London. Her work focuses on the history of experimental broadcast media, satire, intersectional feminism, dyke subjectivities, political rhetoric and class politics. Previous projects include Yank the Chain (with Ruth Angel Edwards), Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2022); One in Every Village, The Box Museum, Plymouth (2021); The Sitcom Show – Series Finale, Peak Gallery, London (2019). She was a residency artist for The White Pube in 2018 and her writing has been published by Elephant Magazine, Sticky Fingers Publishing, Bookworks, Montez Press and Auto Italia, among others. Pope is a recipient of the Loewe Foundation / Studio Voltaire Award 2023-25.
For Club Urania, Pope will share work from her ongoing film series, Poison Pen Letters, (2023 – present). The series takes online letter templates for writing to MPs as a starting point. To avoid being easily deleted or ending up in a junk folder, the videos respond to the advice to personalise letters as much as possible. In Poison Pen Letters, the form of the karaoke lyric video is repurposed to deliver the letters Pope wrote to various members of government in moments of national and global crisis.
Access information:
- All acts will be live captioned, in-person at the venue and on our digital broadcast via zoom
- A decompression space is available
- All spaces are clearly signposted
- All spaces are wheelchair accessible
Wysing Open
Join us from 12 - 6pm on Saturday 6 July for Wysing Open, an invitation to experience Wysing’s thriving artistic community and rural site.
You can meet artists and visit open studios, see live performances, take part in a fantastical drop-in workshop led by Wysing’s Creative Youth Council, and encounter moving image and sound-based works-in-progress from some of Wysing’s artists in residence. You can also grab a delicious vegan lunch and refreshments on site from VG Coffee, or bring your own picnic.
This event is free but ticketed, please book to join us here.
Artists include:
Nurbanu Asena
Sebastian Blackie
Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom
Beverley Carruthers
Emanuela Cusin
Georgie Field
Robert Foster-Jones
Bettina Furnee
Georgia Gendall
Sophie Hill
Hannan Jones
Rohini Kapil
Penny Klein
Wanja Kimani
Alastair Kwan
Georgina Manning
Isobel Meredith-Hardy
Josh McCormack
Aaron Ossia
Shamica Ruddock
Shawn Stipling
Sarah Strachan
Jordan Ward-Williams
Caroline Wendling
Schedule:
12.30 - 2.30: ‘The Disappearance of Bertha Jones’: A performance by Georgia Manning - The Forest Near Amphis
1 - 4pm: Make a fantasy map with Wysing’s Creative Youth Council (Workshop) - Open Studio
3 - 4pm: Horizon, a performance by Caroline Wendling (1 hr): 3-4pm - Across the site
4 - 4.30pm: Alastair Kwan introduces his work-in-progress, 8 Bottle (2024 - Ongoing) - By the planter outside of the New Block
All day:
Open Studios
See work by and meet members of Wysing’s studio community including members of our Ceramic Studio. Studio community artists have also provided original and editioned artworks in the Wysing Shop. Available in Reception throughout the day.
After:Compliments (2024)
Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom, Project Space
The Worm Forgives the Plough (2024)
Georgia Gendall, Amphis
8 Bottle (2024 - ongoing)
Alastair Kwan, Outside of the New Block
The Shift (2022)
Hannan Jones and Shamica Ruddock, The Farmhouse
Corns and Calluses (2024)
Rafał Zajko, The New Block
Planning your visit:
Accessibility: Accessible parking and accessible toilets are available onsite. A decompression space will be available in the Top Barn. The outdoor grounds at Wysing are uneven and have varying surface textures, which may cause some difficulty for unaccompanied wheelchair users. Please be aware that the artist presentations in Wysing’s Project Space, Amphis and the Farmhouse include loud noise.
Food and drink: Grab some lunch from VG Coffee. On site throughout the day.
Parking: Free parking is available on site.
Photography: Be aware that photography will be taking place throughout the day. If you do not wish to be included, please let a member of staff know on the day.
Refreshments
Grab refreshments or lunch onsite throughout the day from VG coffee. You are also welcome to bring a picnic lunch.
Getting to Wysing
We have ample parking on site. Public bus services run hourly from Cambridge (No. 18 from Drummer Street) to Bourn Village Monday to Saturday. Please check bus times before travelling. Wysing is a 15-minute walk from Bourn, but please note this is along a busy road. Find out more about transport information on our website here.
Tickets including transport from Cambridge Station are available here.
Featuring-
Headline DJ: Ryan Lovell
Born and raised in South London, Ryan Lovell developed their sound with influences from the gritty city as well as their culturally diverse heritage. Learning to play music from a young age has led them to develop an Electronic House & Afro & Bass sonic pallet, adorned with hints of fun, sing-along, Pop, RnB & Bashment hits.
Ryan Lovell is a member of the QTBIPOC nightlife collective PXSSY PALACE for whose events they are also a resident DJ, and they co-organize their Afro-Caribbean centric night FEVER. Ryan also curates the platform Dirty Saints Presents.
They have most notably played Glastonbury Festival, Ms Banks + Honey Dijon.
Niche Lorraine
”She’s international, she’s intergalactic and she’s into rimming. She’s a huge fan of novelty slippers and David Gray, but her favourite thing about humans is that they’re 85% water. All the way from Uranus to your anus, please welcome to the stage the icon, the legend, the fugitive that is NICCCCCHHEEEE LORRRAAAINEEE.”
Shardeazy Afrodesiak
Shardeazy Afrodesiak – the Gender Bending Drag Ting ready to explode their fuckery all over you! Busting into the drag scene with no apologies, this thought-provoking thot uses their platform to express and deconstruct topics of race, gender and sexuality through music, dance and fierce af lipsyncing! The mixed heritage, thicc, King n Ting is a powerful gender-fucked entity defying the rules of social and hetro norms! First Runner up of Man Up! – Europe’s largest Drag King Competition – Shardeazy has exploded on stages all over the UK and internationally (including UK Pride’s; national and international Festivals; official award shows; theatre shows, corporate events and many more!)
Margo Marshall
Margo Marshall part pop-princess part fosse showgirl, Margo is known as one of UKs top dancing Drag Performers and cabaret artists, training at The Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. After graduating she quickly rose in London’s alternative queer scene. She was then selected as to tour with Melanie C for her 2019 Pride Tour (including 50 Years of World Pride Closing Ceremony), quickly she racked up credits with a range of artists including Jessie Ware, Mabel, Jake Shears and The Sugababes. After building her reputation in the industry she has also choreographed for Charli XCX, Ava Max and two time Brit winner Becky Hill. In addition to this work Margo also runs events and produces theatre work in London, with her first show premiering at The Roundhouse.
‘Club Urania offers an alternative lineup of queer performance that’s often mesmerising, sometimes bizarre, and always diverse’ – Alex Fice, Cambridge Edition
Club Urania is a collaboration between Cambridge Junction, Wysing Arts Centre and other queer organisations, artists and promoters: Celia Willoughby, Diarmuid Hester, and Roeland van der Heiden.
Club Urania is a not-for-profit event and all money raised will be going towards bringing great artists to Cambridge and enabling us to create these spaces. We’re offering tickets on variable cost basis to remove financial barriers, please do consider paying a higher ticket price if you are able to. If cost is a barrier to accessing the event but you’re still interested in attending, please email Ruth Dorber: ruth.dorber@wysingartscentre.org
Access information:
- All acts will be live captioned, in-person at the venue and on our digital broadcast via zoom
- The main club space will be loud but a decompression space and chill out space are available
- All spaces are clearly signposted
- All spaces are wheelchair accessible
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Open Call for Queer Utopias Zine Fair!
Would you like to be involved in the Queer Utopias Zine Fair?
Applications are open to LGBTQIA+ artists, writers, zinesters, publishers and organisations!
The event will take place on Sat 18th May, with stalls open from 2.00-6.00pm.
Please email Ruth on ruth.dorber@wysingartscentre.org with the following:
- A short bio (100 words max)
- 2 or 3 images OR a link to your website/social media where we can view your work.
DEADLINE: Monday 29th April, 5:00pm.
Wysing is 10 miles from central Cambridge, and there is parking on-site if you are planning to drive. Wysing is wheelchair accessible.
A calm decompression space is available onsite.
Accessible parking and toilets are available.
Free Companion Tickets are available for anyone who needs them.
If you have access requirements that you would like to check with us before applying, please get in touch with Ruth Dorber, Wysing’s Assistant Curator, at ruth.dorber@wysingartscentre.org and we will be happy to help.
Queer Utopias, Saturday 18 May
Wysing Arts Centre, 2.00-10.00pm
In-person
Click here to book your ticket.
Queer Utopias
Join us for Queer Utopias, a festival of queer culture for the LGBTQ+ community and their friends.
Expect relaxed workshops, stimulating conversations, electrifying performances, a zine fair – and a football match! You’ll be accompanied by some of the most exciting artists, writers and performers around.
The event unfolds across our site, with more than one activity happening at one time. Sign-up sheets will be available on the day in reception.
2.30pm | Amphis
Opening Ceremony from bones tan jones (they/them)
tan jones’ soundscapes intuitively emerge from roots in the earth and in their lungs, looping and soaring into psalms and mantras. Let them guide you into the day with a warm and welcoming ceremony. Expect meditation, music, and movement.
2.50pm | Gallery
Welcome from Rosie Cooper (she/her), Wysing Arts Centre Director
3pm to 4pm | Gallery
Diarmuid Hester (he/him) and Noreen Masud (she/her) in Conversation
Dive into a world of queer love, lives, and landscape with Diarmuid Hester author of Nothing Ever Just Disappears, and Noreen Masud whose book A Flat Place has been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction 2024. This informal conversation will touch upon the history of queer places, and the role of ‘utopia’ in the queer cultural imagination.
OR
3pm to 5pm | Open Studio
Crafting Queer Dreamcatchers with Zaki Musa (he/they)
Drop in any time to create symbolic artefacts that encapsulate your aspirations for what a queer utopia could feel like for you.
4pm to 5.30pm | Amphis / Grounds near Amphis (weather dependent)
Workshop with Ama Josephine Budge (she/her)
Join Pleasure Activist Ama Josephine Budge for a breathing and writing workshop. Come prepared to drift off into your own queer imaginings…
OR
3pm to 6pm | Top Field
Kickabout and football match with Babeworld (she/her)
Prepare yourself to take part in the most low-key football match of all time—brought to you by the most passive football fans ever. Spectator, player or hater, we’ve got space for you.
Drop ins available on the day, with the match taking part from 5-6pm!
7pm | Gallery
Open Mic Performances
The night will close Club Urania style, with Open Mic performances from performers and DJs from Cambridge and further afield!
9pm | Gallery
Closing Ceremony from bones tan jones
As the night winds down, brace yourself for fire and a mesmerising closing ceremony by bones tan jones.
10pm | Reception
Pre-booked taxis depart
Throughout the Day
2 to 6pm | Gallery
Diana Puntar
Residency artist Diana Puntar is creating our very own Queer Utopias dance floor! Think lights, disco balls and mushrooms.
2 to 6pm | Window Room
Zine Fair
Explore some of the finest queer publications around.
2 to 6.30pm | Reception
Swamp Fairy Nails (they/them)
Sign up for appointments for Swamp Fairy’s pop-up nail bar. Inspirations for their creations range from aliens to algae bubble baths!
2.40pm to 7pm | The Shack
Tarot Readings with Mister Lucian (it/he)
Have your future unveiled by the incredible Mister Lucian from 2:30-7 PM. Discover what lies ahead. Sign up at the Shack for a 15-minute reading.
2pm to 10pm
A selection of food trucks will be serving vegan bites, drinks and coffee in the courtyard.
ACCESS:
Accessible parking and accessible toilets are available.
A decompression space is available onsite.
The outdoor grounds at Wysing are uneven and have varying surface textures, which may cause some difficulty for unaccompanied wheelchair users.
BIOGRAPHIES:
Babeworld seeks to create a more representative art world through art, grants, and events for those who are marginalised in the arts. With an emphasis on collaboration and co-creation, Babeworld focuses on political and societal identity, specifically disability/access, neurodivergence, sex work and race. Babeworld is Ash Williams (she/her), Ingrid Banerjee Marvin (she/her), Gabriella Davies (she/her) and Caitlin Chase (she/her).
Ama Josephine Budge (she/her) is a British-Ghanaian speculative and art writer, artist, curator and pleasure activist whose praxis navigates intimate explorations of race, art, ecology and feminism. Ama is the recipient of the 2020 Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism and the 20-22 Local, International and Planetary Fictions Fellowship with Frame Contemporary Art Finland and EVA International.
Diarmuid Hester (he/him) is a radical cultural historian, writer and performer based in Cambridge, England. His second book, Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Seven Hidden Histories, follows seven queer artists and writers whose lives and work are inextricable from a sense of place.
bones tan jones (they/them) is a London-based artist and performer whose spiritual practice presents an alternative, queer, ‘optimistic dystopia’. Through pop music, ritual, craft, sculpture, alter-egos, and moving image, tan jones weaves a mycelial web of diverse, eco-conscious narratives that induce audiences to think more sustainably and ethically.
Noreen Masud (she/her) is a writer whose research covers flatness, spivs, puppets, leftovers, earworms, footnotes, rhymes, hymns, surprises, folk songs, colours, superstitions, and more. Part-travelogue through Britain’s flat landscapes, part-memoir, her 2023 book A Flat Place investigates how flat spaces might give shape and succour to complex trauma. A Flat Place has been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction 2024.
Diana Puntar (she/her)is a London based artist and educator originally from New York City. Her practice includes sculpture, installation, drawing, and printmaking. Puntar's ongoing project 'The Milky Way' combines various utopian inventions and contemporary cultural explorations that seek to relieve humanity of suffering - most notably an Orgone Accumulator that combines a disco floor and a mushroom garden into a single installation.
Keep a close eye out on our social media for more programme announcements in the coming weeks!
Queer Utopias is an offshoot of Club Urania, Cambridge’s premiere queer performance and music night. Club Urania is a collaboration between Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge Junction and Diarmuid Hester, Celia Willoughby and Roeland Van Der Heiden.
Spring Celebration, Saturday 23 March
Wysing Arts Centre, 1.30-4.30pm
In-person
Click here to book your ticket.
On Saturday 23rd March - 1.30-4.30pm, Wysing Arts Centre presents: Spring Celebration featuring the chance to view new works by Wysing’s residency artists Elize Charcosset, Rudy Loewe, Feral Practice and Rafał Zajko, brought together for one day only.
The event begins with an exclusive preview in our project space of Feral Practice’s new surround sound, two-screen video installation COMMUNE (comeuntothenest). This work carries us on an intimate journey of human becoming with wood ants, embracing the insects as teachers and spirit guides.
There will then be an opportunity to explore Wysing’s buildings and grounds to see work made by Elize Charcosset, Rudy Loewe and Rafał Zajko’s New Block Commission, Corns and Calluses. This event also celebrates the launch of Zajko’s exclusive new edition, which will be available in our shop.
The day concludes with a conversation from 3-4pm with Feral Practice and Rudy Loewe, chaired by artist and writer El Morgan. This will explore their work at Wysing, and shared research interests, including our entanglement with other species. Please note, this conversation will include references to spiders.
Event Timings
1.30-1.45 - Arrivals at Wysing
2.00 - Viewing work by Feral Practice, Rudy Loewe, Elize Charcosset and Rafał Zajko
3.00 - In-conversation with Feral Practice and Rudy Loewe, chaired by El Morgan
4.00 - Drinks and light refreshments in reception
4.30 - Event ends
Access Information
The in-conversation will be recorded. This will be captioned and available to watch on Wysing Broadcasts at a later date. Please note that this event will not be livestreamed. Please get in touch with us to let us know if there is something you need to participate in this event, by emailing Ruth Dorber on ruth.dorber@wysingartscentre.org.
The venue for the open studio and in-conversation will be wheelchair accessible.
A calm decompression space is available onsite.
Accessible parking and toilets are available.
Free Companion Tickets are available for anyone who needs them.
Please note, works by Elize Charcosset will be on display in Wysing’s Amphis building. To reach this requires moving over uneven ground with varying surface textures which may cause some difficulties for unaccompanied wheelchair users.
Travel recommendations
If you are coming from London, we recommend travelling on the 12.12 service from Kings Cross. We will organise transport from Cambridge Station to and from Wysing, which is in the countryside 10 miles from Cambridge.
Taxis from Cambridge Station will depart at 1.15pm.
Taxis returning from Wysing Arts Centre to Cambridge Station will depart at 4.30pm.
There is free parking available on site for those who are driving; you can find us on Google maps here.
Biographies
Elize Charcosset grew up in Tours (FR), alongside the Loire River. Her drawings, textual pieces and beverages entangle art history, philosophical concepts, and literature to question the modes of appearance and existence of bodies, living or non-living. Her work has been shown in Brussels (Friche, Ateliers Mommen), Sofia (SAW), Bordeaux (CAPC – Musée d'art contemporain), Nyon (Eeeh!), and Périgueux (Dordogne Périgord Cultural Agency).
Rudy Loewe visualises Black histories and social politics through painting, drawing and text. They began a Techne funded practice-based PhD at the University of the Arts London in 2021, critiquing Britain’s role in suppressing Black Power organising in the English-speaking Caribbean, during the 60s and 70s. Loewe is creating paintings and drawings that unravel this history included in recently declassified Foreign & Commonwealth Office records.
Their approach to painting speaks to their background in comics and illustration — combining text, image and sequential narrative.
Fiona MacDonald works with human and nonhuman beings as Feral Practice to expand relationality and cultural connection across species boundaries. Their interdisciplinary work draws on artistic, scientific and subjective knowledge practices and uses augmenting digital technologies together with painting, sculpture, scent, text, ritual and participatory performance to explore diverse aesthetics and foreground distinctive creaturely subjectivities.
El Morgan is an artist and writer who explores our relationship with other animals. This has included serenading a spider, making a diamond from the dead creatures of the River Thames and embracing a giant green sea anemone.
Her book Gossamer Days: Spiders, Humans and Their Threads (Strange Attractor/MIT press, 2016) examines the history of the human uses of spider silk, from gun sights to sticky tunics via acoustic lures and royal underwear. It was chosen by The Guardian as one of their favourite books of the year. Her recent work has been shown with Raven Row, the Serpentine Gallery and Castlefield gallery.
Rafał Zajko is a polish artist based in London, UK. His work deals with issues around the industrial past exploring its environmental impact in relation to working class heritage and queer identities. His sculptural practice incorporates many different materials and processes, including ceramics, ventilation systems, prosthetics, and performance to examine folklore, science fiction and queer technoscience.
His work places an emphasis on industrial materials and the body’s relationship to technology, drawing from his own family history of working in fields and factories in Poland.
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Club Urania
16th February, 7.30pm-Midnight
Cambridge Junction & Online
Cambridge's premier performance and music night for LGBTQ+ people and their friends returns. Star performers, otherworldly open-mic, and heavenly mixes from resident DJs all in an accessible, intimate cabaret setting.
Book your tickets on Cambridge Junction's website by clicking here.
February Line-Up
Belladonna Paloma will present a choose-your-own-adventure poetry reading inhabited by ghosts, faeries, power bottoms, and a pantheon of toilet gods.
Belladonna Paloma is an artist, poet & witch living on a croft in the Shetland Isles, UK. She paints, tattoos, writes poetry, and makes computer games. Her work is into listening to faeries, how divination disturbs linear time, grief rituals and necromancy. Bella makes art as acts of devotion. This devotion has most recently centred on Shetland’s boglands, and wetlands more generally, continuing her interest in the politics and mysticism of what we choose to call ‘waste’.
Tink Flaherty presents an extract from their show Benched, coming to Cambridge Junction in April.
Tink is a loving parent, trained advocate and performance artist. They make bold and provocative work exploring their disability, class, queerness, neurodiversity and Irish traveller heritage. Centring connectivity and radical inclusivity, Tink is deeply committed to creating work that is accessible and engaging, for traditional and non-traditional audiences.
Open Mic Performers
Abbie Loosemore is a queer poet based in Cambridge writing poems mostly about taking celebrities and 80s queer icons on dates and all the women she wants to shag. Abbie has been published by Gobjaw Poetry Collective and Bullshit Lit and regularly reads at open mic poetry nights in Cambridge and South London.
Mistress Mistlehoe returns to Club Urania. Through dance and other performance styles, they aim to create a space where femininity and queerness are blended into one, showing how queerness has no boundaries and the beauty of self expression through pleasure. Drawing inspiration from other performers like Violet Chachki, their performances center around burlesque and the art of seduction.
KIKO’s passion for music was unmistakable from a young age. By 15 years old, KIKO had embraced the classic guitar, gradually shifting his talents towards pop rock. At 17, in his hometown in Spain, he played a pivotal role in managing a choir, showcasing his versatility across various celebrations. With performances on the streets and at open mics, KIKO has honed his craft, engaging audiences with his acoustic performances. We’re thrilled to welcome KIKO to Club Urania where he will bring two heartfelt songs that are a celebration of love in all forms without limitations or prejudice.
Normally, Roeland (co-founder of Club Urania) thrives behind the scenes. But this LGBTQ+ History Month, he’s stepping into the spotlight with a performance that dives into the heart of disco and house music, celebrating its rich legacy shaped by the queer community. From igniting the house music scene in the late ’80s to organising techno, breakbeat, and drumnbass parties in The Netherlands, Roeland has been at the forefront of dance music and (electronic) arts. His journey through the dance community and arts festivals of The Netherlands, all the way to Cambridge (from 2016), showcases his dedication to creating spaces where music and art collide.
Club Urania is a collaboration between Cambridge Junction, Wysing Arts Centre and other queer organisations, artists and promoters: Celia Willoughby, Diarmuid Hester, and Roeland van der Heiden. Club Urania is a not-for-profit event and all money raised will be going towards bringing great artists to Cambridge and enabling us to create these spaces. We’re offering tickets on variable cost basis to remove financial barriers, please do consider paying a higher ticket price if you are able to. If cost is a barrier to accessing the event but you’re still interested in attending, please email Ruth Dorber: ruth.dorber@wysingartscentre.org
Access information:
- All acts will be live captioned, in-person at the venue and on our digital broadcast via Zoom
- At the start of the event, we will show examples of the highest light and sound levels of the night
- The main club space will be loud but a decompression space and chill-out space are available
- All spaces are clearly signposted
- All spaces are wheelchair accessible
SPACE / TIME / LIFE: A Gathering
Friday 9 February
Wysing Arts Centre, 11am-6pm
In-person and livestreamed
FREE
Click here to book your ticket.
Photo: Li Yuan-chia gardening in the grounds of the LYC Museum and Art Gallery, 1970s. Image courtesy of Li Yuan-chia Archive, The University of Manchester Library.
This one-day, lively gathering of artists, academics and curators takes the innovative, generous LYC Museum & Art Gallery (the LYC, operating between 1972–1983 in rural Cumbria) and the extraordinary legacy of its founder, artist / organiser Li Yuan-chia, as inspiration. In a set of converted farm buildings bought by Li Yuan-chia from his friend, the painter Winifred Nicholson, the LYC offered gallery space, a children’s room, a library, performance areas, a printing press, a communal kitchen, and a garden.
SPACE / TIME / LIFE takes place across Wysing’s rural spaces. It includes contributions from a wide range of international practitioners united in their imaginative, provocative approaches to contemporary creative practice, nature, and the complexities of rural life.
The day includes a performance by Aaron Tan, films by Li Yuan-Chia, workshops with Anna Brownsted and Charwei Tsai, a reading by Ama Josephine Budge, conversations with Bella Milroy, The Field, Ysanne Holt, Rosemary Shirley, Hammad Nasar and Rafał Zajko, and a collective meal prepared by Sean Roy Parker. It will also be the first chance to see Corns and Callouses, a new large-scale commission by Rafał Zajko on the front of Wysing’s building, supported by the Art Fund Reimagine grant.
This event is organised in collaboration by Wysing Arts Centre, Kettle’s Yard and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art to coincide with the Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia & Friends exhibition. It is open to anyone interested in exploring these themes and ideas.
The event is primarily in person, with the talks livestreamed with closed captions via Wysing Broadcasts.
Tickets and Transport
You can book tickets for in-person and online attendance by clicking here.
Tickets are free but numbers are limited. Registration essential.
Transport to and from Cambridge train station can be provided. To reserve a space on minibus/taxi ride from Cambridge train station to Wysing (outbound and/or return). Please purchase the necessary ‘Bus’ tickets in addition to your ‘Conference Ticket’.
Further details about exact arrival/departure times to follow.
If you have any access requirements please contact us in advance by emailing events@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk
Programme Timetable
11:00 - Arrival and coffee
11:15 - Welcome and introduction to the day
11:30 - Performance by Aaron Tan, and a screening of selections from Li Yuan-chia’s films (Livestream option)
12:15 - Communal meal, created by Sean Roy Parker. During lunch, we invite guests to share with their neighbour an object or memory connected to the rural.
13:30 - Conversation: Space / Time / Life: What the Rural Offers, with The Field, Bella Milroy and Ysanne Holt. (Livestream with closed captions available)
14:30 - Choice of workshops:
1. Vessel making with Charwei Tsai, in the ceramics studio
2. A reading by Ama Josephine Budge, in the farmhouse
3. Drawing workshop with Anna Brownsted, in the Open Studio
15:30 - Tea and flapjacks
16:00 - Conversation: Beyond landscape: contemporary reflections on rurality, with Rafał Zajko, Dr Rosemary Shirley and Rosie Cooper (Livestream with closed captions available)
17:00 - Closing performance by Aaron Tan (Livestream with closed captions available)
Desktop Studio Visit: Belladonna Paloma
Tuesday 5th December, 5-6pm GMT (online)
Join our latest Desktop Studio Visit with residency artist Belladonna Paloma and Wysing's assistant curator Ruth Dorber.
Book your ticket via Eventbrite by clicking here.
Discussion will focus on Belladonna Paloma's residency at Wysing Arts Centre and artistic influences, ranging from medieval women’s writing to bog bodies, exploring themes of desire and spirituality. The conversation will be followed by an opportunity for questions from the audience.
The studio visit will be streamed live on our Wysing Broadcasts site.
Access Information
This event will be captioned. Please get in touch with us to let us know if there is something you need to be able to participate in this event, by emailing John Bloomfield at john.bloomfield@wysingartscentre.org.
About Belladonna Paloma
Belladonna Paloma is an artist, poet & witch living in Shetland, UK. She paints, tattoos, writes poetry, and makes computer games. Her work is into listening to faeries, how divination disturbs linear time, grief rituals, toilets and necromancy. Bella makes art as acts of devotion. This devotion has recently been centred on Shetland’s boglands, and wetlands more generally, continuing her interest in the politics and mysticism of waste.
Recent projects include: The Flowering Milk of The Boghead, computer game presented as part of the Vital Capacities online exhibition, ‘Gateways’ (current); The Well of Sickness Shimmering, computer game made in collaboration with Uma Breakdown exploring the folklore of holy wells (launching Autumn 2023 at The Overkill Festival, Netherlands); Bog-lore, solo exhibition at Gaada, Shetland (March 2023); Descent to Kilgrimol Rx, solo exhibition at Abingdon Studios, Blackpool (2022).
https://sammypaloma.com (artist website)
About Ruth Dorber
Ruth Dorber is a curator and writer. She studied Curatorial Practice at Glasgow School of Art. She has previously worked with MIMA, Headlands Centre for the Arts, Atlas Arts, The Association for Art History, Understate Projects, and as an artist assistant to Indira Allegra.
Her practice explores fandom and the role of curator as fan. She runs @gushresidency Glasgow, which works with artists to explore themes of love, care and desire.
Club Urania celebrates the end of another season with a night of outrageous, otherworldly performance and music—TIL LATE! Featuring a star-studded line-up of DJs and the weirdest and wildest queer acts on Planet Earth.
Get your tickets here!
-Featuring-
HEADLINE DJ Harry Gay – DJ and full-time gayer from London. Responsible for Queer House Party, Donk If You’re Horny, and the 2013 outbreak of super gonorrhoea, Harry leads a new wave of London dance-floor revolutionaries. Serving a rowdy blend of hard house, filthy bootlegs, techno belters, and dirty donk. And yes, it is his real name.
Bosslady – Cambridge-based producer and underground dance scene DJ. All killers, no fillers: expect a seriously slamming selection of fresh beats, killer drops, cheeky mixes and LOTS of MOOMBAHTON.
Talulah – in a debut Club Urania set, queer DJ Talulah mixes hard drum and global percussive beats. Expect polyrhythmic club music from baile funk, reggaetón, and latin tech.
Performances from:
Zaki Musa – returning to Club Urania after a stupendous, high-flying visit last season! Zaki is a multi-disciplinary creative practitioner and aerialist from Singapore whose work explores concepts of identity, technology, and the art of narrative storytelling. Zaki is an associate artist with Jacksons Lane, Upswing Aerial, and frequent collaborator with the Cocoa Butter Club.
Chiyo – The Prinx of Provocation. Named one of Attitude mag’s 101 Trailblazers of the Year, and fresh off the Royal Court stage after starring in Travis Alabanza’s Sound of the Underground, CHIYO has been known to serve sex, wit, and rage. The first trans man to ever compete for Mr Gay UK—you know already know he’s hotttt!
Orlando – ‘No human being, since the world began, has ever looked more ravishing.’ Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s gender-bending novel, Orlando is the drag king persona of writer, researcher, and presenter Holly James Johnston who has performed at the likes of Tate Britain, the National Gallery, and the V&A. Orlando melds masculinities and femininities together through lip-sync, spoken word, and dance.
Peyvand Sadeghian – An interdisciplinary performer fresh from a UK tour, Peyvand brings a special extract from their award winning solo show, DUAL دوگانه. This cross-medium project delves into Peyvand’s dual citizenship in the UK and Iran, exploring passports & protest. This performance will feature a guest appearance from the Iconoclastic Dictator [of Fun], promising Persian party-time and a passport lottery.
Club Urania is a collaboration between Cambridge Junction, Wysing Arts Centre and other queer organisations, artists and promoters: Celia Willoughby, Diarmuid Hester, and Roeland van der Heiden. Club Urania is a not-for-profit event and all money raised will be going towards bringing great artists to Cambridge and enabling us to create these spaces. We’re offering tickets on variable cost basis to remove financial barriers, please do consider paying a higher ticket price if you are able to. If cost is a barrier to accessing the event but you’re still interested in attending, please email Ruth Dorber: ruth.dorber@wysingartscentre.org
Access information:
- All acts will be live captioned, in-person at the venue and on our digital broadcast via zoom
- The main club space will be loud but a decompression space and chill out space are available
- All spaces are clearly signposted
- All spaces are wheelchair accessible
Club Urania
27 October, 8pm – Midnight
Cambridge Junction & Online
Cambridge’s premier performance and music night for LGBTQ+ people and their friends returns for another season. Star performers, otherworldly open-mic, and heavenly mixes from resident DJs all in an accessible intimate cabaret setting. Get your tickets early as they’re sure to sell out!
Club Urania
-Line-up-
Astro Zenica: ‘Hold your tits and hide your keys, clown mother of The House of Savalon has crash landed on the kerb to explore the gutter outside Cambridge Junction. Who said your toothbrush should be electric anyhow? It never hurt to have glass shoved in my eye. Introducing Astro-Zenica. If she hasn’t been in your arm then one of her sisters will ‘av been. Unless you were one of those arse holes. Who knows what will happen next….’
Jose Funnell: an interdisciplinary artist, dancer and activist based in London. Through live performance, sound and the workshop space, their practice explores the radical potential of embodiment as a site of critical pedagogy, healing and liberation. Their work considers the gaze as material, our embodied relationships to technologies of the gaze, and the experiential dynamics of sharing space, all in relation to structures of power. Both their artistic practice and activist work aims to centre and serve those most alienated by the historic projects of white supremacy and the imperialist capitalist patriarchy. They have facilitated workshops for the Barbican, Cell Project Space, Migration Matters Festival, Prepster, Lovetank, Metro Charity and Live Art Development Agency. They have presented solo work at the ICA (London); Les Urbaines (Lausanne, Switzerland), Steakhouse Live (London), Slap Festival (York), The Albany (London), CLAY (Leeds) and Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski (Warsaw). They have performed internationally with collaborators for institutions including Tate Modern (London), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the Swiss Institute (New York), Museu Serralves (Porto), Bergen Kunsthall (Bergen), Whitechapel Gallery (London), the Serpentine Gallery (London), and the Royal Academy (London).
-DJ-
Rayne Gel: Co-Founder and a resident DJ at Cambridge’s euphoric cult rave Wiggle Room. Rayne’s new album ‘Drink from the river’ is available now on all streaming services.
‘Club Urania offers an alternative lineup of queer performance that’s often mesmerising, sometimes bizarre, and always diverse’ Alex Fice, Cambridge Edition
Club Urania is a collaboration between Cambridge Junction, Wysing Arts Centre and other queer organisations, artists and promoters: Celia Willoughby, Diarmuid Hester, and Roeland van der Heiden. Club Urania is a not-for-profit event and all money raised will be going towards bringing great artists to Cambridge and enabling us to create these spaces. We’re offering tickets on variable cost basis to remove financial barriers, please do consider paying a higher ticket price if you are able to. If cost is a barrier to accessing the event but you’re still interested in attending, please email Ruth Dorber: ruth.dorber@wysingartscentre.org
Access information:
- All acts will be live captioned, in-person at the venue and on our digital broadcast via zoom
- At the start of the event we will show examples of the highest light and sound levels of the night
- The main club space will be loud but a decompression space and chill out space are available
- All spaces are clearly signposted
- All spaces are wheelchair accessible
Wednesday 25 October
Creative Youth Festival
12 - 5pm
For ages 12 – 18
This is your opportunity to get curious, creative and explore different kinds of art at Wysing Arts Centre.
BOOKINGS NOW CLOSED. SOME WALK-INS MAY BE AVAILABLE, BUT THIS IS NOT GUARANTEED.
Join us for Wysing’s Creative Youth Festival, a celebration of creativity in all its forms!
You’re invited to come along and try something new. Meet artists, make friends, and take part in hands on, interactive sessions.
During the day, you can have a go at lino printing to make tarot cards, try out ceramics or have a go at experimental sound workshops in a sound recording studio. You could get creative with makeup, play with products, and ask questions. Fancy having a go at camera less film making? Or maybe take part in games, worldbuilding and storytelling – there is lots to choose from. We’d love for you to come along!
Full Schedule
A full schedule will be added here, approximately 3 weeks prior to the event.
Who is it for?
This festival is for young people aged 12 – 18.
Young people can attend independently, subject to parent/guardian permission, or you can attend with your whole family.
Youth groups and organisations are also welcome to bring groups along.
The Creative Youth Festival has been designed with Wysing’s Creative Youth Council, a group of young people who meet regularly at Wysing to work with artists and develop creative projects. They helped organize this event specially for other young people to come to.
Why should I come?
Do you enjoy being creative? Do you like making things, or trying stuff out just for fun?
Maybe you want to make new friends and meet other people like you, who share your interests.
Or maybe you want to find new ways to develop your creative portfolio, expanding your skills with a new technique, a different material or process?
Would you like to meet and work with professional artists and find out more about what they do?
The youth festival is a space to be playful, it will give you the chance to explore and experience different kinds of art and share your creativity.
Plus, being involved in the arts has been shown to have a positive impact on wellbeing, it enables people to have a sense of belonging and the youth festival at Wysing is a great opportunity to enable you to feel connected with your own creativity, nature, and other people.
Access
A calm, decompression space is available onsite.
Accessible parking and toilets are available.
If you have other access requirements that you would like to check with us before booking, please get in touch with Michaela D’Agati, Young People’s Programme Coordinator at Michaela.dagati@wysingartscentre.org and we will be happy to help.
Health, Safety and Wellbeing
We want to support young people to have the freedom to explore creativity, independently.
We ask the parent/guardian/youth worker to specify if they are happy to allow the young person to explore our rural site freely. To help you make this decision we have provided a risk assessment that specifies what we are doing to ensure the health, safety, and wellbeing of young people at the event.
You can download it here.
FAQs
Do I need to attend for the whole day?
No, you don’t need to attend for the whole day, you can stay for as long as you want.
Do I need to book?
Yes, booking is required.
We are asking people to book via Eventbrite, so we know how many people to expect. Bookings must be completed by/with a responsible adult, to agree to the event details.
Do I need to have any experience?
No, you don't need to have any previous art experience. Come along and try things out!
Do I need to pay for the festival?
No, this event is free! All the sessions are totally free to attend with materials included.
You may want to bring some cash or a card to buy lunch, or you can bring a packed lunch with you.
Do I need to bring lunch?
There will be a food van at the festival for the duration of the day. If you would like to buy food here on the day, please bring some cash or a card.
Alternatively, you can bring along your own packed lunch.
There will be designated areas where people can sit to eat their food, either indoors or outside.
What should I wear?
We recommend wearing clothing you feel comfortable in. Some activities can be messy, like using clay or printing inks, so it is advisable to wear clothes you don’t mind maybe getting a bit messy! Aprons will be provided for messier activities.
We also recommend sturdy, comfortable footwear as you might want to explore Wysing’s outdoor grounds, where the ground can be uneven. Also make sure to bring weather appropriate clothing!
How can I get there?
Free travel is provided from Cambourne, Cambridge and Huntingdon with DBS checked taxi drivers. This must be booked by 9am Monday 23 October. You can select your travel options when you book your ticket.
For Cambridge & Cambourne taxi options: the taxi departs from Cambridge at 11.20am, collecting from Cambourne at 11.45am, arriving at Wysing for 12pm.
For Huntingdon taxi options: the taxi leaves Huntingdon at 11.30pm, arriving at Wysing for 12pm.
All taxis will depart Wysing at 5:15pm and will follow the same route back, arriving Cambourne at 5.30pm, Cambridge and Huntingdon at 6pm. Timings are approximate.
Please note: if you require transport but find it difficult to attend from these locations, please get in touch with us so we can discuss potential travel options to support your attendance.
Wheelchair accessible transport can be provided if needed. If you require wheelchair accessible transport, please tick the box on the Eventbrite ticket checkout page and we will be in touch by email to confirm arrangements with you. Please let us know by 9am Monday 23 at the latest.
I’m a parent/guardian/youth worker. Do I need to attend/stay on site for the event?
We want to encourage young people to have the freedom to explore their own creative interests, in an environment where risks are managed as well as is feasibly possible.
It is the responsibility of the adult (parent/guardian/youth worker) who books to ensure that they understand and agree to the plans put in place by Wysing to minimize potential risks during the event, and to undertake their own assessment of risk for the young person/people they intend on bringing to the event.
A risk assessment is available to support group leaders, parents, and guardians, to support the health and safe welfare of the young people for whom they are booking. Wysing can provide assistance in helping to identify any additional risks posed by any young people they are intending on bringing to the event.
During the event, there will be spaces available with Wi-Fi around Wysing for adults to base themselves if they want to stay on site.
Upon booking parents/guardians/group leaders will be asked to specify whether, a) they are happy for the young person to be independent b) they (the adult) will stay on site while the young person is at the festival or c) they (the adult) will accompany the young person during the event.
For other questions, please email Michaela D’Agati, our Young People’s Programme Coordinator at
Michaela.dagati@wysingartscentre.org
With thanks to our funders for making this event possible: Arts Council, England, The Ragdoll Foundation & the John Armitage Charitable Foundation.
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❗❗Queer Utopias is POSTPONED until Further Notice ❗❗
Due to the rail strikes that have been confirmed for 2 September, we have made the very difficult decision to postpone our Queer Utopias event until further notice.
We want our first Queer Utopias to be a full, lively programme open to LGBTQIA+ people and their friends. The strikes will affect our audiences, participants and scheduling to a degree that will make delivering a successful festival impossible.
The Wysing team stand in solidarity with striking workers. We will work hard to bring you an even better edition of Queer Utopias in the future.
We will be in touch with ticketholders to arrange full refunds and will update everyone with the news as soon as we find a new date.
❗❗Queer Utopias is POSTPONED until Further Notice ❗❗
Due to the rail strikes that have been confirmed for 2 September, we have made the very difficult decision to postpone our Queer Utopias event until further notice.
We want our first Queer Utopias to be a full, lively programme open to LGBTQIA+ people and their friends. The strikes will affect our audiences, participants and scheduling to a degree that will make delivering a successful festival impossible.
The Wysing team stand in solidarity with striking workers. We will work hard to bring you an even better edition of Queer Utopias in the future.
We will be in touch with ticketholders to arrange full refunds and will update everyone with the news as soon as we find a new date.
Wysing Summer Open
Saturday 22 July, 1pm to 6.30pm
Join us onsite for our Wysing Summer Open, a relaxed day-long celebration of our artistic programme with contributions from studio, residency and associate artists, Club Urania favourites, and our Creative Youth Council. Expect performances, new works-in-progress and an opportunity to explore Wysing’s studios.
Ticket options include travel from Cambridge and an informal summer picnic.
To book a ticket via Eventbrite, click here.
Schedule
1pm to 5pm — Open Studios, Presentations and Performances
5pm to 6.30pm — Informal Summer Picnic and Performances
Open Studios
Open Studios is a chance for visitors to see work being made by Wysing studio and associate artists, meet artists onsite and explore Wysing’s rural campus and facilities (including our Ceramics Studio).
Participating artists include:
Aaron Ossia
Bettina Furneé
Beverley Carruthers*
Caroline Wendling*
CJ Mahony
Emanuela Cusin
Emma Smith*
Fiona Curran
Georgina Manning*
Isobel Meredith-Hardy
Josh McCormack
Lawrence Epps*
Nurbanu Asena*
Penny Klein
Robert Foster-Jones
Rohini Kapil
Shawn Stipling
Sophie Hill*
Artist names marked with a * will make a presentation of their work at Wysing, but will not be present at their studio on the day of Wysing Open.
Ruth Angel Edwards and Chloée Maugile — Hyperopia
Ruth Angel Edwards and Chloée
Maugile will preview Hyperopia,
an experimental multi-channel film shot at Wysing in winter 2022. Hyperopia marks Edwards and Maugile’s first major collaboration and features performances from Kierston Wareing (Fish Tank, Top Boy, Eastenders), Anthony Gopaul, Gerhard Sanft and Vanessa Walker.
Creative Youth Council
The Creative Youth Council will be showcasing activity from the last few months. There will be marvelous manifestos on display made with Rachel Sale, as well as their Peculiar Arcana Tarot cards made with Alexi Marshall.
As part of the Summer Open, you are welcome to take part in our lino cutting workshop with Alexi Marshall. This is a relaxed drop-in session from 1 to 4pm. There will also be a big reveal of their current project: a huge collaborative lino print map!
Carol Sorhaindo
View Carol Sorhaindo’s new site-based commission The Golden Crown. Carol Sorhaindo was in residence at Wysing in 2022 as part of The World Reimagined project. Invited to work with Wysing again for the New Block Commission, Carol has created a work which explores plants, textiles and fragmentation.
The Golden Crown is supported by the Art Fund.
Murphy Yum
Murphy Yum is in-residence at Wysing between June and September, spending time researching and developing new work. As part of our Wysing Summer Open, Murphy will present a new work-in-progress responding to Wysing’s agricultural landscape.
Murphy Yum's residency is supported by Knotenpunkt, with additional support from Flat Time House.
Performances
Throughout Wysing Open, expect performances from Club Urania favourites and studio artists Robert Foster-Jones and Penny Klein.
Robert Foster-Jones will present a new participatory performance developed during his time in the British Ceramics Biennale Talent Development Mentoring Programme, June 2022 - January 2023. Inspired by his interest in talismans, the work will act as an invitation for those gathered to consider the potency of objects to act as a link through memory to a point in time and space.
Penny Klein will present a work-in-progress. This theatrical performance will take place in her studio, incorporating large-scale drawing and experiments in storytelling.
Club Urania performers TBA!
Informal Summer Picnic
From 5pm, we will serve a summer picnic of fresh salads, dips and local produce. The picnic will include vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free options.
Dinner will be accompanied by performances as part of Club Urania's programme.
Dinner is priced at £10 per person. Please book ahead via the Eventbrite link here.
Access Information
Accessible parking and toilets are available.
A decompression space is available onsite.
The outdoor grounds at Wysing are uneven and have varying surface textures, which may cause some difficulty for unaccompanied wheelchair users.
If you have other access requirements that you would like to check with us, please get in touch with John Bloomfield at john.bloomfield@wysingartscentre.org and we will be happy to help.
Refreshments
Tea, coffee, soft drinks and cake will be available for visitors with vegan and gluten free options. You are welcome to bring along a picnic for lunch.
From 5pm, an informal summer picnic will be served, priced at £10 per head. Please book ahead via the Eventbrite link here.
Getting to Wysing
We have ample parking on site. Public bus services run hourly from Cambridge (No. 18 from Drummer Street) to Bourn Village Monday to Saturday. Please check bus times before travelling. Wysing is a 15-minute walk from Bourn, but please note this is along a busy road. Find out more about transport information on our website here.
Biographies
Creative Youth Council
The Creative Youth Council (CYC) is designed for and with young people aged 14 to 18. All sessions are free for attendees and take place on the second Saturday of every month, 12 to 4 pm. We invite young people to develop new creative projects and events, give them decision making powers within the organisation, and the chance to roam our woodland and fields, use our ceramics and recording studio and work with artists on lots of different projects.
Club Urania
Club Urania is Cambridge's premier performance and music night for LGBTQ+ people and their friends. Founded as a creative space for the queer crowd, its sell-out shows have hosted the best and bizarrest of queer performance and live art including Figs in Wigs, Harold Offeh, Pink Suits, Wet Mess, Lewis G Burton, and many more. Club Urania is a collaboration between Cambridge Junction, Wysing Arts Centre, and other queer organisations, artists, and promoters: Celia Willoughby, Diarmuid Hester, and Roeland van der Heiden.
Ruth Angel Edwards
Ruth Angel Edwards is a multidisciplinary artist based in London. She works across a wide variety of media, showing works in a range of contexts both inside and outside of traditional art settings. Exhibitions in the UK and internationally include Arcadia Missa, Auto Italia South East, Almanac, Peak, Le Bourgeois, ICA London; Bonington Gallery, Flo Skate Park Nottingham; FACT, Royal Standard, Liverpool; Wysing Arts Centre, As It Stands and Human Resources, Los Angeles; Stadtgallerie Bern, Switzerland; at Postcheckamt with 3hd and at The Wig, Berlin, Mathew Gallery, New York; Lottringer Halle 13 Munich and Denfrei Copenhagen. She has produced radio for NTS, Resonance, Sunflower and Comet Radios in London, Montez Press Radio in New York, Berlin and London, Cashmere radio in Berlin, KChung Radio in Los Angeles and WCBN Ann Arbor in Michigan, US.
Alexi Marshall
Alexi Marshall is a Hastings-based artist who graduated from the Slade School of Art in 2018. She works in print, mosaic and embroidery investigating themes of womanhood, folklore and regeneration. The hand is always present; handmade, hand sewn, hand carved, hand printed, hand bound. The traces it leaves are often visible and embraced. Lines, bodies and worlds fold into each other to create theatrical tableaux, driven by storytelling and otherworldly narrative. Marshall has exhibited her work in three solo exhibitions; mostly recently, ‘Under The Pomegranate Moon’ at Flatland Projects in May of this year. ‘Cursebreakers' at the De La Warr Pavilion in 2021, and ' The Redemption of Delilah' at Public Gallery, 2019, to name a few. She founded and facilitates a community based project, ‘Peculiar Arcana’, centering on fostering connection within groups through tarot and printmaking.
Chloée Maugile
Chloée Maugile is a multidisciplinary artist working broadly in writing & directing actors/ for live performance and film. The work is rooted in surreal narratives that follow voices ranging in age, class & creed depicting the boisterousness of the rise and fall of the everyday.
Graduating from Slade School of Art in 2019, Maugile has written performances V&A, Young Vic, The Block, South London Gallery, Peak Gallery, Wysing Arts Centre & an upcoming show at Primary Gallery 2023. In 2020 Mugile was awarded a grant for a written commission by New York based art publisher Montez Press. In 2021, my artist film; At Dawn Good Manners To Look Good" was shown at the London short film festival. More recently have directed artist films for musicians such as Lolina (relaxinn records) 2022.
Carol Sorhaindo
Carol Sorhaindo is a visual artist. She draws inspiration from nature and landscapes, particularly plants of economic, health, and ethnobotanical interest on the island of Dominica where she currently lives. Her research uses plants as pigments and she extracts fibres from plants for textile dyeing. Having lived in both the UK and Dominica, Carol’s own migration story, entangled transatlantic history and impact on mental wellbeing are of key importance. Carol explores the interplay of dark and light, joy and pain which are brought to light through botanical narratives which speak of migration, trauma, African and indigenous knowledge, resistance and healing.
Murphy Yum
Murphy Yum was born in Seoul and grew up on the outskirts of Seoul in Korea. She currently works by coming and going between France and Korea.
As a visual artist, she works with everyday objects and machines that have a plastic exterior and appear easy to handle, such as household articles with motors and electric cradles. She pays close attention to the relationship between objects and users and seeks to transform them into something new and unexpected by repairing, dismantling, and assembling them in various installations. Through this empirical method, she creates an illusionary space where care and negligence coexist.
Studio Artists
Information on individual studio artists can be found here.
Cambridge Pride X Club Urania
Friday 16th June 7:30pm - 10:30pm
Jesus Green, Cambridge
Club Urania events sell out quickly so get your tickets now (Age 16+). We’re offering tickets on variable cost basis to remove financial barriers, please consider paying a higher ticket price if you can. If cost is a barrier to accessing the event but you’re still interested in attending, please email: urania@cambridgepride.co.uk
Announcing the Cambridge Pride X Club Urania warm-up party!
Expect a night of alternative queer performance and music, including gender-bending drag, angel-voiced singers, side-splitting comedians and music from queer Cambridge DJs that will have you dancing all the way into Saturday’s festivities.
Confirmed local acts include the gorgeous femme vocalist Lovemore, hair-metal drag phenomenon Max Legroom, and Justa Knight, the shapeshifting founder of Cambridge’s trans-led performance night Comfort Zone. Music comes from DJ Provincia, the stunningly coiffed Latin DJ, and DJ Rayne, resident DJ of Cambridge’s number one dance party Wiggle Room. Emcees for the night will be Club Urania’s ethereal space-cadet Celia Willoughby, and in a very special appearance, Azara, the winner of Man-Up 2023 and host of London’s legendary cabaret Duckie.
Headline act for the night is Matty May, a working-class queer performer and associate director of Scottee and Friends. Matty’s 2021 show, ‘If You Love Me This Might Hurt’, an uncensored look at men, queerness, council estates, and suicide was rapturously received by the critics, but sunshine has recently broken through the clouds and his new work is all about queer joy - oodles of which he will be bringing to Jesus Green!
Club Urania is a performance and music night for the arty queer crowd which usually takes place every month at Cambridge Junction. Club Urania is a collaboration between Cambridge Junction, Wysing Arts Centre and other queer organisations, artists and promoters represented by Celia Willoughby, Diarmuid Hester and Roeland van der Heiden.
DISRUPT x Wet Mess
Saturday 27th May, 8.45pm
Cambridge Junction
As part of DISRUPT Festival, 2023-24 residency artist Wet Mess is performing their show, TESTO - work in progress.
DISRUPT:
DISRUPT is back, bringing life-affirming, imagination-firing performance to Cambridge from the UK’s most exciting artists. We promise to thrill you with fists full of live art, performance and dance from early til late.
Featuring work from Samir Kennedy, In Bed With My Brother, Lou Robbin, Katy Dye, ELOINA, Lucy McCormick, Daniel Oliver, Catherine Hoffmann, Nando Messias, Gillian Jane Lees and Adam York Gregory, WET MESS, and Greg Wohead.
Hosted by Midgitte Bardot.
Come join us for one of the UK’s finest art parties, topped off by Club Urania til LATE!
We want to make DISRUPT accessible to everyone so we’re offering tickets on a variable cost basis to remove financial barriers, please consider paying a higher ticket price if you can.
Wet Mess:
Wet Mess is a wet mess, horny for your confusion. Let it all out and guess again at the insecure balding white man/pussy prince/alien baby. Have a lollygag, think about your fantasy flesh suits, call me sweet prince, and remember Roger in a robe. Choose to make some silly campy decisions, with all the hairy thems and dykey men. Mainly thinking about cunnilingus cunni cunni lingus but also being more unknown than known. All I really wanna do is strip for the stripper and drive her home with the dogs.
Wet Mess is a current artist in residence at Wysing Arts Centre.
Testo - Work in Progress:
TESTO is a show about sitting in the confusion of gender and social conformity. Trying to be more unknown than known, it will use drag as a tool to present different versions of the self, blurring lines between reality & performance.
TESTO is supported by Wysing Arts Centre, Battersea Arts Centre and Cambridge Junction.
Club Urania x DISRUPT
Saturday 27th May, 10.30pm-3.00am
Online and at Cambridge Junction
Club Urania celebrates the end of another sold-out season with a night of outrageous, otherworldly performance and music—TILL LATE! Featuring a star-studded line-up of DJs and the wildest acts on Planet Earth, brought to you by Cambridge’s premier club for LGBTQ+ people and friends. Part of DISRUPT Festival, anyone with Weekend or Saturday tickets to DISRUPT will get entry to Club Urania.
Club Urania celebrates the end of another sold-out season with a night of outrageous, otherworldly performance and music—TILL LATE! Featuring a star-studded line-up of DJs and the wildest acts on Planet Earth, brought to you by Cambridge’s premier club for LGBTQ+ people and friends.
Club Urania, in collaboration with Cambridge Junction and Wysing Arts Centre, are delighted to present:
Geegee – pole-dancer, aerialist, fire-dancer, and high-flying circus performer. Principal dancer for Ella Mesma company and director of femme-forward pieces like free femme and ‘The Black Femme Priority’.
Dairy King – providing curdled nourishment to calcium deficient queers since 2022. His produce has previously been enjoyed at London Pride, Fierce Festival, the National Theatre’s River Stage, and the final of Man Up London.
Lucia Blayke – returning after a legendary set in 2022 that caused an outbreak of FOMO in the Cambridge area. We welcome back the superstar DJ, model, and founder of Trans Pride London to pound us till late with her pop bangers.
Bosslady – Cambridge-based producer and underground dance scene DJ. All killers, no fillers: expect a seriously slamming selection of fresh beats, killer drops, cheeky mixes and LOTS of MOOMBAHTON.
Lasana Shabazz – an interdisciplinary performance artist whose work delves deep into identity politics, deconstructing ideas of race, sexuality, class and gender, queering the norm of what is considered acceptable by mainstream and popular culture. Their work incorporates theatre, dance, spoken word, visual art, music production, make up, costume design and construction. They work in art galleries, theatres, arts festivals, museums, educational institutions, black, queer and QTIPOC (queer trans intersex people of colour) art spaces nationally and internationally.
More performances and DJs to be announced.
Access information:
- All acts will be live captioned, in-person at the venue and on our digital broadcast via zoom
- At the start of the event we will show examples of the highest light and sound levels of the night
- The main club space will be loud but a decompression space and chill out space are available
- All spaces are clearly signposted
- All spaces are wheelchair accessible
Our 2022 season featured the best of contemporary queer performance including the likes of Whiskey Chow, Catherine Hoffman, Harold Offeh, Pink Suits, Symoné, Wet Mess, Rebekah Ubuntu, Nando Messias, Jake Wood, Nat Raha, Duane Nasis, Cabbage the Clown, Vidya Patel and Zaki Musa.
Club Urania is a collaboration between Cambridge Junction, Wysing Arts Centre, Roeland van der Heiden, Diarmuid Hester, and Celia Willoughby.
Club Urania is a not-for-profit event and all money raised will be going towards bringing great artists to Cambridge and enabling us to create these spaces. We’re offering tickets on variable cost basis to remove financial barriers, please do consider paying a higher ticket price if you are able to. If cost is a barrier to accessing the event but you’re still interested in attending, please email Jess Webber on: jess.webber@junction.co.uk
This unique Club Urania is a collaboration with brilliant disability arts festival I’m Here, Where Are You? Bringing you a night of incredible art from disabled creatives.
Our April line up features:
Bibi June - a poet and performance maker whose work focuses on queerness, climate justice and post-apocalyptic stories. They write and co-produce award-winning queer horror podcast ‘Folxlore’, and were runner-up for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award 2022 for their fourth pamphlet, ‘Kinsey Scale for the Emotionally Fragile Queer.
Ebony Rose Dark - an all singing, all dancing, lip syncing, story telling, miming VIP, visually impaired cabaret performance artist! Ebony Rose Dark is known for her performances around disability, ableism, racism, and relationships with the LGBTQ+ community at The Royal Vauxhall Tavern's Bar Wotever.
Vali Mahlouji - an art curator. He is founder of Archeology of the Final Decade (AOTFD), a non-profit research and cultural platform that recovers traumatised, violated, erased, dispossessed and obscured histories. His projects have been exposing genocidal or repressive social policies through cultural research over the last decade and a half.
We will also be joined by a host of amazing open mic performers, including the fantastic Man Up finalist - Mr IMP! The night will end with a set from DJ Bosslady.
Club Urania is committed to reducing barriers to access, providing pay-what-you-feel tickets, a decompression space in the venue, and live-captioning. This season is expected to sell out so get your tickets early.
Our 2022 season featured the best of contemporary queer performance including the likes of Whiskey Chow, Catherine Hoffman, Harold Offeh, Pink Suits, Symoné, Wet Mess, Rebekah Ubuntu, Nando Messias, Jake Wood, Nat Raha, Duane Nasis, Cabbage the Clown, Vidya Patel and Zaki Musa.
Club Urania is a collaboration between Cambridge Junction, Wysing Arts Centre, Roeland van der Heiden, Diarmuid Hester, and Celia Willoughby.
Access:
All events will be live captioned and live streamed and a decompression space will be available. Junction's J3 Venue and decompression space are fully wheelchair accessible.
Club Urania is back!
Our March line up features Wet Mess, Frankie Thompson & Liv Ello. DJ's to be announced soon!
Club Urania is committed to reducing barriers to access, providing pay-what-you-feel tickets, a decompression space in the venue, and live-captioning. This season is expected to sell out so get your tickets early.
Our 2022 season featured the best of contemporary queer performance including the likes of Whiskey Chow, Catherine Hoffman, Harold Offeh, Pink Suits, Symoné, Wet Mess, Rebekah Ubuntu, Nando Messias, Jake Wood, Nat Raha, Duane Nasis, Cabbage the Clown, Vidya Patel and Zaki Musa.
Club Urania is a collaboration between Cambridge Junction, Wysing Arts Centre, Roeland van der Heiden, Diarmuid Hester, and Celia Willoughby.
Featuring:
Wet Mess is a wet mess, horny for your confusion. Let it all out and guess again at the insecure balding white man/pussy prince/alien baby. Have a lollygag, think about your fantasy flesh suits, call me sweet prince, and remember Roger in a robe. Choose to make some silly campy decisions, with all the hairy thems and dykey men. Mainly thinking about cunnilingus cunni cunni lingus but also being more unknown than known. All I really wanna do is strip for the stripper and drive her home with the dogs.
Access:
All events will be live captioned and live streamed and a decompression space will be available. Junction's J3 Venue and decompression space are fully wheelchair accessible.
One Day I Will Feel My Power
Wednesday 12 April, 6.30pm (online)
One Day I Will Feel My Power is an event held by the ICA and streamed online by Wysing Arts Centre, as part of Things I Have Learned The Hard Way: a multi-site celebration of the life and work of Lizzy Rose (1988 – 2022) taking place from Fri 31 March – Sun 23 April 2023.
View the online stream here.
For One Day I Will Feel My Power, two of Lizzy’s video works My Heart Will Go On and Sick, blue sea will be screened alongside video works and readings from Leah Clements, RA Walden, Abi Palmer, Benedict Drew, Alice Hattrick, and Carolyn Lazard: artists who are friends and peers of Lizzy’s, many of whom formed her crip artist community. Themes of chronic illness, neurodivergence and disability recur across the work shown, nestled in a wider context of experimentation with aesthetics, form, and humour that Lizzy’s work is part of.
The event is curated by Leah Clements who was in residence with Lizzy at Wysing Arts Centre in 2018, which led to Access Docs For Artists: an online resource to help disabled art workers make and use ‘Access Docs’ – documents that outline a person’s access needs. In the lead-up to the Wysing residency, Clements also worked with Lizzy and Alice on the event On Cripping, and this event will be hosted by these two organisations to continue their relationship with Lizzy’s work.
Audiences are invited to access the event by attending in person at the ICA Cinema, or online, via Wysing Broadcasts. The event will be BSL interpreted and it will be available to view online, via Wysing Broadcasts for 3 months after the event.
Leah Clements will also give a live reading of Lizzy’s text ‘Exposing Trauma: The Post-Surgery Selfie’, published in the book Fifty reflections on women, power and identity in 2022.
Abi Palmer Invents the Weather is part of The Artangel Collection, an initiative to bring outstanding film and video works, commissioned and produced by Artangel, to galleries and museums across the UK. The Artangel Collection has been developed in partnership with Tate, is generously supported by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and The Foyle Foundation and uses public funding from Arts Council England.
Access Information
This event will be captioned and BSL interpreted. Please get in touch with us to let us know if there is something you need to be able to participate in this event, by emailing John Eng Kiet Bloomfield at john.bloomfield@wysingartscentre.org
R A Walden is an artist whose work questions contemporary western society’s relationship with care, tenderness and fragility in relation to our bodies, our communities and our failing ecosystems. They explore this through lenses of crip theory, queer theory, sci-fi, speculative fiction and disobedient archives. Walden is interested in our ability and failure to navigate physicality, interdependency and vulnerability both communally and individually. Their practice spans text, sculpture, printed matter, performance and video, all of which is undertaken with a socially engaged and research-led working methodology. They have shown work nationally and internationally including at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg and National Gallery of Australia. Their upcoming solo exhibition at Storm King will open in New York in 2023.
rawalden.com
Leah Clements is an artist from and based in East London whose practice spans film, photography, performance, writing, installation and other media. Her work is concerned with the relationship between psychological, emotional, and physical states, often through personal accounts of unusual or hard-to-articulate experiences. Her practice also focuses on sickness/cripness/disability in art, in critical and practical ways. Recent projects include her solo shows INSOMNIA at South Kiosk (2022–23), and The Siren of the Deep at Eastside Projects (2021), and artist-in-residence at Serpentine Galleries (2020–21). Upcoming projects include a solo show at PEER and artwork commissioned by Bethlem for a new hospital. She has been in residence and exhibited nationally and internationally, including a screening in Piccadilly Circus and other public squares in Melbourne, Seoul and Berlin presented by CIRCA & Dazed, and exhibitions and residencies at: Haus N Athen, Athens; Eastside Projects, Birmingham; Serpentine Galleries, London; Somerset House Studios, London; The Artists’ Association Gallery, Vilnius; Rupert, Vilnius; La Casa Encendida, Madrid; Science Gallery London; Baltic39, Newcastle; the ICA, London; Wellcome Collection, London; National Gallery of Art, Vilnius; Matèria, Palermo; Vermilion Sands, Copenhagen; Space, London; Jupiter Woods, London; Chisenhale Gallery, London; and Vitrine, London. In March 2019 Leah launched Access Docs for Artists: an online resource made in collaboration with Lizzy Rose and Alice Hattrick to help disabled artists create and use access documents.
leahclements.com
Abi Palmer is an artist, writer and filmmaker exploring the relationship between linguistic and physical communication. Key work includes Crip Casino – an interactive gambling arcade parodying the wellness industry and institutionalised spaces, shown at Tate Modern, Somerset House and Wellcome Collection (2018–20) – and Sanatorium – a fragmented memoir that jumps between a luxury thermal pool and a blue inflatable bathtub (Penned in the Margins, 2020). Personal essays and articles have been published by The Guardian, Vice and Wellcome Collection Stories. In 2016 she won a Saboteur Award for her multisensory poetry installation Alchemy. In 2020 she was awarded an Artangel Thinking Time award to address the pandemic. She was awarded a Paul Hamlyn Award For Artists in 2021.
abipalmer.com
Benedict Drew is an artist and musician who works across video, sculpture, drawing, painting, and music. He creates large-scale installations, often concerned with ecstatic responses to socio-political anxiety. Solo exhibitions include The Trickle-Down Syndrome at Whitechapel Gallery, London; KAPUT at QUAD, Derby; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; and THE ANTI ECSTATIC MACHINES and Heads May Roll at Matt’s Gallery, London. Drew’s work has been exhibited internationally including at: Adelaide Festival, Australia; Lofoten International Arts Festival, Norway; and in Hayward Touring exhibitions British Art Show 8 and Shonky: The Aesthetics of Awkwardness. He has been commissioned to create videoworks for public spaces including Art on the Underground, London and Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea. Drew was a producer at the cultural charity London Musicians Collective, has released several records on labels including Mana Records and Kaleidoscope, and launched his own label, Thanet Tape Centre, in May 2020 and regularly makes work for radio.
benedictdrew.com
Alice Hattrick is a writer based in London. Their recent work has been included in HEALTH: Documents of Contemporary Art, edited by Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz (Whitechapel/MIT, 2020) and Mine Searching Yours (Forma, 2020). Their essays, interviews and criticism have been published by The White Review, Frieze, Art Review and Rhizome among other publications, and included in events at institutions such as the ICA (On Cripping), Raven Row (Sick Time is Resist Time), the Barbican (New Suns Festival) and the Goldsmiths Centre of Feminist Research. Alice is also the co-producer of Access Docs for Artists, a resource for disabled and/or chronically ill artists, curators and writers, made in collaboration with artists Leah Clements and Lizzy Rose, for which they were named on The Innovator’s List for 2020 (Artnet Intelligence Report). Alice studied at the Royal College of Art and the Courtauld Institute of Art, and teaches criticism at the London College of Fashion. Alice’s non-fiction book on chronic illness, intimacy and mother-daughter relationships, Ill Feelings, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in August 2021.
cargocollective.com/alicehattrick
Carolyn Lazard is an artist and writer based in the US whose work depicts the experience of autoimmunity in film, visual art and composition. Working across disciplines and mediums, Lazard explores the political and aesthetic dimensions of care and dependency. Their practice centres disability as a site of abundance and collectivity, questioning dominant ways of art-making and working that value efficiency and ability over life itself. They work across video, sound, sculpture and performance. Lazard has participated in exhibitions at several institutions including the Walker Art Center, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Palais de Tokyo, Museum für Moderne Kunst, and the New Museum. Lazard was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial and is a recipient of the 2021 United States Artist Fellowship. Their writing has been published in the Brooklyn Rail, Mousse Magazine, and Triple Canopy. In 2019, Lazard published Accessibility in the Arts: A Promise and a Practice, an open-source accessibility guide for small-scale arts organisations.
carolynlazard.com
Onsite
Join us for a special in-conversation event with artist Delaine Le Bas, and curator Stephen Ellcock.
To register for this free event on Eventbrite, please click here. Tickets include the option of transport from Cambridge, available as an £8 standard price or as pay-what-you-can.
Throughout February and March, Delaine Le Bas has been in residence at Wysing Arts Centre creating a new body of work. You are invited to join us for a studio tour, led by the artist, which offers visitors a unique opportunity to step into a highly personal, large-scale installation assembled from a mix of diary entries, literary practice, and performance painting. By sharing time in the studio, Le Bas welcomes visitors to become part of her work, collectively questioning how you can make art in times of chaos and examining our past, present, and future through her unique blend of texts, signs, and symbols.
The tour will be followed by an in-conversation event with acclaimed writer and curator Stephen Ellcock, a renowned image-collector. Stephen Ellcock has been working closely with Delaine Le Bas, and this event will explore their shared research interests and inspirations - from mythology and symbolism to landscape and artistic rebellion. Following this there will be an opportunity for questions from the audience.
Event Timings
13.45- Arrivals at Wysing, open studio with Delaine Le Bas, time for the public to explore Wysing’s grounds
2.30- In-conversation with Delaine Le Bas and Stephen Ellcock
4.00 - Drinks in reception of Wysing Art Centre
4.30 - Event ends
Access Information
The in-conversation will be recorded, this will be captioned and will be available to watch on Wysing Broadcasting at a later date. Please note it will not be livestreamed. Please get in touch with us to let us know if there is something you need to be able to participate in this event, by emailing Ruth Dorber on ruth.dorber@wysingartscentre.org.
The venue for the open studio and in-conversation will be wheelchair accessible.
A calm decompression space is available onsite.
Accessible parking and toilets are available.
Free Companion Tickets are available for anyone who needs them.
Biographies
Delaine Le Bas is a cross disciplinary artist creating installations, performances, photography and films. She is one of sixteen artists who are part of Paradise Lost, The First Roma Pavilion of the Venice Biennale 2007. Her work explores themes of identity, gender and belonging.
Her works are included in Venice Biennale 2007, Prague Biennale 2005 & 2007, Gwangju Biennale 2012, Zacheta National Gallery Of Art 2013, MWW Wroclaw Contemporary Art Museum 2014, The Third Edition Of The Project Biennial Of Contemporary Art D-O Ark Underground Bosnia and Herzegovinia 2015, Off Biennale Budapest 2015, Goteborg International Biennial For Contemporary Art Extended.
For more information on Delaine Le Bas residency with Wysing, please click here.
Stephen Ellcock is a London-based online collector and curator of images, author, researcher and former musician and bookseller. He is creating an ever-expanding, virtual museum on Facebook and Instagram – the ultimate cabinet of curiosities – which so far has attracted more than 600k followers and increasing media attention, not all of which is unwelcome.
He is the author of All Good Things (September Publishing, 2019), The Book of Change (September Publishing / Princeton Architectural Press, 2021), Jeux de mains, with Cécile Poimboeuf-Koizumi (Chose Commune, 2021), England On Fire, with Mat Osman (Watkins 2022), The Cosmic Dance (Thames & Hudson 2022).
His next book, Underworlds will be published worldwide by Thames & Hudson in October 2023.
Image Credits: Self portrait by Dr. S. D. Jouhar, Self Shadowgram, 1958
Delaine Le Bas in their studio, Wysing Arts Centre, 2023
What’s on in Cambridge
Make a day of it and view other exhibitions around Cambridge.
Kettle’s Yard is currently showing Lucie Rie: The Adventure of Pottery. More information here.
The New Hall Art Collection have launched Radium Dreams, a collaboration between award-winning poet Sue Hubbard and internationally acclaimed artist Eileen Cooper. More information here.
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Desktop Studio Visit: Brooke Palmieri
Wednesday 1 March, 5pm GMT (online)
Join our latest Desktop Studio Visit with residency artist Brooke Palmieri and Wysing's assistant curator Ruth Dorber on Wednesday 1 March, 5pm GMT (online).
Discussion will focus on Brooke Palmieri's residency at Wysing Arts Centre and their wider artistic practice. The in-conversation will be followed by an opportunity for questions from the audience.
The studio visit will be streamed live on our Wysing Broadcasts site.
Access Information
This event will be captioned. Please get in touch with us to let us know if there is something you need to be able to participate in this event, by emailing Elizabeth Brown at lizzie.brown@wysingartscentre.org.
About Brooke Palmieri
Brooke Palmieri is an artist, writer, and educator working at the intersection of memory, history, and gender-bending alternate realities. In 2018 they founded CAMP BOOKS (http://campbooks.biz), a platform and travelling bookshop promoting access to queer history through prints and zines; workshops and installations; and the collaborative construction of archives related to LGBTQIA+ activism and the long history of gender non-conformity. Their writing has recently been featured in Louche Magazine and anthologies by Pilot Press, and their work has been exhibited at Gaada, the Glasgow Women’s Library, The Bower, and Chelsea Space.
About Ruth Dorber
Ruth Dorber is a curator and writer. She studied Curatorial Practice at Glasgow School of Art. She has previously worked with MIMA, Headlands Centre for the Arts, Atlas Arts, The Association for Art History, Understate Projects, and as an artist assistant to Indira Allegra.
Her practice explores fandom and the role of curator as fan. She runs @gushresidency Glasgow, which works with artists to explore themes of love, care and desire.
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Desktop Studio Visit: Eve Stainton
Monday 13th February, 5pm GMT (online)
Join our latest Desktop Studio Visit with residency artist Eve Stainton and Ruth Dorber, Assistant Curator at Wysing Arts Centre, on 13 February, 5pm (online).
Discussion will focus on Eve Stainton's recent residency at Wysing Arts Centre as well as their wider artistic influences. The in-conversation will be followed by an opportunity for questions from the audience. The studio visit will be streamed live on our Wysing Broadcasts site.
Access Information
This event will be captioned. Please get in touch with us to let us know if there is something you need to be able to participate in this event, by emailing Elizabeth Brown at lizzie.brown@wysingartscentre.org.
About Eve Stainton
Eve Stainton is an artist interested in the politics of uncodeable queer presence and its intersections with race and class. They create multidisciplinary performance worlds that hold movement practices, digital collage and welded steel, and other invisible forces like waves, imagination and drama. These forms work together to create live ecologies that are discordant, multilayered and psychedelic. Stainton is interested in the production of conflicting states and textures to unravel essentialist thinking, with the intent to create more expansive understandings of the lesbian identity, non-gender/variance, and perceptions of the ‘real’.
During their time at Wysing, Stainton has been researching how movement, live welding and live sound can come together choreographically under a new performance project, Impact Driver. Impact Driver is interested in methodologies for constructing thriller-like suspense. How suspense can be sustained as the main event in the absence of a climax or traditional resolve. Haunting, time stretching, absurdist. Foregrounding the gender non-conforming masc experience. Involving a cast of performers from different creative backgrounds Tink Flaherty, Leisha Thomas, Imani Mason Jordan, Romeo Roxman Gat and Eve Stainton, with sound world contributions from Mica Levi and Leisha Thomas.
About Ruth Dorber
Ruth Dorber is a curator and writer. She studied Curatorial Practice at Glasgow School of Art. She has previously worked with MIMA, Headlands Centre for the Arts, Atlas Arts, The Association for Art History, Understate Projects, and as an artist assistant to Indira Allegra.
Her practice explores fandom and the role of curator as fan. She runs @gushresidency Glasgow, which works with artists to explore themes of love, care and desire.
Club Urania
Friday 17th February 8pm-midnight
Online and at Cambridge Junction
Cambridge’s premium performance and music night for LGBTQ+ people and their allies returns for its 2023 season.
The full line-up will be released soon but book early to ensure disappointment.
Club Urania is committed to reducing barriers to access, providing pay-what-you-feel tickets, a decompression space in the venue, and live-captioning. This season is expected to sell out so get your tickets early.
Our 2022 season featured the best of contemporary queer performance including the likes of Whiskey Chow, Catherine Hoffman, Harold Offeh, Pink Suits, Symoné, Wet Mess, Rebekah Ubuntu, Nando Messias, Jake Wood, Nat Raha, Duane Nasis, Cabbage the Clown, Vidya Patel and Zaki Musa.
Club Urania is a collaboration between Cambridge Junction, Wysing Arts Centre, Roeland van der Heiden, Diarmuid Hester, and Celia Willoughby.
Featuring:
Katie Greenall (she/they) is a facilitator, theatre maker & writer living in London. She makes autobiographical work, that often explores fatness, queerness and community, alongside making work with Young People and Communities across London. Previously, Katie performed her award-winning autobiographical solo show, FATTY FAT FAT & is currently developing her new show BLUBBER.
More to be announced soon
Access:
All events will be live captioned and live streamed and a decompression space will be available. Junction's J3 Venue and decompression space are fully wheelchair accessible.
A Language of Holes is a project co-developed by Wysing Arts Centre and Sarah Hayden, as part of Voices in the Gallery, with support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Together, we are developing innovative and creative approaches to making live art and performance events maximally (and excitingly) accessible.
This collaboration comprises three strands, each designed to extend different elements of the Wysing programme: The Art of Captioning, Club Urania, and the Sensory Support Programme.
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Nat Raha at Club Urania
16 September 2022, 8pm
Cambridge Junction
Re-entering the atmosphere after a sold out first season, Club Urania is back!
For the first Club Urania in the next season, Wysing Arts Centre, in conjunction with A Language of Holes, are pleased to present Nat Raha.
Nat Raha will be presenting a new work-in-progress with a particular emphasis on centring captioning and access in the development of the work. This work-in-progress is commissioned by Wysing in partnership with Sarah Hayden and AHRC funded A Language of Holes, a project that explores innovative approaches to captioning in live contexts.
This event will have live CART captioned by Bo from 121 Captions and BSL Interpretation from Sue MacLaine.
There is also the option to watch the event via live stream with the same access provisions.
Club Urania is Cambridge’s premium performance and music night for LGBTQ+ people and allies. Bringing you a constellation of star performers, otherworldly open-mic, and heavenly mixes from resident DJs.
For more information about this event please click here.
For tickets to see Club Urania at Cambridge Junction, please click here.
Sensory Support Programme with Hannah Kemp-Welch
September-October 2022
Wysing Arts Centre
Returning after a successful project in Spring 2022, a group of young people from the Cambridge Sensory Support Unit join us again for a series of workshops and events led by social practice sound artist Hannah Kemp-Welch.
The young people, who all experience different hearing profiles will undertake a project to build their own radio from scratch. They will learn how to make an electrical circuit that picks up the radio waves in the air around us, and design and decorate the inventions to reimagine what a radio can be.
This project will take place over 4 sessions, plus a final celebration for the young people and their friends and families, sharing the results of the workshops and sound experiments.
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Temporalities of Access
5 November 2022, 12-5.30pm
Online
Temporalities of Access is a partnership event between A Language of Holes and British Art Network funded project, The Art of Captioning. Both projects are supported by Wysing Arts Centre and this event, on Saturday 5 November will bring together the culmination of a year’s research into the creative possibilities of captioning, along with the necessity of centering access and accessibility arts contexts.
Speakers to be announced soon.
About Sarah Hayden
Voices in the Gallery is a research, writing and curatorial project about how voice, text and access intersect in contemporary art. Funded by the AHRC, Voices in the Gallery is led by Sarah Hayden at the University of Southampton. Sarah’s work on Voices in the Gallery also encompasses ongoing collaborations with John Hansard Gallery (Liza Sylvestre | asweetsea), Nottingham Contemporary (Caption-Conscious Ecology) and LUX (slow emergency siren, ongoing)
A Language of Holes takes its title from the Raymond Antrobus poem ‘Dear Hearing World’ (The Perseverance, 2021)
Club Urania
11 November, 10pm – 3am
Cambridge Junction & Online
An otherworldly night for queers and their allies
Presented by Cambridge Junction x Wysing Arts Centre Club, Urania is once again taking over Junction's J1 club space! After another sold-out season of cabaret shows, Cambridge’s star-studded night for the arty queer crowd goes supernova. Join us on the dancefloor – allies welcome – for the best and bizarrest of LGBTQ+ performance and music. Get your tickets early as the night is likely to sell out!
Find out more and book your tickets on Junction's website by clicking here.
Line-up
Headline DJ
Lewis G Burton
We are thrilled to welcome Lewis G Burton to Cambridge and Club Urania. An internationally renowned DJ, performance artist, curator and activist, Lewis has been at the forefront of London’s underground queer scene for a decade. They are the founder of the infamous INFERNO, a queer-techno-rave-cum-art-platform that champions trans+, non-binary and femme identifying individuals. With support from queer Cambridge DJs
Otherworldly acts
Duane Nasis
Vogue and movement artist from queer Asian cabaret collective, The Bitten Peach
Cabbage the Clown
Top of the Slops 2022 winner does tragicomic clown burlesque
Plus more star performers TBA
Club Urania is a collaboration between Cambridge Junction, Wysing Arts Centre and other queer organisations, artists and promoters: Celia Willoughby, Diarmuid Hester, and Roeland van der Heiden. Club Urania is a not-for-profit event and all money raised will be going towards bringing great artists to Cambridge and enabling us to create these spaces. We’re offering tickets on variable cost basis to remove financial barriers, please do consider paying a higher ticket price if you are able to. If cost is a barrier to accessing the event but you’re still interested in attending, please email Ema Boswood on: ema.boswood@junction.co.uk
Access information:
- All acts will be live captioned, in-person at the venue and on our digital broadcast via zoom
- At the start of the event we will show examples of the highest light and sound levels of the night
- The main club space will be loud but a decompression space and chill out space are available
- All spaces are clearly signposted
- All spaces are wheelchair accessible
Temporalities of Access
Presented by The Art of Captioning and A Language of Holes
Saturday 5 November, 12-5.30pm
Online
Join us for Temporalities of Access: an afternoon-long exploration of access in relation to time, liveness, literary arts and time-based media.
Welcome and introductions
12pm (15 mins)
Welcome from Wysing Arts Centre and introduction to Temporalities of Access
Locked World, a video essay by Sandra Alland.
12.15pm (1hr, 15mins)
Sandra will share film clips from their recent Locked World video essay, and join us live for a talk and short Q&A.
Break
1.30pm (30 mins)
In-conversation with Kitty Anderson, Annie Crabtree and Tarik Elmoutawakil
2pm (1hr, 30 mins)
In-conversation with Tarik Elmoutawakil of Marlborough Productions and Kitty Anderson & Annie Crabtree of LUX Scotland, discussing the longer-term thinking and commitments needed from institutions and organisations in order to work towards the embedding of access.
Break
3.30pm (30 mins)
Screening and In-Conversation with Liza Sylvestre
4pm (1hr, 15 mins)
Liza will join us live for an In-Conversation about the centrality of captioning in her practice. We’ll screen clips from new and recent work and discuss Liza’s Captioned series.
The event will be hosted via Zoom with opportunities to ask questions and feed into the conversation. We support Crip Time involvement in the days event and encourage visitors to join in the call at any point throughout the day. There will be one zoom link for the afternoon.
Some aspects of the day's event will be recorded and shared online after the event has ended.
Temporalities of Access is a partnership event between A Language of Holes and British Art Network funded project, The Art of Captioning.
For more information and to book your free ticket, please click here.
Access Information
This event will take place on Zoom webinar, you will be sent a link via Eventbrite.
This event will be live CART captioned by 121 Captions and BSL interpreted.
There will also be ASL onscreen for Liza Sylvestre’s screening and in-conversation.
The event will start at 12pm and end at 5.30pm.
Each session is between 1hr –1hr 30 mins.
There will be 2 half-hour breaks throughout the afternoon.
Contributors will provide a brief visual description of themselves before starting.
The event will be introduced by Hannah Wallis (Wysing Arts Centre) and Sarah Hayden (Voices in the Gallery).
If you have any questions or further access requirements, please email Hannah on hannah.wallis@wysingartscentre.org.
About the contributors
Sandra Alland
Sandra Alland is a Glasgow-based writer and artist who experiments with form and integrated access. San co-edited Stairs and Whispers: Deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back, and was commissioned with Etzali Hernández to co-create Sore Loser, a multimedia zine on queer disabled grief. www.blissfultimes.ca.
Kitty Anderson
Kitty Anderson is Director of LUX Scotland, an organisation based in Glasgow that supports, develops and promotes artists’ moving image practices across Scotland. She was previously Curator at The Common Guild; Associate Director of The Modern Institute; and Associate Curator of Frieze Projects. Kitty is a regular visiting lecturer at Glasgow School of Art and has given talks and presentations at galleries and museums around the UK.
Annie Crabtree
Annie Crabtree is Project Manager at LUX Scotland, an organisation based in Glasgow that supports, develops and promotes artists’ moving image practices across Scotland. They are an artist and researcher based in Glasgow. Annie has done residencies at Hospitalfield and Cove Park, including the Experimental Film and Moving Image Residency in 2019, and has screened work as part of Glasgow International and Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival. Annie is currently working on a new film supported by Creative Scotland. Annie is dedicated to access for artists’ moving image, with a particular interest in embedding creative captioning and audio description as part of the creative process.
Tarik Elmoutawakil
Tarik Elmoutawakil is an artist, programmer and creative producer as well as Founder and Artistic Director at Marlborough Productions in Brighton, the UK’s only performing arts orgnasiation dedicated to intersectional queer arts. His current public work is entitled 'Brownton Abbey', an evolving Afro-Futures Performance Party that centres disabled QTIPOC (queer, trans and intersex People of Colour). Brownton Abbey reclaims and reinterprets QTIPOC spirituality and ritual, channelling it into an out-of-this-world, accessible party. Tarik is plugged into a network of disabled qtipoc artivists across the globe, contributing to an ongoing movement to reshape access and leadership. A spirited public speaker, Tarik uses his joyous brand of activism wherever he can to transform the perception and treatment of marginalised QTIPOC.
Liza Sylvestre
Liza Sylvestre is a multimedia artist and Research Assistant Professor within the College of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign where she has co-founded the initiative Crip*: Cripistemology and the Arts. Her work has been shown internationally at venues including the Plains Art Museum, Weisman Art Museum, Roots & Culture, Soap Factory, Soo Visual Arts Center, John Hansard Gallery, ARGOS, and MMK. Sylvestre has been the recipients of numerous grants, fellowships, and residencies including a 2021 Joan Mitchell Fellowship, artist-in-residence at the Weisman Art Museum and the Center for Applied and Translational Sensory Science (CATSS), and a Citizens Advocate Award from the Minnesota Commission of the Deaf, DeafBlind, and Hard of Hearing (MNCDHH). Sylvestre’s work has been written about in numerous publications and books including Art in America, Mousse Magazine, Ocula Magazine, Art Monthly, and SciArt Magazine.
About The Art of Captioning
The Art of Captioning is a research group, supported by British Art Network, that explores what creative captioning can bring to art while advancing vital work around access, equality and inclusivity in the sector.
In the current landscape of increased awareness and innovative activity, there is both huge opportunity and great need for collaborative research. The Art of Captioning hopes to generate new ideas and approaches, collectively — ideas with tangible, practical implications that will positively affect the way that the production and display of art is considered and resourced.
The Art of Captioning is led by Hannah Wallis and Sarah Hayden. It brings together artists, curators, researchers, activists and access workers to address the state of captioning and access awareness in British Art. Click here to find out more about The Art of Captioning.
About A Language of Holes
A Language of Holes is a project co-developed by Wysing Arts Centre and Sarah Hayden as part of Voices in the Gallery, with support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Together, we are developing innovative and creative approaches to making live art and performance events maximally (and excitingly) accessible.
This project takes the format of three events, each in partnership with different elements of the Wysing programme: The Art of Captioning, Club Urania, and the Sensory Support Programme. Click here to find out more about A Language of Holes.
Temporalities of Access is generously supported by funds from AHRC and British Art Network (Paul Mellon Cente and Tate).
Dr Uma Breakdown In-Conversation with Angela YT Chan and Dr Tom Dillon
6pm, Wednesday 16 November
The event will be streamed live on our Wysing Broadcasts website at this link.
To register for this free event on Eventbrite, please click here.
Join us online for a special in-conversation event to celebrate Uma Breakdown’s gallery exhibition Earth A.D. Uma has invited researcher, curator and artist Angela YT Chan and Dr Tom Dillon to discuss systems of archiving, collapse and repair and queer counter-culture science fiction.
Angela YT Chan will share how self-archiving current climate experiences resists future data gaps in our inherently political climate histories.
Tom Dillon will deliver a short presentation on the science fiction writer Michael Moorcock, focusing on his relationship with 60s counterculture and queerness.
To find out more about ‘Earth A.D.’, visit the exhibition website page here.
Access Information
This event will be captioned. Please get in touch with us to let us know if there is something you need to be able to participate in this event, by emailing John Bloomfield john.bloomfield@wysingartscentre.org
Biographies
Uma Breakdown
“Hi I’m Uma, an artist interested in animals, horror, queer feminist literature, and games design. Everything I make is about some combination of love, grief, hallucination, and an excess of joy. In 2020 I finished a PhD about The Evil Dead, care, trans* écriture feminine, and disaster. With Sammy Paloma I make video games about the divine and occult providence of transfemme existence. I live in Gateshead, UK.
Recent projects include “The Speculative Dismemberment of Agent Leon Kennedy” for Market Gallery (Glasgow, 2022), “Take The Moonlight by The Tail” for Arebyte Gallery (London, 2021), and “Wastework” for TEXTUR (Berlin, 2021).
Imminent things include group shows “Practicing Futures While Grieving in Eight Movements” at Klosterruine (Berlin, 2022) and “Hinterlands” at Baltic (Gateshead, 2022).”
Angela YT Chan
Angela YT Chan is an independent researcher, curator and artist specialising in climate change. Her work explores power in relation to the inequity throughout the history of the climate crisis, through self-archiving, rethinking geographies and speculative fiction. Her recent research-art commissions focus on water scarcity, conflict and everyday experiences through climate framings and communications. Since 2014, Angela has produced curatorial projects and workshops as Worm: art + ecology, collaborating with artists, activists and youth groups. She co-directs the London Science Fiction Research Community. Angela is also a research consultant, having worked in international climate and cultural policy and on climate and sustainability projects for major cultural institutions.
Tom Dillon
Tom Dillon is a researcher whose work investigates the politics and aesthetics of speculative fiction magazines. They recently finished a PhD thesis on the speculative fiction magazine New Worlds in the 1960s. Tom is a founding member of Beyond Gender, a research collective which looks at the representation of gender in relation to race, sexuality, and class in science fiction; and is a former director of the London Science Fiction Research Community.
Join Martin Glover for a BSL tour of Earth A.D. on 29 October, 11am at Wysing Arts Centre.
Earth A.D.: BSL Tour with Martin Glover
Martin, deaf BSL user, is an architect and art facilitator. Over the decade, he have delivered many BSL tours, covering many themes relating to Contemporary Art, Architecture and more recently Street Art and Sculpture. He also manages his Digitspace project, championing better Visual Art access nationally.
About Earth A.D.
I sing softly to myself, unconcerned with either my uncertainty of the lyrics, or my ability to hold the tune. The paddle dips into the water on one side of the canoe and then the other, a rhythm that I sing to, mostly. Above, if I were to look up, the sky is oppressive. It has more in common with visual artefacts in video reproduction or from eyes under stress than something with genuine depth. I dreamt once of a huge eye following me. The eye was so large that I could barely make out its curve. To the untrained, it may have appeared just as a black sky, but I was all too aware that it was a huge pupil, with the iris beginning just at the horizon if only the mountains did not obscure this. That dream stayed with me, and then I pushed it down with my work, and now, now it surfaces in my memory once again, and so I try not to look at this sky above my rhythmic paddling in case I summon that dream to come to be the next night, when I must lie in the bottom of my canoe, the sky feeling as if it begins only inches from my face. ~ Earth A.D. Archive text.
About Martin Glover
Earth A.D. is the first solo exhibition from artist Uma Breakdown. This new body of work draws on the artist’s research into the structures and historical context of Gothic narratives, and their creative relationships to time, space, identity and social relations.
The project consists of video games, objects, and an installation. An immersive installation in the gallery made from muslin, concrete rebar, bioresin and lino prints presents coffin-like structures, a hanging coracle alongside a holographic projection and new drawings from the artist. The immersive Earth A.D. game will be playable online on WysingBroadcasts.Art, while a lo-fi "demake" game is playable in the gallery.
Find out more about the exhibition by clicking here.
Commissioned in partnership with FACT, Liverpool and QUAD, Derby, Earth A.D. will launch as an installation in Wysing’s gallery in September and a game on WysingBroadcasts.Art later in the autumn, before evolving and touring to FACT in Summer 2023 and QUAD in Summer 2024.
Earth A.D. explores the Gothic genre’s relation to deep time, real and imagined versions of England, industrial capitalism, guilt, shame, queerness, and the Gothic’s entangled relationships with the evolution of science fiction, horror and the computer.
That’s one description. Another is that it’s a science fiction story about trans* solidarity and care across time and space, which is repeatedly told, distorted, translated, lost, and reinvented.
Yet another is that it's a room full of coffin technology and holograms, and a video game about the dreams of a sleeping cyborg girl.
Earth A.D. is commissioned by Wysing Arts Centre, FACT and QUAD with public funding from Arts Council England.
Digital Fabrication: Partytime.jpeg
Fabrication: Jack Wilson and Loukas Morley
Technical Production: Jack Wilson, Liam Cahill, Loukas Morley and Chloe Page
Wysing Exhibition curated by John Eng Kiet Bloomfield
The exhibition tour will be delivered in British Sign Language.
A calm decompression space is available onsite.
The exhibition is wheelchair accessible.
Accessible parking and toilets are available.
If you have other access requirements that you would like to check with us before booking, please get in touch with Beth Harrison and Gabby Gilmore, our Programme and Operations Assistants, at info@wysingartscentre.org and we will be happy to help.
Access Information
Uma Breakdown
Earth A.D. Launch event
Saturday 24 September, 4–6pm Video introduction from the artist, 5.30pm
Join us at Wysing to celebrate the launch of Uma Breakdown's new exhibition Earth A.D. a new body of work draws on the artist’s research into the structures and historical context of Gothic narratives, and their creative relationships to time, space, identity and social relations.
The launch is open to all, but due to Covid-19 booking is essential. Transport from Cambridge is available with 'pay what you can' options.
Please book your place for the launch event on our Eventbrite by clicking here.
Event Timings
4pm — Arrivals, launch event begins
5.30pm – Video introduction from the artist
6pm — Event ends, Cambridge transport departs Wysing
Ticket Options
- Ticket Without Transport – free
- Ticket With Cambridge Transport – £8 or pay-what-you-can
- Companion Ticket for Cambridge Transport – free
Please note: Wysing is a not-for-profit organisation. As a registered charity, we are committed to supporting artists and ticket sales help to support our charity mission. We ask you to pay what you can afford and leave it to your discretion. Please keep in mind that there are people who will genuinely need the cheaper tickets and we will have a limited number of those to offer.
Transport Information
Transport for the event will depart Cambridge train station at 3.15pm; arrive Wysing 3.45pm; depart Wysing 6pm; arrive back in Cambridge at approximately 6.30pm.
We will send an email prior to the event with details on travel and what expect on the day.
Bookings for transport close at 12 midday on Wednesday 21 September.
Access Information
- Wheelchair accessible transport - We can offer wheelchair accessible transport from Cambridge. If you require wheelchair accessible transport, please tick the box on the ticket checkout page and we will be in touch by email to confirm arrangements with you. Please let us know by 12 midday on Wednesday 21 September so we can make arrangements.
- A calm decompression space is available onsite.
- The exhibition is wheelchair accessible.
- Accessible parking and toilets are available.
If you have other access requirements that you would like to check with us before booking, please get in touch with John Eng Kiet Bloomfield, our Senior Programmes Curator, at john.bloomfield@wysingartscentre.org and we will be happy to help.
Covid Safety
- We ask you to take a lateral flow test before attending if you can, and do not attend if you have a positive test.
- If you have symptoms of Covid-19 or have been in close contact with someone who has tested positive please do not attend.
- Indoor spaces will be well ventilated and much of the programme will be taking place outdoors.
- You are welcome to wear a mask during the event if you prefer to.
- Sanitiser points and spare masks are available around the site.
Refreshments
Light refreshments will be available with vegan and gluten free options.
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Commissioned in partnership with FACT, Liverpool and QUAD, Derby, Earth A.D. will launch as an installation in Wysing’s gallery in September and a game on WysingBroadcasts.Art later in the autumn, before evolving and touring to FACT in Summer 2023 and QUAD in Summer 2024.
Club Urania
Friday 16 September, 8pm-midnight
In-person tickets are now SOLD OUT, however online tickets are still available. Book tickets to Club Urania via Cambridge Junction here.
Please note that the lift to the upper level is out of service, so there is no wheelchair access to the Decompression Space.
Re-entering the atmosphere after a sold out first season, Club Urania is back!
Cambridge’s premium performance and music night for LGBTQ+ people and allies returns this autumn. Bringing you a constellation of star performers, otherworldly open-mic, and heavenly mixes from resident DJs.
For the first Club Urania in our next season, Wysing Arts Centre in conjunction with A Language of Holes, are pleased to present Nat Raha.
Nat Raha will be presenting a new work-in-progress with a particular emphasis on centring captioning and access in the development of the work. This work-in-progress is commissioned by Wysing in partnership with Sarah Hayden and AHRC funded A Language of Holes, a project that explores innovative approaches to captioning in live contexts.
Also performing the same night will be a fabulous performance from Jake Wood, as well as brilliant sets in our regular open mic slots.
Club Urania is committed to reducing barriers to access, providing pay-what-you-feel tickets, a decompression space in the venue, and live-captioning. This season is expected to sell out so get your tickets early!
Spring 2022 season featured the best of contemporary queer performance including the likes of Whiskey Chow, Catherine Hoffman, Harold Offeh, Pink Suits, Symoné, and Wet Mess.
Club Urania is a collaboration between Cambridge Junction, Wysing Arts Centre, Roeland van der Heiden, Diarmuid Hester, and Celia Willoughby.
Tickets
Club Urania will be live streamed on zoom for those that aren’t able to attend in person.
Click HERE for in-person tickets.
Click HERE for livestream tickets.
Access Information
Club Urania events are live-captioned both in-person and on the livestream.
A wheelchair-accessible decompression space is also available during the night, which will be signposted on the night.
We will provide sensory information such as lighting and noise levels at the start of the night.
If you have any questions about accessibility of the event, please get in touch with Hannah Wallis on hannah.wallis@wysingartscentre.org.
For more information about accessibility at Cambridge Junction please visit their website here.
About Nat Raha
Dr Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar, based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her work is of an experimental queer lyric, attending to the everyday of marginalised lives, hirstories of struggle and resistance to racial capitalism, of humans and more-than-humans. She works through de/re/materialising sound, form and syntax, on the page and in performance.
Nat is the author of three collections of poetry: of sirens, body & faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018), countersonnets (Contraband Books, 2013) and Octet (Veer Books, 2010). Recent anthologies featuring her work include 100 Queer Poems, We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, the weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene, ON CARE, What the Fire Sees and Makar/Unmakar. Nat’s creative and critical writing has appeared on Poem-a-Day, and in The New Feminist Literary Studies, South Atlantic Quarterly, Third Text, TSQ, Transgender Marxism (Pluto Press, 2021) and Wasafiri Magazine. Her work has appeared in recent exhibitions at Mimosa House London, yaby Madrid, and in 2021 she co-curated 'Life Support: Forms of Care in Art and Activism' Exhibition at Glasgow Women's Library.
Nat holds a PhD in queer Marxism from the University of Sussex. She co-edits Radical Transfeminism zine; and is co-authoring a book Trans Femme Futures: An Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds with Mijke van der Drift.
About A Language of Holes
A language of Holes is a project co-developed by Wysing Arts Centre and Sarah Hayden, with support from the AHRC. Together, we are developing innovative and creative approaches to making live art and performance events maximally (and excitingly) accessible.
Saturday 16 July, 11am to 7pm
Onsite and on WysingBroadcasts.Art (selected highlights and digital programme)
'From the Ground Up' takes Wysing’s rural context, abundant land and neighbouring Fenland (at risk due to climate change, and rich in histories of land-based struggle) as a rich context for thought and action about topics including land rights, ownership and access, sustainability, environmental time and crip time, growing, wildness and racial justice.
The day will bring together a range of practitioners and thinkers for a mini-festival of talks, walks, workshops, screenings, informal conversations over lunch, readings and tastings. There will also be an expanded digital programme unfolding in the weeks before and after the event. Selected highlights will be presented via the Wysing Broadcasts website throughout the day.
The expanded programme for ‘From The Ground Up’ will include contributions from writer and artist Khairani Barokka; historian James Boyce; poet, writer and artist Victoria Adukwei Bulley; Wysing co-founder Terry Brooks; artist, educator and community developer, Jo Capper; Artist Olivier Castel; Director of Studies for Geography at Queens College, Cambridge, Elsa Noterman; artist Rosanna Greaves; curator and writer, Taylor Le Melle; artist and writer, Bella Milroy; historian, writer, printmaker and founder of CAMP books, Brooke Palmieri; organic food grower and writer, Claire Ratinon; RESOLVE Collective; broadcaster, writer and DJ Zakia Sewell; artist Caroline Wendling; and more to be announced...
Ticket Options
• Event Ticket - £22 or pay-what-you-can
• Event Ticket With Cambridge Transport - £30 or pay-what-you-can
• Companion Ticket - free
• Online Ticket - free
The event is open to all with transport available from Cambridge provided if needed.
Tickets are available with pay-what-you-can options (minimum is £1). Pay-what-you-can tickets gives you the option to pay as little or as much as you can. If you are able to pay more, this allows us to continue offering cheaper tickets for those who need them.
Please note: to book more than 1 x pay-what-you-can option for the same ticket, please place separate orders for each ticket. Unfortunately it is not possible to book multiple pay-what-you-can tickets for the same ticket on Eventbrite.
The online ticket gives you access to the digital programme for ‘From The Ground Up’. The digital programme will consist of selected highlights from the onsite programme streamed on 16 July and an expanded programme taking place in the weeks before and after the onsite event.
Onsite event tickets also include access to the digital programme.
Refreshments
All tickets for the onsite event include lunch and refreshments throughout the day. Vegetarian, vegan and gluten free options will be available.
Covid Safety
Sanitiser points and spare masks are available around the site.
Toilets will be available in our buildings with antibacterial wipes and spray.
If the event is cancelled, tickets will be fully refunded.
We kindly ask guests to test before travelling to Wysing and not to attend if you test positive or display symptoms.
Transport Information
Transport for the event will depart Cambridge train station at 10.15am; arrive Wysing 10.45am; depart Wysing 7pm; arrive back in Cambridge at 7.30pm.
We will send an email prior to the event with details on travel, Covid safety and what to expect on the day.
Ticket sales for transport tickets close at 12 midday on Wednesday 13 July.
Access Information
The onsite programme for ‘From The Ground Up’ will include moments where the audience can choose between different activities. These activities will take place in a number of locations across Wysing’s site, but there will always be a wheelchair accessible option and an option with live-captions.
Selected highlights from the Onsite programme will be streamed live on our Wysing Broadcasts site and will include opportunities to ask questions. Streamed highlights will be live-captioned. Wheelchair accessible transport - we can offer wheelchair accessible transport from Cambridge. If you require wheelchair accessible transport, please tick the box on the ticket checkout page and we will be in touch by email to confirm arrangements with you. Please let us know by 12 midday on Monday 11 July so we can make arrangements.
A calm decompression space is available onsite.
Accessible parking and toilets are available.
Free Companion Tickets are available for anyone who needs them.
If you have access requirements that you would like to check with us before visiting, please get in touch with Ceri Littlechild, Wysing’s Deputy Director, at ceri.littlechild@wysingartscentre.org and we will be happy to help.
Schedule
Before 16 July
Keep an eye on your inbox and wysingbroadcasts.art for an online programme from Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Zakia Sewell and Taylor Le Melle.
16 July: Online
The online programme will include livestreams of onsite events over the day. For an online schedule of the day, please click here.
16 July: Onsite
The day’s programme will take place across Wysing’s site. Click here for a site map.
The following key relates to access.
CC= Live-captions provided
W= Wheelchair accessible
All day — Rosanna Greaves — The Flaming Rage of The Sea (2018) (Amphis) CC
The Flaming Rage Of The Sea explores the constructed and ever-changing landscape of the Cambridgeshire Fenlands, a region below sea level. It features choreographed stilt performers as apparitions of past farming practices done on stilts and was filmed at various locations in the Fens including Whittlesey Strawbear festival, The Great Fen and the Rothschild Bungalow.
Rosanna Greaves is an artist, researcher and senior lecturer in fine art at Cambridge School of Art, ARU. Rosanna’s art practice is multidisciplinary, working with sound, text, sculpture and moving image; often working in a site-specific context, exploring place as material.
All Day — Taylor Le Melle
A new text from Taylor Le Melle is fragmented and installed around the site. Look out for printed cards staked into the ground.
Taylor Le Melle wonders if claiming polymath would be preferable to constructing a string of slashes: writer/publisher/infrastructuralist/herbalist/designer/curator/..../..../. Le Melle holds a research fellowship in the Design Department at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, and is a Deviant Practice researcher at VanAbbe Museum, Eindhoven. Their group exhibition Swimmers Limb opens at Somerset House Gallery 31 July 2022.
All day — Decompression/Quiet Space (Media Suite) W
All Day — Tea and Coffee (Reception) W
Refreshments are available in Reception throughout the day.
10:45 — Arrivals 11 — Introduction from Rosie Cooper, Wysing Director (Wysing Gallery) CC & W
11.10 — James Boyce and Elsa Noterman in conversation, chaired by Rosie Cooper (Wysing Gallery) CC & W
Fenland communities fought to keep their common land for over a hundred years. Strategies to quash these lively resistance movements in the 17th century became a blueprint for Britain’s Imperial project. Access to space in Cambridgeshire remains contested; the countryside and parts of the City are inaccessible to many. How can we learn from the past, change structures of ownership and control, to re-shape access to public space and the land? Join James Boyce, award-winning author of Imperial Mud: the Fight for the Fens, 2020, in conversation with Dr Elsa Noterman, Junior Research Fellow and Director of Studies for Geography at Queens' College Cambridge.
12.10 — — Khairani Barokka and Bella Milroy in-conversation, chaired by Hannah Wallis (Wysing Gallery) CC & W
If ‘normative time’ can be understood as artificial and possible to change, what can we learn from ‘crip time’ as a new way of understanding time that acknowledges different lived realities? Join Bella Milroy and Khairani Barokka in thinking through and with crip time in relation to rural contexts and anti-colonial praxis. Khairani Barokka is an Indonesian writer and artist in London, whose work centres disability justice as anticolonial praxis, and has presented widely internationally. Okka is the new Editor of Modern Poetry in Translation. Her latest book is Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches), shortlisted for the Barbellion Prize. Bella Milroy is an artist and writer who lives in her hometown of Chesterfield, Derbyshire. She works responsively through mediums of sculpture, drawings, photography, writing and text. She makes work about making work (and being disabled) and not being able to make work (and being disabled).
1 — Lunch (Window Room) W
Lunch will be made from ingredients grown at CoFarm Cambridge, an agroecological community farm. Founder Gavin Shelton aims to roll out their community farming model to 250,000 acres across the UK by 2030, building towards sustainably produced food and better ecosystems for all. Gavin Shelton and Dominic Walsh will introduce lunch. Vegetarian, vegan and gluten free options will be available. Lunch is included in the ticket price.
2.30 (Im)possible Projects
Option 1: Olivier Castel and John Eng Kiet Bloomfield (Wysing Gallery) CC & W
Artist Olivier Castel is joined by Wysing Senior Programme Curator John Eng Kiet Bloomfield for a discussion of a series of works originally proposed during his residency at Wysing in 2014. These included a waterway linking the two ponds on Wysing’s site and transplanting a largescale screen from New York’s Times Square to Wysing’s site. Conceived as interventions to the site, their ambition, scale and cost has prevented them from ever being realised. Olivier Castel usually presents work under heteronyms and has created over thirty different identities since 2001. Often using ephemeral or temporal forms he works primarily with projections, reflective surfaces, light, text and audio. His work functions as a set of propositions, employing the imaginary and exploring the process by which something is made visible.
Option 2: Terry Brooks and Ceri Littlechild (Site walk: meet in Window Room)
Join Wysing founder Terry Brooks and Wysing Deputy Director Ceri Littlechild for a site walk and discussion-as-excavation, focusing on forgotten site interventions and the possible futures offered by unrealised projects. Terry Brooks was one of four founding directors of Wysing in 1989. He served as its chair from 1994 to June 2002.
Option 3: Jack Wilson and Rosie Cooper (Site walk: meet outside Media Suite)
Join Wysing’s Site and Technical Manager Jack Wilson and Wysing Director Rosie Cooper for a site walk and discussion of your own (Im)possible projects. If you have an intervention to the site that you would like to suggest, pin it to the noticeboard in reception in the morning or share it on our Instagram @wysing.arts.centre or twitter @wysingartscentr
3
Option 1: Claire Ratinon (Wysing Gallery) CC & W
Join Claire Ratinon, acclaimed author of Unearthed: on Race and Roots, and How the Soil Taught me I Belong, 2022, for an informal session. Like many diasporic people of colour, Claire grew up feeling cut off from the natural world. Unearthed is the story of how, after years of a troubled relationship with the land of her birth, Claire Ratinon found belonging through falling in love with growing, and reconnecting with nature. Claire Ratinon is an organic food grower and writer. Claire has shared her growing journey in talks for organisations including The Garden Museum and Royal Botanical Garden, Edinburgh, as well as on Radio 4. She co-wrote the pamphlet, ‘Horticultural Appropriation’ for Rough Trade Books with artist, Sam Ayre and her new book, ‘Unearthed’ is out now.
Option 2: Caroline Wendling (Site walk: meet in Window Room)
Artist Caroline Wendling will lead an intimate and meditative performance-walk through some of the less commonly visited areas of Wysing’s site. Participants will be asked to engage in deep listening practices and some simple actions. Caroline Wendling is a studio artist at Wysing. Her work explores ideas of place and belonging through layered projects that draw on history and explore local myths, inviting re-imagings of sites. She attempts to give material form to the complex interconnectedness of our mental landscapes and the actual space we inhabit.
Option 3: Brooke Palmieri (Workshop: meet outside Window Room)
Learn and test out natural printing techniques with artist Brooke Palmieri. To consider nature, and our mimicry of it, requires us to completely change our view of technologies, and reconsider the ecology of media in terms of the natural materials that comprise them, a consideration that is queer, feminist, and decolonial. Working with historic examples and foraging for materials, we will discuss the history of nature printing, and try our hands at making our own. Brooke Palmieri is a historian, writer, and printer, if printing can also be considered as a form of sculpture and performance. In 2018 they founded CAMP BOOKS, a platform for making the history of gender non-conforming people more accessible through teaching, cheap printing, and building archives and libraries. Brooke will be in residence at Wysing later in 2022.
4 — Break (Reception) W
Refreshments are available in Reception.
4.30
Option 1 Jo Capper and Akil Scafe-Smith, RESOLVE Collective, in conversation (Wysing Gallery) CC & W
What role can cultural spaces that are custodians of land, like Wysing, play in fostering a sense of ownership in public space? How can the resources that the culture sector currently holds contribute better to grassroots justice work? What are the imaginative possibilities of divestment? Jo Capper is Grand Union (Birmingham)’s Collaborative Programme Curator. Capper is an artist educator with a strong desire to heal, restore and do good in the world, creating alternative cultural and living practices that start with simple acts of growing or sharing food - embodying the cultural specifics of human conviviality. Akil Scafe-Smith is part of RESOLVE Collective, an interdisciplinary design collective that combines architecture, engineering, technology and art to address social challenges. Much of their work aims to provide platforms for celebrating local knowledge as well as organising and collaborating in communities.
Option 2 Brooke Palmieri (Workshop: meet outside Window Room)
Learn and test out natural printing techniques with artist Brooke Palmieri. To consider nature, and our mimicry of it, requires us to completely change our view of technologies, and reconsider the ecology of media in terms of the natural materials that comprise them, a consideration that is queer, feminist, and decolonial. Working with historic examples and foraging for materials, we will discuss the history of nature printing, and try our hands at making nature prints. Brooke Palmieri is a historian, writer, and printer, if printing can also be considered as a form of sculpture and performance. In 2018 they founded CAMP BOOKS, a platform for making the history of gender non-conforming people more accessible through teaching, cheap printing, and building archives and libraries. Brooke will be in residence at Wysing later in 2022.
5.30 — Snacks and Drinks (Window Room) W
Join us for snacks and a drink. Vegetarian, vegan and gluten free options will be available. Snack and drinks are included in the ticket price.
6.15 — Victoria Adukwei Bulley reading (Window Room) CC & W
As the day comes to a close, poet and artist Victoria Adukwei Bulley will share a reading from her new book of poetry ‘Quiet’ along with other texts, reflecting on the themes explored through the days events. Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a poet, writer and artist. Her debut poetry collection, Quiet, was released by Faber in the UK this year, and is set for North American release in January 2023 with Knopf.
Saturday 23 July
Open Studios
12 to 4pm
Open Platform
4 to 6pm
Free admission
Join us on-site for Wysing Open Studios 2022, a celebration of Wysing’s studio and associate artists, and our first Open Platform event, presented in collaboration with artist led space, Motion Sickness.
Wysing Open Studios 2022
Open Studios is a chance for visitors to see work being made by Wysing studio and associate artists, meet artists onsite and explore Wysing’s rural campus and facilities (including our Ceramics Studio).
Artists include; Beverley Carruthers, Fiona Curran, Emanuela Cusin, Damaris Athene, Rob Foster-Jones, Bettina Furnée, Isobel Meredith-Hardy, Sophie Hill, Penny Klein, Georgina Manning, Josh McCormack, Aaron Ossia, Soheila Sokhanvari, and Caroline Wendling.
Open Platform presented by Motion Sickness X Wysing Arts Centre
Open Platform is a lo-fi sharing space for artists to present work-in-progress sound, moving image, performance and other kinds of ephemeral media in a supportive environment.
You are invited to join us after Open Studios to watch or take part in this second half of the event.
Performance slots are 10 minutes long with a limited number of slots available. There will be an audio jack, connection for projection, microphone and a simple sound system to make use of and artists will be expected to look after their own tech when presenting.
If you would like to present at Open Platform, please contact Hannah on hannah.wallis@wysingartscentre.org, for more information and to book a slot. If no slots are available, we will add your name to the waiting list.
Access Information
Accessible parking and toilets are available.
The outdoor grounds at Wysing are uneven and have varying surface textures, which may cause some difficulty for unaccompanied wheelchair users.
The ground floor studios of Bettina Furnée and Caroline Wendling have a small step and are not wheelchair accessible. The first floor studio of Beverley Carruthers is not wheelchair accessible.
If you have other access requirements that you would like to check with us, please get in touch with Hannah at hannah.wallis@wysingartscentre.org and we will be happy to help.
Refreshments
Tea, coffee, soft drinks and cake will be available for visitors with vegan and gluten free options. You are welcome to bring along a picnic.
Please note we do not have a café and there is nowhere to buy lunch on site.
Getting to Wysing
We have ample parking on site. Public bus services run hourly from Cambridge (No. 18 from Drummer Street) to Bourn Village Monday to Saturday. Please check bus times before travelling. Wysing is a 15-minute walk from Bourn, but please note this is along a busy road. Find out more about transport information on our website here.
About Motion Sickness
Motion Sickness Project Space is a gallery set in an empty retail unit at the Lion Yard Shopping Centre in Cambridge. Since its launch in 2019, the artist-led space has exhibited emerging artists from all over the UK, particularly supporting those from groups currently marginalised in the art world.
The project space was launched by art collective Motion Sickness. The collective was set up by three Cambridge School of Art graduates Denise Kehoe, Eleanor Breeze and Arabella Hilfiker, and they initially started working together in 2018 as a way to revive the infertile Cambridge art scene whilst exploring and satirising society's view of millennial-hood. Before launching the project space, they ran a series of themed networking events for local artists called Playdates.
The Art of Captioning: Introduction to Caption-writing and Caption Consultation
Wednesday 29 June, 12.30–2pm (Online)
You are invited to join us for an online workshop, the second event in a series from The Art of Captioning research group.
To register for this free event on Eventbrite, please click here.
Join us for a workshop that explores different aspects and specificities for approaching caption writing and consultation with practical exercises that target particular skills in order to begin interpreting and consulting on captions. The workshop will be led by Care-fuffle Working Group member Anita Wolska-Kaslow, with support from artist and activist Nina Thomas.
This workshop will introduce ways to start thinking about implementing captions in moving image work, from early preparations for approaching caption-writing to exercises concerning interpreting and describing sound work. It is a practical and interactive workshop where participants will have an opportunity to engage in creative tasks and experiment with translating sound into captions to encourage them to start forming their own methods for caption-writing, all in a welcoming and supportive atmosphere.
We hope that this workshop will offer insights into the process of caption-writing for anyone interested in implementing access measures in their work. And facilitate a space where collectively we can unravel and inspire ways to begin thinking of captions as another creative tool to be used in moving image work that sparks innovation, enhances access and stands for collective joy, care and solidarity.
This event is a part of a series across 2022 supported by the British Art Network and is free to attend.
Introduction to Caption-writing and Caption Consultation is a closed session hosted on zoom and will not be recorded or livestreamed.
Places are limited to 12 and must be booked in advance. If the workshop is fully booked a waiting list will be available, which you can sign up to via Eventbrite. We will be in touch with you by email should a place become available. If you can no longer attend the event, please contact us to cancel your booking to free up your ticket to another participant.
Access Information
This event will be live-captioned and BSL interpreted.
The event will be 90 minutes long with a 10-minute comfort break halfway through.
If you have any questions or further access requirements, please email Hannah on hannah.wallis@wysingartscentre.org.
About The Art of Captioning
The Art of Captioning is a research group, supported by British Art Network, that explores what creative captioning can bring to art while advancing vital work around access, equality and inclusivity in the sector.
In the current landscape of increased awareness and innovative activity, there is both huge opportunity and great need for collaborative research. The Art of Captioning hopes to generate new ideas and approaches, collectively — ideas with tangible, practical implications that will positively affect the way that the production and display of art is considered and resourced.
The Art of Captioning brings together artists, curators, researchers, activists and access workers to address the state of captioning and access awareness in British Art. Questions under consideration include:
- How do we build on the activist histories of experimental moving image practices to galvanise discussions about the politics of access to art?
- How can we develop new methodologies for retroactively making moving image and sound art works more accessible through captioning and audio description?
- What can we learn from the artists and access workers developing novel approaches to the translation of sound and image?
- What have the past two years of programming taught curators and organisations about access and accountability?
- How can we work together to embed caption-consciousness in commissioning, event-programming, and exhibition-making in British art?
The Art of Captioning is co-led by Hannah Wallis (Artist and Curator; Assistant Curator, Wysing Arts Centre) and Sarah Hayden (Associate Professor in Literature and Culture, University of Southampton, AHRC Innovation Fellow: Voices in the Gallery).
Biographies
Care-fuffle (b. 2021) is a disabled-led experimental film and art working group built on the belief of access as a collective joy and a gesture of care and solidarity. Through process-based research, experimentation and public programmes, we take and make space for disabled genius and creativity, encouraging its growth within cultural production. With our work we wish for disabled wisdom to be recognised and cherished. To be an inspiration for working towards a liberatory future and a new cultural ecosystem defined by equity and inclusion, care and socio-cultural responsibility.
Nina Thomas is a visual artist and advocate for captioning and improved access to the arts, heritage and film for deaf and hard of hearing people. In her art practice, she often foregrounds stories and histories which might be overlooked or underexplored. Much of her recent work has focused on her experience of becoming deaf and subsequently seeking to understand other deaf experiences and deaf history. She has exhibited at venues such as The Crypt Gallery (NW1), LUX (online) and OVADA (Oxford). She is a founding member of The Film Bunch, where she curated the online screening ‘Deaf Experience’, and she was commissioned by Pan Macmillan to create
an animation for the poet Raymond Antrobus. She has worked on access and advisory projects at the V&A, The Wallace Collection, NDACA, British Ceramics Biennial, The British Museum, Shape Arts and D4D. She is also a trustee at Stagetext.
Desktop Studio Visit: Maëva Berthelot and Coby Sey
Tuesday 17 May, 7pm
The studio visit will be streamed live on our Wysing Broadcasts website at this link.
To register for this free event on Eventbrite, please click here.
A Twitch thread will accompany the livestream. If you would like comment or ask questions on this thread, please create a Twitch account here.
Join us for a very special Desktop Studio Visit to celebrate our gallery exhibition ‘A Tender Ascent’.
Maëva Berthelot and Coby Sey will be joined by Wysing’s Senior Curator of Programmes, John Eng Kiet Bloomfield, to discuss their exhibition ‘A Tender Ascent’ and the research and influences behind the collaboration. Using a number of references from the project as a framework for an informal chat, they will touch on topics including the role of chance, role reversal and collaborating during Covid-19.
The in-conversation event will be followed by an opportunity for questions from the audience.
To find out more about ‘A Tender Ascent’, visit the exhibition website page here.
Access Information
This event will be captioned. Please get in touch with us to let us know if there is something you need to be able to participate in this event, by emailing John Bloomfield john.bloomfield@wysingartscentre.org
Biographies
Maëva Berthelot is a choreographer, performer and teacher whose mode of working unfolds along the threshold between experimental, performative and collaborative approaches. After graduating in 2003 from the Paris Superior Conservatoire of Music and Dance, she has collaborated with artists and companies such as Emanuel Gat, Ohad Naharin, Clod Ensemble, Sharon Eyal, Rambert and spent six years as a senior member with Hofesh Shechter Company, contributing creatively as an original cast member in numerous pieces and as a teacher. Her work intends to instil a dialogue between material and immaterial realms, drawing attention to the tension between visible/invisible, conscious/unconscious and rehearsed/improvised. Whilst her research is rooted in a movement practice which is an ongoing inquiry into the themes of consciousness, transformation, healing, death and rebirth, her interest lies in creating cathartic spaces in which the emotional and sensational states related to loss, grief and change can be explored, processed and assimilated into conscious experience.
Coby Sey is a vocalist, musician and DJ, who, after years spent buzzing around the DIY artist circuitry of South East London, has developed a distinctive presence as a performer and producer offering a shifting, disorienting vision of club music.
A long-time collaborator with Mica Levi, Tirzah, Babyfather, Klein and Kwes, Coby’s recorded work– as best evidenced on the Whities 010: Transport for Lewisham 10′′ – spans the realms of live instrumentation, sample-based productions and experimental music, melding recognisable motifs of hip hop, drone, jazz, grime and more into a dubbed-out anaesthesia. Live, these dreamlike compositions are imbued with a heavy, uneasy dancefloor energy, often abetted by live vocals as well as saxophone interjections c/o regular cohorts Ben Vince and Calderwood.
Coby’s open-door approach to sharing and making music stretches to his work with London collective Curl, who release records and host events with a collaborative, improvisatory approach, as well as a regular slot on NTS which offers a portal into his appealingly murky musical world.
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Ceramics Studio Open Day
Thursday 5 May, 11am–3pm
Thinking about applying for our new Ceramics Studio Membership, but not sure? Join our free open day to find out more.
Wysing staff will be available to answer questions and give you a tour.
Drop in any time, but please book a free ticket on Eventbrite here so we know to expect you.
About the Ceramics Studio Membership
Wysing's ceramics studio will soon be available for public membership access, for a monthly or annual subscription fee. The studio is well-equipped, with a kiln, pottery wheels, moulds and basic glazes. You'll need to have experience of working with ceramics and be comfortable working in a shared space. The studio can accommodate up to 6 people at once, but will not be supervised by a technician at all times.
Access to the studio for up to 8 hours a week on Thursdays 10am-8pm and the first Saturday of the month 10am-6pm.
Membership Options
£140 per month, paid by direct debit on the first day of the month. Cancel any time with 30 days notice.
£800 for six months, paid upfront
£1,500 for one year, paid upfront.
Applications
Applications will open from Monday 25 April and need to be submitted via Submittable by midnight on 25 May 2022.
To find out more about the opportunity and how to apply, visit our website page here.
Access Information
There is ample parking at Wysing including two accessible bays next to the front entrance.
The entrance of the ceramics studio does not have a level surface and has a low step.
If you have access requirements that you would like to check with us before visiting, please get in touch with Ceri Littlechild, Wysing’s Deputy Director, at ceri.littlechild@wysingartscentre.org and we will be happy to help.
AMPlify showcase
Thursday 28 April, 7 - 8pm
The showcase will be streamed live on our Wysing Broadcasts website at this link.
A Twitch thread will accompany the livestream. If you would like comment or ask questions on this thread, please create a Twitch account here.
Since October 2021, eight young artists from across England have been creating new digital work as part of Wysing Arts Centre’s AMPlify programme.
The work will be showcased on Wysing Broadcasts online on Thursday 28 April, 7–8pm. A Twitch thread will accompany the livestream. If you would like comment or ask questions on this thread, please create a Twitch account here.
Spanning sound, audio-visual and text, the new work explores themes including: reframing histories; relationships between non-human and human; trauma and loss; voices, places, bodies and time; pain, queerness and religion; and fantasy world building. Following the showcase the work will be available to be viewed online on WysingBroadcasts.Art until 28 July.
AMPlify is an alternative learning programme and residency for artists aged 18 to 25 years to test new approaches and ideas through workshops and talks, whilst also having time to develop their own work. It has been running annually since 2018. In 2021/22 AMPlify took place as a hybrid programme, with an initial residency at Wysing in October followed by online workshops, sessions and 1-2-1 mentoring. The workshops were delivered by contributing artists: Uma Breakdown, Dylan Fox, Carl Gent and Rebekah Ubuntu.
This year the participating artists are: Sarah Al-Sarraj (she/her/they/them), Elinor Arden (she/her), Billie Baxter (she/they), Harry Cross (he/him), Lucy Rose Cunningham (she/her), Zoe Harding (she/her), Rowan Perrow (they/them) and Meitao Qu (she/her).
You can find the participating artist biographies here.
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The Art of Captioning: Making Access Work
Wednesday 25 May, 12.30–2pm (Online)
To register for this free event on Eventbrite, please click here.
Image credit: Nina Thomas, [the sound of memory] - work in progress (2021);
Join us for a discussion about access work with guest panellists Elaine Lillian Joseph, Nina Thomas and Natasha Trantom.
In this conversation, we will explore arts access from the perspective of those who translate, interpret and describe sound and image. Contributors include access workers who specialise in captioning, audio description and BSL interpreting in art contexts, and artist who are also accessibility-activists. By bringing together those who make access their work, we hope to open a conversation about how arts access might develop.
This event is open to all, but may be of special interest to artists and arts institutions keen to understand the nature of access work.
Making Access work will be streamed online, more information on how to access the talk will be sent to you closer to the date.
This event is a part of a series across 2022 supported by the British Art Network.
Access
This event will be live-captioned and BSL interpreted.
The event will be 90 minutes long with a comfort break. The panelists will first present for 15 minutes each followed by a 10 minute break and the remaining time given to in-conversation and questions. The event will be introduced by Hannah Wallis (Wysing Arts Centre) and chaired by Sarah Hayden (Voices in the Gallery).
If you have any questions or further access requirements, please email Hannah on hannah.wallis@wysingartscentre.org.
About The Art of Captioning
The Art of Captioning is a research group, supported by British Art Network, that explores what creative captioning can bring to art while advancing vital work around access, equality and inclusivity in the sector.
In the current landscape of increased awareness and innovative activity, there is both huge opportunity and great need for collaborative research. The Art of Captioning hopes to generate new ideas and approaches, collectively — ideas with tangible, practical implications that will positively affect the way that the production and display of art is considered and resourced.
The Art of Captioning brings together artists, curators, researchers, activists and access workers to address the state of captioning and access awareness in British Art.
Questions under consideration include:
- How do we build on the activist histories of experimental moving image practices to galvanise discussions about the politics of access to art?
- How can we develop new methodologies for retroactively making moving image and sound art works more accessible through captioning and audio description?
- What can we learn from the artists and access workers developing novel approaches to the translation of sound and image?
- What have the past two years of programming taught curators and organisations about access and accountability?
- How can we work together to embed caption-consciousness in commissioning, event-programming, and exhibition-making in British art?
Biographies
Elaine Lillian Joseph is an audio describer for TV, cinema and live shows. She has a BA in Modern Languages (German) and English Literature and trained as a describer at ITV under Jonathan Penny. She specialises in experimental films and dance but also loves to provide live description at queer cabaret nights. Over the years she has delivered a number of AD workshops and consultancy advice to clients in the public and private sector.
Nina Thomas is a visual artist and advocate for captioning and improved access to the arts, heritage and film for deaf and hard of hearing people. In her art practice, she often foregrounds stories and histories which might be overlooked or underexplored. Much of her recent work has focused on her experience of becoming deaf and subsequently seeking to understand other deaf experiences and deaf history. She has exhibited at venues such as The Crypt Gallery (NW1), LUX (online) and OVADA (Oxford). She is a founding member of The Film Bunch, where she curated the online screening ‘Deaf Experience’, and she was commissioned by Pan Macmillan to create an animation for the poet Raymond Antrobus. She has worked on access and advisory projects at the V&A, The Wallace Collection, NDACA, British Ceramics Biennial, The British Museum, Shape Arts and D4D. She is also a trustee at Stagetext.
Natasha Trantom began her career as a communication support worker, working for a small Deaf led charity and supporting Deaf students in higher/further education. After completing her studies in BSL and qualifying as a registered sign language interpreter in 2009, she became a freelance interpreter working predominantly in mental health services for Deaf people.
After years of working in mental health services and with a wealth of experience, Natasha decided she wanted to go back to her theatre roots, (BA.hons in Theatre Studies and Spanish). Natasha has been working alongside Deaf artists, actors, dancers, directors, and writers in theatre/ dance/ TV for several years. From auditions to R&D's, from rehearsals to film shoots, Natasha loves to be a part of the creative process and strongly believes in access to the arts for all.
Club Urania
Friday 25 March 8pm – midnight
In-person tickets are now sold out, but booking is open for the livestream hosted on Zoom:
Book tickets to Club Urania via Cambridge Junction here.
Enter into the orbit of Club Urania, a monthly night of music and performance for LGBTQ+ people and their allies in Cambridge.
You can expect DJs, artists, poets, performers and open mic slots for performance, Drag, readings and more.
Each night will host new and existing works from artists connected to Cambridge Junction and Wysing Arts Centre, open mic slots from performers based in and around Cambridge and resident DJs to end the night.
For the second Club Urania on Friday 25 March, Wysing are pleased to present Iceboy Violet
Iceboy Violet will be presenting a new work-in-progress for the night.
You can also expect an otherworldly open mic with opportunities to get up and share your stuff.
Club Urania will be live streamed on zoom for those that aren’t able to attend in person.
Club Urania is a collaboration between Cambridge Junction, Wysing Arts Centre and other queer organisations, artists and promoters; Celia Willoughby, Diarmuid Hester and Roeland van der Heiden.
Access Information
Club Urania events are live-captioned both in-person and on the livestream.
A wheelchair-accessible decompression space is also available during the night, which will be signposted on the night.
For more information about accessibility at Cambridge Junction please visit their website here.
About Iceboy Violet
Iceboy Violet is a Vocalist//producer channeling the energy, emotionality and resistance of mc music. Giving voice to anger, anxieties and defiance as personal and collective catharsis.
A Tender Ascent 16 April Performance
Saturday 16 April, 2 – 4.30pm
We are delighted to invite you to the final performance of A Tender Ascent at Wysing. Developed by choreographer and performer Maëva Berthelot and musician, vocalist and DJ Coby Sey, the performance expands on the exhibition of the same name, which can also be viewed during the event.
The event is open to all, but due to Covid-19 booking is essential. Transport from Cambridge is available with 'pay what you can' options.
Event Timings
1.45pm — Arrivals
2pm — Performance
3.10pm — Exhibition opens
4.30pm — Event ends, Cambridge transport departs Wysing
Transport Information
Transport for the performance will depart Cambridge train station at 1.15pm; arrive Wysing 1.45pm; depart Wysing 4.30pm; arrive back in Cambridge at 5pm.
We will send an email prior to the event with details on travel, Covid safety and what expect on the day.
Access Information
- Wheelchair accessible transport - We can offer wheelchair accessible transport from Cambridge. If you require wheelchair accessible transport, please tick the box on the ticket checkout page and we will be in touch by email to confirm arrangements with you. Please let us know by 12 midday on Wednesday 13 April so we can make arrangements.
- A calm decompression space is available onsite.
- Accessible parking and toilets are available.
- The exhibition is wheelchair-accessible.
- Free Companion Tickets for transport are available for anyone who needs them.
- An audio description of A Tender Ascent is available on headphones.
- The film has open captions describing the soundtrack, and elements of the soundtrack can be experienced physically through sculptures that emphasise low frequencies.
If you have other access requirements that you would like to check with us before booking, please get in touch with Ceri Littlechild, Wysing’s Deputy Director, at ceri.littlechild@wysingartscentre.org and we will be happy to help.
Covid Safety
- Our team will be wearing masks and we ask you to continue wearing masks indoors (unless you are exempt).
- Sanitiser points and spare masks are available around the site.
- Capacity of the exhibition spaces will be monitored.
- Toilets will be available in our buildings with antibacterial wipes and spray.
- The event and performance will have capacity capped at 50%. Transport organised by Wysing will also be at reduced capacity.
- If the event is cancelled, paid transport tickets will be fully refunded.
- We kindly ask guests to test before travelling to Wysing and not to attend if you test positive or display symptoms.
A Tender Ascent is supported by Arts Council England and Fluxus Art Projects. Wysing Arts Centre would like to wish a special thank you to A---Z (Anne Duffau).
Saturday 26 February, 2 to 4.30pm and 6 to 8.30pm (performances: 2pm and 6pm)
We are delighted to invite you to our first exhibition of 2022, A Tender Ascent, from choreographer and performer Maëva Berthelot and musician, vocalist and DJ Coby Sey.
The launch is open to all, but due to Covid-19 booking is essential. Bookings for this event have now closed. Transport from Cambridge is available with 'pay what you can' options.
Two slots will be available to attend the exhibition opening and to view the performance: 2pm to 4.30pm and 6pm to 8.30pm. Performances are at 2pm and 6pm.
Please note that both performances are the same and you do not need to book tickets for each performance time.
There will be an opportunity to visit the exhibition after each performance and light refreshments will be available.
Event Timings - 2pm Performance and Opportunity to View Exhibition
1.45pm — Arrivals
2pm — Performance
3.10pm — Exhibition opens
4.30pm — Event ends, Cambridge transport departs Wysing
Event Timings - 6pm Performance and Opportunity to View Exhibition
5.45pm — Arrivals
6pm — Performance
7.10pm — Exhibition opens
8.30pm — Event ends, Cambridge transport departs Wysing
Ticket Options
- Ticket Without Transport – free
- Ticket With Cambridge Transport – £8 or pay-what-you-can
- Exhibition only ticket from 7.10pm (no performance) - free
Bookings for tickets with transport close at 12 midday on Wednesday 23 February.
Please note: Wysing is a not-for-profit organisation.
As a registered charity, we are committed to supporting artists and ticket sales help to support our charity mission. We ask you to pay what you can afford and leave it to your discretion. Please keep in mind that there are people who will genuinely need the cheaper tickets and we will have a limited number of those to offer.
Covid Safety
Our team will be wearing masks and we ask you to continue wearing masks indoors (unless you are exempt). Sanitiser points and spare masks are available around the site. Social distancing is in place and capacity to the exhibition spaces will be monitored. Toilets will be available in our buildings with antibacterial wipes and spray.
The launch event and performance will have capacity capped at 50%. Transport organised by Wysing will also be at reduced capacity.
Please note: We will require evidence of a negative lateral flow test from all attendees.
Access Information
We want as many people as possible to be able to access and enjoy this exhibition.
The exhibition includes a film with surround sound and sculptures of human shapes.
- The film has open captions.
- An audio description of the film is available on headphones. You can find these in the corridor on the way into the gallery.
- Elements of the soundtrack can be experienced physically through vibrating benches in the exhibition.
- The gallery is wheelchair accessible.
- There is seating in the gallery.
- The bathroom nearest the carpark is accessible.
- A calm decompression space is available onsite in the building opposite reception.
- A sensory map of Wysing and the exhibition is available at Reception.
By default, the gallery is dark and the sound is fairly loud. Please ask at Reception if you would like help with any of the following:
- Adjustment to the lighting
- Adjustment to the volume
- Guidance into the gallery
If you have other access requirements that you would like to check with us before booking, please get in touch with Ceri Littlechild, Wysing’s Deputy Director, at ceri.littlechild@wysingartscentre.org and we will be happy to help.
A Tender Ascent is supported by Arts Council England and Fluxus Art Projects. Wysing Arts Centre would like to wish a special thank you to A---Z (Anne Duffau).
Friday 11 March, 12.30 to 3pm (GMT)
Drop-in, on Discord
Join British Council Net//Work Residency artists Laura Andreato, Halik Azeez, Wajeeha Batool and Wendy Teo on Discord to celebrate the opening of the Net//Work Exhibition, taking place on our Wysing Broadcasts site between 21 February to 31 March 2022.
This will be a relaxed, drop-in event where visitors can view work from the exhibition on Discord and the Wysing Broadcasts website, and will have the opportunity to chat to the artists on Discord. The artists will be online on Discord during the following timeslots:
Wendy Teo – 12.30pm (GMT)
Halik Azeez – 1pm (GMT)
All artists – 1.30pm (GMT)
Wajeeha Batool – 2pm (GMT)
Laura Andreato – 2.30pm (GMT)
The exhibition draws on the development of the artists’ digital research during the residency, presenting work in an array of media including film and AR through the connections and reciprocity formed between the artists.
To find out more about the Net//Work residency click here, and for more information about the exhibition, click here.
Access Information
The Discord chat will be screen-reader accessible. Please get in touch with us to let us know if there is something you need to be able to participate in this event, by emailing Rhiannon Moxham at Rhiannon.Moxham@wysingartscentre.org.
We will endeavor to hold this event in a digital safe space. We ask all visitors to read our Code of Conduct before attending. This event is 18+. Please note that screenshots will be taken throughout this event in order to archive it.
About Discord
Discord is a digital communication platform hosting text-based threads. Attendees of the event will be able to interact with the artists and one another via a text-based chat function. You can access Discord using a browser or via the app.
You do not need to have a Discord account to attend this event. When you are sent the event link after booking on Eventbrite, simply enter your name and date of birth (for Discord's age verification procedure). You will then automatically be given the option to create a Discord account with an email address and password, but you can click out of this box and proceed directly to the event thread if you prefer.
About British Council Net//Work Residency
Net//Work was a four-week residency that ran from 25 October-19 November 2021 developed in partnership with British Council offering artists a period of reflection, research, practice, skills exchange and professional networking opportunities focused on digital artistic practices and technologies.
Wysing worked with artists Laura Andreato, Halik Azeez, Wajeeha Batool and Wendy Teo, with Anna Bunting-Branch as Artist Advisor. Artists took part in a programme of activities including peer-to-peer exchange, mentoring, group critiques and presentations.
British Council in partnership with Wysing Arts Centre and Digital Arts Studios
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Club Urania
Friday 18 February 8pm – midnight
Book tickets to Club Urania via Cambridge Junction here. Please note that in person tickets are now sold out. Live stream tickets are still available.
Enter into the orbit of Club Urania, a new monthly night of music and performance for LGBTQ+ people and their allies in Cambridge.
You can expect DJs, artists, poets, performers and open mic slots for performance, Drag, readings and more.
Each night will host new and existing works from artists connected to Cambridge Junction and Wysing Arts Centre, open mic slots from performers based in and around Cambridge and resident DJs to end the night.
For the first Club Urania on Friday 18 February, Wysing are pleased to present Whiskey Chow, a London-based artist and Chinese drag king.
Whiskey will be presenting a new work-in-progress for the night, alongside existing work from Cambridge Junction artists-in-residence, queer feminist punk duo pink suits.
You can also expect an otherworldly open mic with opportunities to get up and share your stuff.
The night will end with a good dance with mixes from Toby Hardwick aka Locomotion, a young DJ from Cambridge who specialises in nudisco. Toby’s a fierce ally, whose mixes are keyed into the queer roots of house and funk.
Club Urania will be live streamed on zoom for those that aren’t able to attend in person.
Club Urania is a collaboration between Cambridge Junction, Wysing Arts Centre and other queer organisations, artists and promoters; Celia Willoughby, Diarmuid Hester and Roeland van der Heiden.
Access Information
For more information about accessibility at Cambridge Junction please visit their website here.
About Whiskey Chow
London-based artist and Chinese drag king. Whiskey’s art practice engages with broadly defined political issues, covering a range of related topics: from female and queer masculinity, problematizing the nation-state across geographic boundaries, to stereotypical projections of Chinese/Asian identity. Her work is interdisciplinary, combining embodied performance with moving image and experimental sound pieces.
As an artist-curator, Whiskey launched, led-curated and performed in ‘Queering Now 酷兒鬧’ in 2020 (Chinese Arts Now Festival). Queering Now is a curatorial programme amplifying marginalized voices of the queer Chinese/Asian diaspora.
In addition to teaching at the Royal College of Art (MA Sculpture, MA Digital Direction, MA Information Experience Design), Whiskey is also a Guest Lecturer at Sotheby’s Institute of Art.
Whiskey has been involved in feminist and LGBTQ activism in China since 2011. She contributed to and performed in ‘For Vaginas’ Sake 將陰道獨白到底 (2013)’ (original Chinese version of The Vagina Monologues), and curated the first Chinese LGBTQ music festival, ‘Lover Comrades Concert 愛人同志音樂會 (2013)’, Guangzhou.
Whiskey's recent works include: you must everywhere wander 你必顧盼, Film Maudit 2.0: Transgressive Desire, Online (2022); Queering Now 酷兒鬧 2021: Dreamality, Online/ Dream Babes HK: Real Reality, Hong Kong/ Fringe! Queer Film & Arts Fest, London/ Scottish Queer International Film Festival, Glasgow/ EXiS Film and Video Festival, Seoul (2021); Do You Hear The People Dream?, Wysing Polyphonic Festival, Online; The Moon is Warmer than the Sun, Queering Now, Rich Mix, London (2020); Unhomeliness, Tate Modern, London; Whiskey the Conqueror, Tate Britain, London (2018); Purely Beautiful New Era (ft. Haocheng Wu), Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Great Conversation, Uppsala Konstmuseum, Uppsala (2017).
About pink suits
Formed in 2017, pink suits make loud aggressive political punk noise as well as dance, physical theatre, film and art. pink suits work is an exploration of sexuality, fantasy, mental health, politics, activism and is a resistance of binary gender expectations, questioning how voices and bodies can be used as a form of protest.
Friday 25 March, 10am–12pm at Wysing and Saturday 26 March, 10–11am on Zoom
As part of our open call for Artist-Led Courses, we are holding two open mornings for artists who are interested in delivering courses, to find out more about our plans for public art courses at Wysing.
These events are free but booking is essential. Book your space on Eventbrite here.
Wysing has successfully launched a programme of adult education courses, led by studio artists and offering development of creative practical skills in 2020-21. Our courses have included ink-making, moulding and casting and experimental photography. Given the restrictions of the pandemic, we’ve had to operate with limited capacity and a small number of courses on offer.
We are looking to expand our programme, forward planning a new range of courses for 2022 onwards and inviting artists from across the region (within a 40 mile radius of Wysing), as well as Wysing studio artists, to apply to deliver courses with us. Please note that London is not included within the 40 mile radius, as we are really keen to support artists within some of the areas nearer to us.
We are now inviting artists to deliver public workshops and courses for adult audiences, held on site using facilities and the grounds at the Arts Centre.
If you're an artist in the local area, and you are interested in running an art course at Wysing, find more information about applying on Submittable here.
For the full artists' brief (PDF), click here.
For the easier to read version of the artists' brief (PDF), click here.
We are holding two open mornings for artists who are interested in applying for this opportunity. The events are free to attend but booking is essential. Please book your space on Eventbrite here.
Friday 25 March 10.00-12.00pm
Wysing Arts Centre, Reception
An informal conversational morning (children are welcome if you need to bring them) to learn more about the opportunity, speak to artists sharing experience of teaching/workshops, opportunity to network and tea/coffee/biscuits.
Access information: Wysing's Reception is wheelchair accessible, there is ample parking and two accessible bays at the site entrance. A quiet decompression space is available in the building opposite Reception.
Saturday 26 March 10.00-11.00am
Online, Zoom
Online version of the open morning on Zoom if you cannot attend in person. Details of how to join the Zoom will be emailed to you prior to the event.
Access information: this event will captioned.
Access Information
If you have other access requirements that you would like to check with us before booking, please get in touch with Ceri Littlechild, Wysing’s Deputy Director, at ceri.littlechild@wysingartscentre.org and we will be happy to help.
Online, 10 December 11am (GMT)
Join us for the online Net//Work Artist Sharing Event on 10 December at 11am GMT. Free admission (booking essential via Eventbrite).
Net//Work: Artist Sharing Event
Chaired by Anna Bunting-Branch, this webinar will be a creative forum with residency artists Laura Andreato, Halik Azeez, Wajeeha Batool and Wendy Teo, who will share and respond to one another's projects, drawing out the reciprocities that have emerged between their digital practices during the Net//Work Residency. There will be an opportunity for audience questions at the end of the event.
Bookings for the webinar will close at 10am GMT on 10 December.
Access Information
This event will be auto-captioned via Zoom Webinar. Please get in touch with us to let us know if there is something you need to be able to participate in this event, by emailing Rhiannon Moxham at rhiannon.moxham@wysingartscentre.org.
The Net//Work Residency offers time for reflection, research, practice, skills exchange, and professional networking opportunities focused on digital artistic practices and technologies. This autumn's residency artists are internationally based across Brazil, Malaysia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Indonesia.
The residencies consist of online mentoring, group conversations, problem solving surgeries, guest talks and workshops with external curators and artists and 1-2-1 tuition. Following the residency, artists will have the opportunity to participate in an online exhibition hosted by each residency partner.
Click here to find out more about the autumn residency.
British Council in partnership with Wysing Arts Centre and Digital Arts Studios
Anna Bunting-Branch (born 1987, Cambridge, UK) is an artist and researcher based in London. Recent solo presentations include Warm Worlds and Otherwise, QUAD, Derby (2020) and Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2018), and The Labours of Barren House, Jerwood Space, London (2017).
Selected group presentations and events include Soft Bodies, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester (2020); Crepuscolo (DUSK) (2020), Bastione Sangallo, Loreto; you feel me_, FACT, Liverpool (2019); All His Ghosts Must Do My Bidding, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2019); La Nit del Cos, Bombon Projects, Barcelona (2019); Waking the Witch: Old Ways, New Rites, UK venues (2018-2019); Landscapes of the Future, Helsinki Contemporary (2018); POEKHALI!, Bergen Kunsthall (2018); Hauntopia/What If?, The Research Pavilion, Venice (2017); I AM SF,CCA Derry~Londonderry (2017); Witchy Methodologies, ICA, London (2017).
Her published work includes Fandom as Methodology, Goldsmiths Press (2019); ‘More generous and more suspicious’—Feminist SF as a worldbuilding practice, MAP Magazine (2018); figure, feels,fantom, ArtLicks, Issue 22 (2018). Anna is currently undertaking a practice-related PhD at Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, supported by the AHRC London Arts & Humanities Partnership. In 2019 she was awarded an Arts Council England Project Grant. Moving between different practices–including painting, writing and animation–her work explores science fiction as a methodology to re-vision feminist practice and its histories. www.annabuntingbranch.com
Artist Bios
Laura Andreato is a visual artist and art educator, set and costume designer. Laura graduated in Visual Arts at São Paulo University, holds a master's degree in Visual Poetics and is currently pursuing her doctorate.
Laura has exhibited in sole and collective shows in museums and galleries both within Brazil and globally. Prominent exhibitions include Pensamiento Salvaje, part of Bienal Sur (Buenos Aires, 2017); Le Royale (La Maudite, Paris, 2014), Deslize (Museu de Arte do Rio de Janeiro, 2014) and Paradiso, Museu de Arte de São Paulo -MASP (São Paulo, 2012).
Laura has also participated in the Pivô Pesquisa Program 2019, 13th artistic residency at Red Bull Station 2017 and in 2018 she nominated for the Pipa Award. In 2014 she was in residence at Cité des Arts, selected by the Institut Français.
Halik Azeez is a new media artist based in Colombo Sri Lanka with a background in journalism and critical discourse analysis. His work reflects on technologies of power as mediated through contemporary culture, lived experiences and media.
Transformations within Sri Lanka’s post-war urban landscape is a central archive from which Azeez draws, working across a range of mediums such as photography, video, digital interventions, writing, installation and publication.
In 2019 he co-founded The Packet, an independent community of artists which works with publication, digital interventions and site specific installations. He has held solo exhibitions at the Saskia Fernando Gallery, Colombo (2014 & 2021) and exhibited widely both locally and internationally including at the Ishara Foundation, Dubai (2019 & 2021), the Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa (2016, 2019 & 2020), The Art Foundation, Athens (2017), Edinburgh Festival Fringe (2017), the Karachi Biennale (2019) and Colomboscope (2015, 2016, 2017 & 2019).
Wajeeha Batool is an artist based in Lahore, Pakistan. Wajeeha earned her Bachelors and Masters degrees in Visual Arts at the Beacon House National University (BNU) where she was subsequently a Montessori teacher.
Wajeeha investigates the relationship between fantasy and reality, drawing on her experience to layer and create systematic chaos in her work. Her use of both organic forms and pixelated shapes serve as reference to living organisms as well as the world of technology. These patterns work together in harmony, often superimposed upon the other, to create a reverie of unpredictable movement and transparent effects.
Wajeeha’s artwork has been shown in exhibitions in Alhamrah Art Gallery, Lahore, Karachi Art Summit, Sanat Initiative Art Gallery Karachi: Reading Between the Lines, Taseer Gallery, Lahore: Domestic Bliss and Antidote Gallery Dubai. She also won a second place award for Arts Contest from Shaukat Khanum Hospital, Title: Smoking Kills.
Wendy Teo is a Malaysian based artist, UK ARB/RIBA Chartered Architect, Curator, Researcher and Tutor. Wendy believes an innovative, cutting-edge approach to design and making has capacity to revitalise craftsmanship of the region; stating social-culture dialogue as the driving force behind her design pursuit.
In her award winning design practice Wendy Teo Atelier, she designed a range of nature and culture inspired interactive sculptures, furniture, architectural installation and publication. With Borneo Laboratory, Wendy currently focuses on developing a series of projects that are inspired by the crafts language and materials found from abundant landscape and cultural scape of Borneo.
Wendy Teo’s projects were endorsed by a number of international awards such as Holcim Sustainable Next Generation Award (First Prize), Archiprix, and Threadneedle Prize. Her recent furniture design was selected as a finalist in ‘Asia Design Award’ 2018. Wendy has shown in prominent exhibitions such as 2013/14 Archilab ‘Naturalising Architecture’ exhibition curated by Pompidou Center director Frédéric Migayrou and FRAC Orlean Director Marie-Ange Brayer.
Saturday 4 December, 4–6.30pm
Performances: 5pm
You are warmly invited to join us for the closing event of our two autumn exhibitions, and then, a harrowing, from Linda Stupart, Carl Gent and Kelechi Anucha and An echo imprinted, from Wysing studio artist Robert Foster-Jones.
Autumn Exhibitions Closing Event
A creature is...
...advancing, swallows grit,
…. …
...hide nor flesh, goes on feet...
…
must each time
Wysing is excited to present two newly commissioned open air performances by artists Carl Gent and Linda Stupart, on the occasion of the exhibition’s closing weekend.
Centring on a tractor and harrow, two pieces of agricultural equipment installed on Wysing’s site as part of ‘and then… a harrowing’, Stupart and Gent’s newly commissioned performances will expand on the exhibition’s themes of agitating, excavating and exhuming ghosts, traditions, memories, viruses, melodies and gestures from a land in crisis.
Featuring original writing, music, DIY props and elaborate costumes, Stupart and Gent’s collaborative performance practice has been termed ‘queer anti-art’ by 2021 Goldsmiths Prize-winning author Isabel Waidner. You can read Waidner’s review of their previous play, ‘All Of Us Girls Have Been Dead For So Long’ at the ICA, London, in 2019, here.
There will be an opportunity to view both exhibitions and light refreshments will be available. Please wear appropriate clothing for spending time outdoors.
The launch event is open to all, but due to Covid-19 the event is ticketed and booking is essential.
Book a free ticket on Eventbrite here, including travel from Cambridge with
pay-what-you-can option.
Event Timings
4pm — Arrivals and an opportunity to view both exhibitions
5pm — Performances outside Amphis
6.30pm — Event ends
Please note: Bookings for tickets with transport close at 12 midday on Wednesday 1 December.
- Ticket Without Transport – free (attend the event any time between 4 - 6.30pm)
- Ticket with Cambridge transport – £8 or pay what you can (depart Cambridge train station at 3.30pm; arrive Wysing 4pm; depart Wysing 6.30pm; arrive back in Cambridge at 7pm)
We will send a reminder prior to the event with details on travel, Covid safety and what to expect on the day.
Please note: Wysing is a not-for-profit organisation.
As a registered charity, we are committed to supporting artists and ticket sales help to support our charity mission. We ask you to pay what you can afford and leave it to your discretion. Please keep in mind that there are people who will genuinely need the cheaper tickets and we will have a limited number of those to offer.
Ticket Options
To help keep audiences, artists and staff safe, capacity will be limited.
Transport to the launch arranged by Wysing will be shared and at reduced capacity.
Toilets will be available in Wysing’s buildings and sanitiser points are available around the site.
If the event is cancelled due to Covid, paid transport tickets will be fully refunded.
Access Information
The performances will take place outside Amphis, where the grounds are uneven and have varying surface textures, which may cause some difficulty for unaccompanied wheelchair users.
The exhibition work installed in Amphis is also available to view on a monitor in reception, as Amphis is not wheelchair accessible.
Accessible parking and toilets are available.
Covid Safety
Wheelchair accessible transport - We can offer wheelchair accessible transport from Cambridge. If you require wheelchair accessible transport, please tick the box on the Eventbrite checkout page and we will be in touch by email to confirm arrangements with you. Free Companion Tickets for transport are available if required. Please let us know by Wednesday 1 December at 12 midday so we can make arrangements.
If you have other access requirements that you would like to check with us before booking, please get in touch with Ceri Littlechild, Wysing’s Head of Operations, at ceri.littlechild@wysingartscentre.org and we will be happy to help.
Saturday 16 October, 2–6pm
You are invited to join us for the launch of two exhibitions at Wysing: and then, a harrowing, which brings together work by three of Wysing’s 2020 residents, Linda Stupart, Carl Gent and Kelechi Anucha and An echo imprinted, a new solo exhibition from artist Robert Foster-Jones as part of Wysing's Test Space programme strand.
The launch event is open to all, but due to Covid-19 the event is ticketed and booking is essential. Book a free ticket on Eventbrite here.
Find out more about and then, a harrowing here and An echo imprinted here.
The exhibition launch runs between 2 to 6pm on Saturday 16 October. Two slots will be available to attend the exhibition opening, allowing for a small crossover period between the two. During this time refreshments and drinks will be available. The event is open to all, but due to Covid-19 the event is ticketed and booking is essential.
Transport options from Birmingham, Cambridge and London are available with ‘pay what you can’ options.
Event Timings and Tickets Options
Bookings for tickets with transport close on Thursday 14 October at 12 midday.
2–5pm Entry
- Ticket without transport - free
- SOLD OUT Ticket with Birmingham transport - £12 or pay what you can (depart Digbeth, Birmingham at 12pm; arrive Wysing at 2pm; depart Wysing at 5pm and arrive back in Birmingham approx. 7pm)
- Ticket with Cambridge transport - £8 or pay what you can (depart Cambridge train station at 1.30pm; arrive Wysing 2pm; depart Wysing 5pm and arrive back in Cambridge at 5.30pm)
3-6pm Entry
- Ticket without transport - free
- Ticket with London transport - £12 or pay what you can (depart London Kings Cross at 1pm; arrive Wysing at 3pm; depart Wysing at 6pm and arrive back in London approx. 8pm)
Please note: Wysing is a not-for-profit organisation.
As a registered charity, we are committed to supporting artists and ticket sales help to support our charity mission. We ask you to pay what you can afford and leave it to your discretion. Please keep in mind that there are people who will genuinely need the cheaper tickets and we will have a limited number of those to offer.
Access Information
The outdoor grounds at Wysing are uneven and have varying surface textures, which may cause some difficulty for unaccompanied wheelchair users.
The work in Amphis is also available to view on a monitor in reception, as Amphis is not wheelchair accessible.
Accessible parking and toilets are available.
Wheelchair accessible transport - We have a limited capacity to offer wheelchair accessibility for Cambridge and London transport. If you require wheelchair accessible transport, please tick the box on the ticket checkout page and we will be in touch by email to confirm arrangements with you. Free Companion Tickets for transport are available if required. Please let us know by Monday 4 October so we can make arrangements.
If you have other access requirements that you would like to check with us before booking, please get in touch with Ceri Littlechild, Wysing’s Head of Operations, at
ceri.littlechild@wysingartscentre.org and we will be happy to help.
Covid Safety
To help keep audiences, artists and staff safe, capacity will be limited. Transport to the launch arranged by Wysing will be at reduced capacity.
Toilets will be available in Wysing’s buildings and sanitiser points are available around the site.
If the event is cancelled due to Covid, paid transport tickets will be fully refunded.
Ain Bailey & Hannah Wallis
16 August 2021, 5pm
Book a ticket via Eventbrite here
Discussion will focus on the development of Version, Ain Bailey’s current exhibition at Wysing Arts Centre, curated by Hannah Wallis as DASH Curator-in-Residence. The in-conversation event will be followed by an opportunity for questions from the audience. The studio visit will be streamed live on our Wysing Broadcasts site at the link here.
Desktop Studio Visit
Version runs between 12 July to 22 August open daily 12-5pm, free admission.
Book a ticket to the exhibition by clicking here.
Access Information
This event will be captioned. Please get in touch with us to let us know if there is something you need to be able to participate in this event, by emailing Elizabeth Brown on lizzie.brown@wysingartscentre.org.
About Ain Bailey
Ain Bailey is a sound artist and DJ whose compositions encompass field recordings and found sounds and are inspired by ideas and reflections on silence and absence, architectural urban spaces, and feminist activism. Her electroacoustic compositions are created for a variety of forms, including multichannel and mixed media installations, moving image soundtracks, live performance and dance.
In 2019 Bailey exhibited as part of The Range at Eastside Projects, Birmingham; RE: Respite at Transmissions Gallery, Glasgow; and presented her first solo exhibition, And We’ll Always be a Disco in the Glow of Love at Cubitt, London. Bailey has collaborated with numerous artists including; Sonya Boyce with Oh Adelaide! which toured to Iniva, London, Tate Britain, CCA, Glasgow, Whitechapel Gallery London and The Kitchen, New York between 2010-2015; as well as Jimmy Robert, Jasleen Kaur and most recently Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski with Remember to Exhale for Studio Voltaire, 2019.
Between 2017-2019, The Pitch Sisters was presented as part of Sounds Like Her, a touring exhibition curated by Christine Eyene and commissioned by New Art Exchange, Nottingham and a Serpentine commission working with MRI clients who are LGBT+ asylum seekers and refugees remains ongoing. In 2020 Bailey was commissioned by Radiophrenia Festival and in 2021 will be presenting new works with Rewire Festival and Tectonics Festival.
About Hannah Wallis
Hannah Wallis is an artist and curator based in the Midlands. Concerned with how visual and performative knowledge production can inform and be informed by collectivisation, collaboration and long-term research cycles, Hannah has worked under the moniker of Dyad Creative since 2014 and is currently working as curator-in-residence at Wysing Art Centre alongside her role as Assistant Curator at Nottingham Contemporary. Committed to embedding accessibility practices within the arts and supporting the working rights of artists and art-workers, Hannah has worked with National Gallery, London, Aural Diversity, DASH and East Street Arts among others.
About DASH
DASH and Wysing Arts Centre are working together as part of a three-year programme of curatorial commissions providing individual residencies for three artists/curators who identify as Deaf and Disabled people with three major arts organisations around the UK.
7 August 12pm to 5.30pm
Free admission
Join us on-site for Wysing Open Studios 2021, a celebration of Wysing’s studio and associate artists.
Wysing Open Studios 2021
Visitors will be able to see work in the studios, meet the artists and explore the variety of work being made throughout Wysing’s rural campus.
Artists include Damaris Athene, Philip Cornett, Emanuela Cusin, Lawrence Epps, Robert Foster, Bettina Furnée, Penny Klein, Mae, Aaron Ossia, Soheila Sokhanvari, Shawn Stipling and Caroline Wendling.
Visitors will also have the opportunity to explore Caroline Wendling's new commission, Hypoteinousa, a sound walk through Wysing's topographies and part of the Test Space programme. For more information, click here.
If you would like to combine visiting the open studios with seeing Wysing's current exhibition, Ain Bailey: Version (12 July to 22 August), click here to book a ticket.
To see the range of Adult Art Courses offered by our studio artists, click here.
Access Information
Accessible parking and toilets are available.
The outdoor grounds at Wysing are uneven and have varying surface textures, which may cause some difficulty for unaccompanied wheelchair users.
The ground floor studios of Bettina Furnée and Caroline Wendling have a small step and are not wheelchair accessible. The first floor studio of Philip Cornett is not wheelchair accessible.
If you have other access requirements that you would like to check with us, please get in touch with Elizabeth Brown at
lizzie.brown@wysingartscentre.org
and we will be happy to help.
Covid Site Safety
Booking is essential for this event. Studio artists will be permitting access to their private studios – for their safety we will have a capacity limit for each studio. Please wear your mask when visiting a studio.
5 May 2021 6pm-10pm (drop in)
Join British Council Net//Work Residency artists Uma Breakdown, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and Leyya Mona Tawil on Discord to celebrate the opening of the Net//Work Exhibition, taking place on our Wysing Broadcasts site between 4 May to 7 June 2021.
Join the Discord server here, and visit the exhibition here.
Net//Work Exhibition Open Evening
This will be a relaxed, drop-in event where visitors can explore the online exhibition on our Wysing Broadcasts site in their own time, and will have the opportunity to chat to the artists on Discord. The artists will be online on Discord during the following timeslots:
Uma Breakdown - 6-7pm
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley - 7-8pm
All artists - 8-9pm
Leyya Mona Tawil - 9-10pm
The exhibition will draw on the development of the artists’ digital research during the residency. From games to interactive audio and film, the exhibition will present these very different practices through the connections and reciprocity formed between the artists.
To find out more about the Net//Work residency click here, and for more information about the exhibition, click here.
Access Information
The Discord chat will be screen-reader accessible. Please get in touch with us to let us know if there is something you need to be able to participate in this event, by emailing Elizabeth Brown on lizzie.brown@wysingartscentre.org.
We will endeavor to hold this event in a digital safe space. We ask all visitors to read our Code of Conduct before attending. Please note that screenshots will be taken throughout this event in order to archive it.
About Discord
Discord is a digital communication platform hosting text-based threads. Attendees of the event will be able to interact with the artists and one another via a text-based chat function. You can access Discord using a browser or via the app.
You do not need to have a Discord account to attend this event. When you are sent the event link after booking on Eventbrite, simply enter your name and date of birth (for Discord's age verification procedure). You will then automatically be given the option to create a Discord account with an email address and password, but you can click out of this box and proceed directly to the event thread if you prefer.
About British Council Net//Work Residency
Net//Work was a four-week residency that ran from 18 January - 14 February 2021 developed in partnership with British Council offering artists a period of reflection, research, practice, skills exchange and professional networking opportunities focused on digital artistic practices and technologies.
Wysing worked with artists
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Uma Breakdown, Nikissi Serumaga and
Leyya Mona Tawil with support from
David Blandy.
Digital Arts Studios joined with Golden Thread Gallery and Momentum Berlin to host Rita Adib, Mohamed Abdel Gawad, Tim Shaw and Maya Chowdhry. Artists took part in a programme of activities including peer-to-peer exchange, mentoring, group critiques and presentations.
British Council in partnership with Wysing Arts Centre and Digital Arts Studios
Desktop Studio Visit: Ruth Angel Edwards
Thursday 29 April, 5pm
The studio visit will be streamed live on our Wysing Broadcasts website at this link.
To register for this free event on Eventbrite, please click here.
A Twitch thread will accompany the livestream. If you would like comment or ask questions on this thread, please create a Twitch account here.
Desktop Studio Visits are a new strand in our online events programme aimed at highlighting research from recent artists-in-residence and platforming new works in progress.
For the first event in the series, Ruth Angel Edwards will be joined by Wysing Curator and Acting Head of Programme John Eng Kiet Bloomfield to discuss her ongoing residency at Wysing which includes various collaborations and investigations, to produce sound, radio, video works and research.
The in-conversation event will be followed by an opportunity for questions from the audience.
Access Information
This event will be captioned. Please get in touch with us to let us know if there is something you need to be able to participate in this event, by emailing Elizabeth Brown on lizzie.brown@wysingartscentre.org.
Biography
Ruth Angel Edwards explores the dissemination of ideology through pop culture, drawing from sub and counter cultural movements both past and present, as well as the conditions which give rise to them. Individualism, the body, gender and sexuality, consumerism and spirituality are recurring themes in her work; hedonism, spectacle and dissent are deconstructed and reformed to create communicative works across a variety of media. For the past few years her 'ENEMA' series of installation works have used fan fictional narratives staged within dense augmented spaces, to explore personal cycles of consumption and waste and the ways these things are politicised as they connect with global capitalist economies. She is interested in how ideology is communicated, consumed, internalised, rebelled against and regurgitated.
Ruth Angel Edwards works across a wide variety of media, showing works in a range of contexts both inside and outside of traditional art settings. She studied on School of the Damned, an alternative postgraduate art course and protest, run by
and for its students in 2014. She has exhibited in the UK and internationally including at Arcadia Missa, Auto Italia South East, Almanac, Peak, London; Bonington Gallery, Flo Skate Park Nottingham; FACT, Royal Standard, Liverpool; Lottringer Halle 13, Munich; Denfrei, Coppenhagen; Human Resources, Los Angeles; Mathew Gallery, New York and Moscow Youth art Biennale. She has produced radio for NTS, Resonance, Sunflower and Comet Radios in London, Montez Press Radio in New York, Berlin and London, Cashmere radio in Berlin, KChung Radio in Los Angeles and WCBN Ann Arbor in Michigan, US.
During her residency at Wysing, through archival research and collaborative investigations, Ruth Angel Edwards will explore the role of broadcast media in community organising and bringing people together, both historically and looking to its future positive potential. Edwards will be joined by various collaborators, including Adam Gallagher, Chloée Maugile, Conrad Pack and Emily Pope to create new works exploring the dissemination of radical and counter cultural material through music subcultures.
17 March to 8 October 2021
Episodes of TRANSMISSIONS were broadcast monthly at 9pm on Wednesdays and 10am on Fridays. Episodes may contain mature content.
Access information: The main stream on the TRANSMISSIONS website was subtitled.
Watch live and find out more on the TRANSMISSIONS website, by clicking here.
TRANSMISSIONS returned for a third Season comprising six episodes.
Season 3 of TRANSMISSIONS ran as six monthly episodes between March and October screening Wednesdays at 9 pm BST and repeated on Fridays at 10 am BST on the TRANSMISSIONS website.
Each artist included in TRANSMISSIONS is paid a fee in return for their contribution. In some instances, artists have waived their fees in order to donate the money to a charity of their choice. With a sense of community, all the money used to pay artists in season 3 has been kindly donated by established art institutions and commercially stable artists.
Episode 6 | 6 October | 9PM BST
REPLAY | 8 October | 10AM BST
'The Band and Friends'
Curated by Tosh Basco
'The things that emanate from the ones I love'
W/ Sophia Al-Maria / Tosh Basco / Patrick Belaga / Kelton Campos / Enantios Dromos / Josh Johnson / Asma Maroof / Fred Moten / Lorenzo Moten / Julian Moten / Matthew Stone / Wu Tsang
Episode 5 | 15 September | 9PM BST
REPLAY | 17 September | 10AM BST
W/ Noor Abed / Noor Abuarafeh / Yazan Khalili / Dina Mimi / Amani Yacoub
This episode of Transmissions is curated by Yazan Khalili who lives and works in and out of Palestine. He is an architect, visual artist, educator, and cultural producer. He is co-founder of Radio Alhara.
Sometimes but especially during our current time, places and images have collided and became one. The image is the place, and the place is an image. The 5 videos by Palestinian artists included within Place? What Place? I don’t see a place here… are asking, contemplating, and playing with this confusion between place and image. They inhabit one and run away from the other. They jump between what they are, videos on a screen, to claiming to be the only possible places where social and political events can occur. Are these images of places? Or are they places that exist only in images? Do these questions matter anymore?
Yazan Khalili lives and works in and out of Palestine. He is an architect, visual artist, educator, and cultural producer. He is co-founder of Radio Alhara. His works have been exhibited in several major solo and collective exhibitions, including at KW, Berlin (2020); MoCA-Toronto (2020); New Photography, MoMA (2018). Currently he is a Phd candidate at Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam, a guest artist resident at Rijksakademie, and the co-chair of photography discipline at the MFA program at Bard, NY.
Episode 4 | 16 June | 9PM BST
REPLAY | 18 June | 10AM BST
not/nowhere W / Jennifer Martin / Pratibha Parmar
'No Prospects'
Are you still looking for love? Are you between the years 2000 and 2021? Are you ready for the algorithm to shape your desire? not/nowhere presents Pratibha Parmar’s Wavelengths (2000) alongside research by Jennifer Martin.
not/nowhere
not/nowhere (n/n) is an artists’ workers cooperative. Black and POC-led and East-London based, we provide training in skills and techniques for film, audio, performance and writing. Our mission is to ensure that local artists who use new media in their work can access film and media equipment, and acquire the training to use these machines creatively. We are committed to Black and POC artists exploring new possibilities for owning the means of production of our work and finding sustainability in our practice. not/nowhere’s additional focus is to provide infrastructural support for artists working in all mediums, and enfranchise people living or working in London to take pleasure in expressing themselves creatively.
Episode 3 | 26 MAY | 9PM BST
REPLAY | 28 May | 10AM BST
Shen Xin W / You Mi / Wang Tuo / Zairong Xiang
If the variety show exhibits symptoms of social conditionings, can its participants distance themselves from the symptoms? How can a nation-state be seen as land when settler/post/decolonial critique's applications are questionable? How do we speak about our own ethnicity when the doors behind us remain closed, and with walls around each of us? One participant's provocation, "Does China really exist?" is brought into a dialogical structure that asks, "Can fear be cute?" Discussions around ethnicity are pumped into our air hammers and ghostly encounters are channelled across lifetimes, painted in smoke and fire.
Shen Xin (b. 1990, Chengdu) creates moving image installations and performances that empower alternative histories, relations, and potentials between individuals and nation-states. They seek to create affirmative spaces of belonging that embrace polyphonic narratives and identities. Shen Xin’s most recent work, Brine Lake (A New Body), will have its world premiere in Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning, Gwangju Biennale (2021), and its North American premiere in their first US museum solo exhibition at Walker Art Center (2021). Shen Xin has been a visiting artist at numerous institutions including, Slade School of Fine Art, Goldsmiths University London, University of Connecticut, and Newcastle University. They received the BALTIC Artists’ Award (2017) and held the Rijksakademie residency in Amsterdam (2018-19). Shen Xin practice on Miní Sóta Makhóčhe, the land of the Dakhóta Oyáte, as well as in London, UK
Episode 2 | 28 APRIL | 9PM BST
REPLAY | 30TH APRIL | 10 AM BST
“Not a gimmick, a punchline'
Low key, obsessed with reality TV, the multidisciplinary artist and musician Christelle Oyiri presents a specially commissioned episode for TRANSMISSIONS.
Christelle Oyiri (b. Nogent-sur-Marne, 1992) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Paris. She is a sound artist and DJ as well as a performer. Her work highlights forgotten mythologies, the subtle interstices between memory and alienation, DIY culture and technology. Her work has been exhibited at Lafayette Anticipations, France (2019); Frac Lorraine, France (2019); La Gaité Lyrique, France (2018); Espace Arlaud, Lausanne (2018); HEK, Basel (2019) Auto Italia South East, London (2019).
Episode 1 | 17 March | 9PM GMT
REPLAY | 19 March | 10AM GMT
Group show, programmed by Anne Duffau, Hana Noorali, Tai Shani
W/ Ron Athey / JJ Chan / Jamie Crewe / Valie Export / Ioanna Gerakidi / Will Harris / Caspar Heinemann / Ayesha Tan Jones / Martha Rosler / Julietta Singh / Peter Spanjer
"Our collective isolation highlights that all forms of community are now more important than ever, and it is vital that we find mechanisms to support each other through this precarious time. In the landscape that we have found ourselves in, it is clear that many artists, writers and thinkers have had exhibitions, opportunities and subsequent fees cancelled for the foreseeable future. In response to this, we have established TRANSMISSIONS an online platform that commissions artists to share their work within a classic DIY TV show format."
TRANSMISSIONS was established and is programmed by Anne Duffau, Hana Noorali and Tai Shani.
Season 3 is funded and supported by BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Chisenhale Gallery, Forma Arts and Media, Manchester International Festival, Netwerk Aalst, Somerset House Studios, South London Gallery & Wysing Arts Centre.
Image: Adam Sinclair.
Production Director: Lori E Allen
Production Associate: Mika Lapid
Trailer: Adam Sinclair
Music: Maxwell Sterling
Gather, 10th February 2021 3pm–4.30pm
Ticket holders drop in anytime
Subtitled Tour at 3.30pm
SOLD OUT: Join the waiting list here via Eventbrite. If you have booked a space and can no longer make it, please let us know by emailing info@wysingartscentre.org.
For anyone who has been unable to book a ticket, the tour of the open studios will be livestreamed on our Wysing Broadcasts page here at 3.30pm on 10 February.
Net//Work Residency: Virtual Open Studios
Join British Council Net//Work Residency artists Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Uma Breakdown, Nikissi Serumaga and Leyya Mona Tawil for a virtual open studios on Gather, the free social meeting app.
Using an avatar, you are invited to move through each artist’s room to meet the artists and Wysing staff, view works in progress and to engage with recent research. In Gather, ticket holders can drop in at any time during the session and are welcome to navigate the space in their own time.
For those who would like a more structured visit, you are welcome to join a subtitled tour at 3.30pm led by Chloe Page, Digital Producer and Elizabeth Brown, Assistant Curator at Wysing. We will provide subtitles during the tour using otter.ai. The tour will also be streamed via our Wysing Broadcasts site.
To add your name to the waiting list via Eventbrite, please click here.
Access information
The tour at 3.30pm will be subtitled. Unfortunately, it is not possible for us to subtitle other interactions on Gather, but both artists and Wysing staff will be happy to use the chat function for conversations. Simply ask for a conversation over text chat rather than audio, if you prefer.
Please get in touch with us to let us know if there is something you need to be able to participate in this event, by emailing Elizabeth Brown on lizzie.brown@wysingartscentre.org.
We will endeavor to hold this event in a digital safe space. We ask all visitors to read our Code of Conduct before attending.
Please note that the tour will be recorded for our archive and photographs will be taken throughout the event, however you may disable your camera prior to joining if wished. Throughout the event there will be the option to turn off your audio and camera. We will also give notice before recording or streaming.
About Gather
Gather is a free social meeting platform accessible through a web browser. It allows users to move through digital spaces freely, join and leave conversations easily, and interact with videos and other content located in the space.
Click here for a PDF with more information about the Open Studios event and how to use Gather.
About the Net//Work Residency
Net//Work is a four-week residency taking place between 18 January to 14 February 2021, developed in partnership with British Council. The residency offers artists a period of reflection, research, practice, skills exchange and professional networking opportunities focused on digital artistic practices and technologies. This year, the residency is taking place online due to COVID-19.
The online residency aims to find points of connection between four very exciting, but very different practices. The sessions in the residency provide critical support in the form of mentoring, group conversations, problem solving surgeries, guest talks and reading groups. These sessions are used to test ideas, tease out solutions and suggest new possible directions for these artists' projects. Following the residency, artists will have the opportunity to participate in an online exhibition.
Wysing is working with artists
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Uma Breakdown, Nikissi Serumaga
and Leyya Mona Tawil with support from David Blandy.
Digital Arts Studios is joining with Golden Thread Gallery and Momentum Berlin to host Rita Adib, Mohamed Abdel Gawad, Tim Shaw and Maya Chowdhry. Artists are taking part in a programme of activities including peer-to-peer exchange, mentoring, group critiques and presentations.
Drawing on his knowledge of digital technology within creative practices, David Blandy, whose practice slips between performance and video, is working with Syrian artist Leyya Mona Tawil and Uganda-based Nikissi Serumaga. Currently living in Oakland, California, Tawil is a performance and installation artist working with voice, movement and interactive audio electronics, whilst Serumaga is interested in stretching the limits of the screen, looking at the conjunction between physical objects, 3D space and ephemeral moments.
Net//Work’s UK-based artists are Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and Uma Breakdown. Working with video game, animation, sound and performance, Brathwaite-Shirley uses digital technologies to archive Black and Trans experiences, whilst Breakdown uses parallels drawn from experimental feminist writing practices, the study of horror cinema and game design to reconfigure art as an encounter with unstable and desirable processes.
British Council in partnership with Wysing Arts Centre and Digital Arts Studios
Artist Biographies
David Blandy
David Blandy (b. 1976) lives and works in Brighton and London. He studied at Chelsea College of Art and The Slade School of Art. Blandy has established his terrain through a series of investigations into the multiple cultural forces that inform and influence him, ranging from his love of hip hop and soul, to computer and role playing games, geopolitical events and climate cataclysm. His works move between performance, video and installation.
He has exhibited at venues nationally and worldwide such as Focal Point, Southend, UK; Bloomberg Space, London, UK; Art Tower Mito, Tokyo, Japan;
Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum, Helsinki, Finland; Tate Modern, London, UK; The Baltic, Gateshead, UK; Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK; Spike Island, Bristol, UK; Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany; MoMA PS1, New York, USA, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, China. He is represented by Seventeen Gallery, London.
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley works predominantly in animation, sound, performance and video games to communicate the experiences of being a Black Trans person. Their practice focuses on recording the lives of Black Trans people, intertwining lived experience with fiction to imaginatively retell Trans stories.
Spurred on by a desire to record the “History of Trans people both living and past,” their work can often be seen as a Trans archive where Black Trans people are stored for the future: “Throughout history, Black queer and Trans people have been erased from the archives. Because of this it is necessary not only to archive our existence, but also the many creative narratives we have used and continue to share our experiences.” Danielle’s work has been shown in Science Gallery, Barbican, Tate, Les Urbains as well as being part of the BBZ Alternative Graduate Show at the Copeland Gallery. An online component of their work can often be found here.
Uma Breakdown
Uma breakdown is an artist/writer/researcher working around horror studies, feminist literature, and queer RPGs. This year they finished a PhD about The Evil Dead, care, trans* écriture féminine, disaster and play.
Also in 2020 they presented a plant horror RPG (with Una Hamilton Helle, Eltons Kūns, and Erik Martinson) at Kim?, Riga; a video game about sleeping on the ground next to animals for FACT, Liverpool; and a short story about SSRIs and Artaud for Ma Bibliothèque. They are currently researching criminality as love/writing in Genet and Cixous.
Leyya Mona Tawil
Leyya Mona Tawil [Lime Rickey International] is an artist working through dance, sound and hybrid transmissions. Tawil is a Syrian, Palestinian, American engaged in the world as such. Her 24-year record of performance/installation scores that have been presented in cities throughout the US, Europe and the Arab world. Tawil was the 2020 ISSUE Project Room Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow for her NOMADIC SIGNALS program; and a 2018 Saari Residence Fellow (Finland).
Tawil’s solo work - Lime Rickey International’s Future Faith - was nominated for a 2019 Bessie Award in Music. Tawil has received commissioning support from Abrons Arts Center (NYC), KONE Foundation (Helsinki), Pieter Performance Space (Los Angeles), Gibney DiP (NYC) and the Kenneth Rainin Foundation (Oakland). She is the director of Arab.AMP – a platform for experimental live art and music from the SWANA diaspora.
Nikissi Serumaga
Nikissi Serumaga is an independent short filmmaker and programme manager at 32° East, an organisation for the creation and exploration of Ugandan contemporary art. In her own artistic practice, she creates bite-sized content that blurs the lines between fiction and documentary. She has made two fiction/documentary hybrid short films exploring the East African coast line (Speak Soon, 2017), and coming of age (Hibo & Hoden). She also participated in the Pictures of Aging Residency led by 32° East.
A Lament for Power: Screening and
In-Conversation with Larry Achiampong, David Blandy and John Eng Kiet Bloomfield
3 February 2021, 6–7.15pm
The screening and in-conversation will be streamed live on our Wysing Broadcasts website here.
To register for this free event on Eventbrite, please click here.
In collaboration with Art Exchange, we are excited to announce A Lament for Power: Screening and In-Conversation with artists Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, and John Eng Kiet Bloomfield, Curator / Acting Head of Programme at Wysing.
The event will begin with a screening of A Lament for Power, the outcome of a nine-month residency by artists Larry Achiampong and David Blandy at the University of Essex, exhibited at Art Exchange in 2020. This ambitious new film explores the ethics of scientific discovery and the complex relationship between science, politics and race in our age of avatars, video gaming and DNA Ancestry testing. This will be followed by an in-conversation between the artists and John Eng Kiet Bloomfield, with an opportunity for questions from the audience.
Access Information
This event will be captioned. Please get in touch with us to let us know if there is something you need to be able to participate in this event, by emailing Elizabeth Brown on lizzie.brown@wysingartscentre.org.
A Lament for Power investigates how science can be used to understand the world – but also how it is exploited for economic and political ends. At its nucleus is Henrietta Lacks (1920–1951), a black American known to scientists as ‘HeLa’, the name given to the cells that were taken from her body without her consent. Because of their ability to endlessly replicate and become ‘immortal cells’, Lack’s cells have been used in numerous discoveries including mapping the human genome, cures for cancer and the development of Polio and HIV vaccines. However, her contribution remained unknown for decades, reminding us of whose voices are erased from society’s narratives and in doing so, whose interests are served.
Weaving together images from sources that include the gaming world’s Resident Evil 5, Larry Achiampong and David Blandy’s new commission takes the form of a video installation that creates a space to make visible the sometimes murky world of scientific research as they probe at the economic and racial divides that underpin our social structures.
Larry Achiampong and David Blandy’s new work is informed by the research of Dr Antonio Marco from the School of Life Sciences, University of Essex, and Dr Santiago Oliveros previously from Department of Economics at the University of Essex, now at the University of Bristol.
Biographies
Larry Achiampong (b. 1984, UK) is a Jarman Award nominated artist (2018). He completed a BA in Mixed Media Fine Art at University of Westminster in 2005 and an MA in Sculpture at The Slade School of Fine Art in 2008. He lives and works in Essex, and has been a tutor on the Photography MA programme at Royal College of Art since 2016. Achiampong currently serves on the Board of Trustees at Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts) and is represented by C Ø P P E R F I E L D.
David Blandy (b. 1976) lives and works in Brighton and London. He studied at Chelsea College of Art and The Slade School of Art. Blandy has established his terrain through a series of investigations into the multiple cultural forces that inform and influence him, ranging from his love of hip hop and soul, to computer and role playing games, geopolitical events and climate cataclysm. His works move between performance, video and installation.
Thursday 3 June, 5pm
The studio visit will be streamed live on our Wysing Broadcasts website at this link.
To register for this free event on Eventbrite, please click here.
A Twitch thread will accompany the livestream. If you would like comment or ask questions on this thread, please create a Twitch account here.
Desktop Studio Visits are a new strand in our online events programme aimed at highlighting research from recent artists-in-residence and platforming new works in progress.
For the next event in the series, Crystallmess (Christelle Oyiri-K) will be joined by Wysing Curator and Acting Head of Programme John Eng Kiet Bloomfield to discuss a recent residency at Wysing. Using a number of artefacts from the residency as a framework for an informal chat, they will touch on Christelle’s experimentation with sound synthesis and field recordings from a research trip to Guadeloupe and Martinique and work developing a new body of work exploring the intersection of anti-environmentalism, state secrecy and institutional racism.
The in-conversation event will be followed by an opportunity for questions from the audience.
Access Information
This event will be captioned. Please get in touch with us to let us know if there is something you need to be able to participate in this event, by emailing Elizabeth Brown on lizzie.brown@wysingartscentre.org.
Biography
Christelle Oyiri (b. Nogent-sur-Marne, France 1992) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Paris. She is a sound artist and DJ as well as a performer. Her work highlights forgotten mythologies, the subtle interstices between memory and alienation, DIY culture and technology. Her work has been exhibited at Lafayette Anticipations, France (2019); Frac Lorraine, France (2019); La Gaité Lyrique, France (2018); Espace Arlaud, Lausanne (2018); HEK, Basel (2019) Auto Italia South East, London (2019).
Ain Bailey: Version Launch
Saturday 10 July, 3–7pm
You are invited to join us for the launch of Version, our first onsite exhibition of 2021, from sound artist and DJ Ain Bailey.
The exhibition launch is open to all, but due to Covid-19 the event is ticketed and booking is essential.
Book a ticket on Eventbrite here, including options for transport from London and Cambridge.
The exhibition launch runs between 3 to 7pm on Saturday 10 July. Two slots will be available to attend the exhibition opening, allowing for a small crossover period between the two. During this time refreshments and drinks will be available. The event is open to all, but due to Covid-19 the event is ticketed and booking is essential.
Transport options from Cambridge and London are available with ‘pay what you can’ options. We are very pleased to partner with our neighbours Kettle’s Yard to offer those travelling on the London transport a stop at Kettle’s Yard to view the exhibition UNTITLED: Art on the conditions of our time.
Event Timings and Tickets Options
3-6pm Entry
- Ticket without transport - free
- Ticket with Cambridge transport - £8 or pay what you can (depart Cambridge train station at 2.30pm)
4-7pm Entry
- Ticket without transport - free
- SOLD OUT - Ticket with London transport, including stop at Kettle’s Yard - £12 or pay what you can (depart London Kings Cross at 12 midday; arrive Kettle’s Yard 2pm; depart Kettle’s Yard at 3.30pm; arrive Wysing at 4pm; depart Wysing at 7pm and arrive back in London approx. 9pm)
Please note: Wysing is a not-for-profit organisation.
As a registered charity, we are committed to supporting artists and ticket sales help to support our charity mission. We ask you to pay what you can afford and leave it to your discretion. Please keep in mind that there are people who will genuinely need the cheaper tickets and we will have a limited number of those to offer.
Access Information
Sound works in the exhibition are available in experimental textual forms.
Accessible parking and toilets are available.
The outdoor grounds at Wysing are uneven and have varying surface textures, which may cause some difficulty for unaccompanied wheelchair users.
Wheelchair accessible transport - We have a limited capacity to offer wheelchair accessibility for Cambridge transport (London transport is sold out). If you require wheelchair accessible transport, please tick the box on the ticket checkout page and we will be in touch by email to confirm arrangements with you. Free Companion Tickets for transport are available if required. Please let us know by Monday 5 July so we can make arrangements.
If you have other access requirements that you would like to check with us before booking, please get in touch with ceri.littlechild@wysingartscentre.org and we will be happy to help.
Covid Safety
To help keep audiences, artists and staff safe, the reception area for the exhibition launch will be outside and access to the exhibition spaces will be carefully monitored. Transport to the launch arranged by Wysing will be at 50% capacity.
We advise you to dress for spending the day outdoors.
Toilets will be available in Wysing’s buildings and sanitiser points are available around the site.
If the event is cancelled due to Covid, paid transport tickets will be fully refunded.
About the exhibition
Installed in three parts across Wysing’s site, the title pays tribute to the ‘version’ of a vocal reggae track. Throughout the exhibition, Bailey brings together sound and sculpture as means to expand on ideas and techniques of ‘sonic biography’, a generative methodology of sound exploration that the artist has finessed over the years. Presented with the opportunity to occupy several spaces across the site, Bailey has produced a series of works that reflect on the artist’s Jamaican heritage, albeit from the position of someone who has not yet visited the island. The exhibition features collaborations with Elaine Mitchener and Taylor Le Melle and is curated by Hannah Wallis, Wysing’s DASH curator-in-residence.
Ain Bailey’s exhibition is generously supported by Arts Council England, DASH and the Future Curators' Programme, The Henry Moore Foundation and The Elephant Trust.
With special thanks to Martha Todd from Studio1Ceramics.
Episdoes of TRANSMISSIONS are broadcast at 9pm on Wednesdays and 10am on Fridays. Episodes may contain mature content.
Access information: The Transmissions chatbox will feature on both the TRANSMISSIONS website and the Wysing Broadcasts website. Viewers of the subtitled stream and the main stream will be able to easily chat together. Please note if you watch the subtitled stream directly on Twitch, the main chat will not appear.
TRANSMISSIONS returns for Season 2 comprising eight episodes with contributions from BBZ TV, Juliet Jacques, Ignota Books, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Kat Anderson, Plastique Fantastique, Legacy Russell and many others!
Season 2 of TRANSMISSIONS will run as eight weekly episodes screening every Wednesday at 9 pm BST and repeated on Friday at 9 am BST on Twitch. The 1st episode will air on 9th of September 2020. Each artist included in TRANSMISSIONS is paid a fee in return for their contribution. In some instances, artists have waived their fees in order to donate the money to a charity of their choice. With a sense of community, all the money used to pay artists in season 2 has been kindly donated by established art institutions and commercially stable artists.
Episode 1 | 9 September | 9PM BST
REPLAY | 11 September | 10AM BST
Kat Anderson: Bad Man Nuh Flee
Episode 2 | 16 September | 9PM BST
REPLAY | 18 September | 10AM BST
Plastique Fantastique Communiqué:
Beware Mars with Earth in Ascendance
W/ Plastique Fantastique / Arianne Churchman &
Benedict Drew / Christopher Kirubi / Gentle Stranger
Episode 3 | 23 September | 9PM BST
REPLAY | 25 September | 10AM BST
Juliet Jacques: Spectres of Socialism
W/ Bill Morrison / Colin Newman / Deimantas Narkevičius /
The Duvet Brothers / Erica Scourti / Igor & Gleb Aleinikov /
Jasmina Cibic / John Smith / Kerry Tribe /
Octavio Cortázar / Oleksiy Radynski / R W Paul /
Santiago Álvarez
Episode 4 | 30 September | 9PM BST
REPLAY | 2 October May | 10AM BST
Lawrence Abu Hamdan
W/ Maryam Jafri / Maan Abu Taleb & Others
Episode 5 | 7 October | 9PM BST
REPLAY | 9 October | 10AM BST
BBZ TV: Past, Present and Future
Episode 6 | 14 October | 9PM BST
REPLAY | 16 October | 10AM BST
Ignota Books: Deep Deep Dream
Episode 7 | 21 October | 9PM BST
REPLAY | 23 October | 10AM BST
Curated by Anne Duffau, Hana Noorali and Tai Shani
W/ Anaïs Duplan / Carolyn Lazard / Hardeep Pandhal / Imran Perretta / Jordan Lord / Sung Tieu / Tabita Rezaire / Lloyd Corporation / Rehana Zaman / Isabel Waidner & Others
Episode 8 | 28 October | 9PM BST
REPLAY | 30 October | 10AM BST
GLITCHED NARRATIVES curated by Legacy Russell
W/ Georgie Grace, Tony Cokes & Others
TRANSMISSIONS was established and is programmed by Anne Duffau, Hana Noorali and Tai Shani.
Season 2 is funded and supported by BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Chisenhale Gallery, DACS, Grazer Kunstverein, Matt's Gallery, Studio Oscar Murillo, Netwerk Aalst, Somerset House Studios and Wysing Arts Centre.
Image: Adam Sinclair.
Production Director: Lori E Allen
Production Associate: Mika Lapid
Trailer: Adam Sinclair
Music: Maxwell Sterling
6pm, Thursday 23 July
FREE CASH PRESENTS: Welfare to (Art) Work Part 3, the third in a series of investigations into the role of the benefits system in Britain's art, music and subcultural histories from Wysing residency artists Ruth Angel Edwards and Adam Gallagher.
Listen to parts one, two and three on Wysing Broadcasts here.
From Thatcher's Enterprise Allowance Scheme to Tony Blair's New Deal for Musicians, ‘Welfare to (Art) Work’ looks at how welfare policy has affected the lived realities of 'cultural producers' in the UK, and considers what, if any, horizon is left for artists and musicians in today's punitive, broken benefits system. This show includes an interview with experimental musician Stephen Mallinder from Cabaret Voltaire, and was produced at Wysing as part of our 2020 broadcast residencies. The series was commissioned by Montez Press.
Ruth Angel Edwards explores the dissemination of ideology through pop culture, drawing from sub and counter cultural movements both past and present, as well as the conditions which give rise to them. Individualism, the body, gender and sexuality, consumerism and spirituality are recurring themes in her work; hedonism, spectacle and dissent are deconstructed and reformed to create communicative works across a variety of media. For the past few years her 'ENEMA' series of installation works have used fan fictional narratives staged within dense augmented spaces, to explore personal cycles of consumption and waste and the ways these things are politicised as they connect with global capitalist economies. She is interested in how ideology is communicated, consumed, internalised, rebelled against and regurgitated.
Ruth Angel Edwards works across a wide variety of media, showing works in a range of contexts both inside and outside of traditional art settings. She studied on School of the Damned, an alternative postgraduate art course and protest, run by and for its students in 2014. She has exhibited in the UK and internationally including at Arcadia Missa, Auto Italia South East, Almanac, Peak, London; Bonington Gallery, Flo Skate Park Nottingham; FACT, Royal Standard, Liverpool; Human Resources, Los Angeles; Mathew Gallery, New York and Moscow Youth art Biennale. She has produced radio for NTS, Resonance, Sunflower and Comet Radios in London, Montez Press Radio in New York, Berlin and London, Cashmere radio in Berlin, KChung Radio in Los Angeles and WCBN Ann Arbor in Michigan, US.
Adam Gallagher is an artist and writer from and based in London who works mainly through performance, sculpture and publishing. He works against the performative artist ego; disassembling its reliance upon the myopic context, history and industry of art to produce new meaning. He self-publishes a series of pamphlets called ‘E.A.R.F’. The series transposes original fictionalised biographies that aim to dramatise instances in which disparate subjectivities appear, relate, contradict and attempt to coexist, forming a picture of the fallout, failures and flatulence of global capitalism. Recently he has been working in collaboration with Curtly Thomas on his music and performance act, clubcouture and with him and Ruth Angel Edwards on The Unwelcome Collection, a collaborative performance. The project aims to provoke and challenge art’s inherent injustices, its tokenisations, professionalism and cleanliness. Recent exhibitions, performances and projects include: Free Cash Radio Hijack, Cashmere Radio, Berlin (2020), A group show at 3236RLS, (2020), Seminar: Working Title, Black Box Theatre, Oslo, (2020), ‘The Unwelcome Collection: We the Upsetters: Executive Plunge’, Peak Gallery, (2019), ‘What can Robert do next? Where is Roberto going?’, Piper Keys, (2018), ‘Divine Cargo’, South London Gallery, (2018), ‘CC, Klein presents’, with clubcouture, Somerset House, ‘The Unwelcome Collection: An Incendiary Costume Drama’, Auto Italia South East, (2018), ‘Words fail me’, Auto Italia South East. (2018) and ’Polly Anything’, Lima Zulu (2017). Commissioned writing include The Happy Hypocrite issue 11: Silver Bandage, ‘Helpful tips/Call me when you see this!’, ‘Tuna Temperature’, The Tube #3: Loosing, ‘Special Category Status’ and ‘Trust’ for The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis (2018), ‘Extra Judicial Killing’ and ‘What did I do to deserve this?’, Montez Press, Interjection Calendar (2017).
Ruth and Adam started the Free Cash radio project at the beginning of 2020.
14 July to 16 August
Open Studios 2020 brings together Wysing’s studio and associate artists to share their practices. This year we host Open Studios online to provide a platform for the artists to share how their studio practices have changed during 2020 so far and the recent months of lockdown.
Open Studios 2020
Bringing together 15 artists over 5 weeks plus the young artists working with Circuit Cambridge, Wysing Open Studios 2020 will showcase online works, panel discussions, live performances and more.
The event on 21 July will be held on Zoom and the events on 22 July, 30 July, 5 August and 12 August will be streamed live on Wysing's Twitch channel, here.
You can book a space for the events via Eventbrite. Please follow the link below the event. Instructions on how to join the event on Twitch will be emailed to you before the event.
You can also visit Wysing Open Studios 2020 in the 'Explore' section on our new broadcasting website here, for experimental videos, ongoing research and retrospective showcases from Wysing studio and associate artists.
The artists taking part in Wysing Open Studios 2020 are; Damaris Athene, Aliaskar Torkaliaskari, Philip Cornett, Emanuela Cusin, Lawrence Epps, Robert Foster, Bettina Furnée, Naomi Harwin, Penny Klein, Mae, Emma Smith, Soheila Sokhanvari, Lucy Steggals and Caroline Wendling.
More information about each artist's practice can be found here.
Circuit Virtual Social: Regeneration
21 July, 4–5pm
Get creative, meet with other people and be part of online collaborative activities around the theme of Regeneration with Circuit Cambridge, a group of 18 to 25 year olds who work with Wysing and Kettle’s Yard. Over the past month Circuit have been exploring the theme of Regeneration in relation to recent world events, highlighting inequalities and issues in creative ways, as a response to Wysing’s 2020 programme theme of Broadcasting.
The event is recommended for those aged 16 to 25.
Booking for this event has closed.
Studio Artists Panel Discussion (Part 1)
22 July, 5–6pm
With Damaris Athene, Lawrence Epps and Soheila Sokhanvari.
A panel discussion on studio practices during 2020 streamed via Twitch with: Damaris Athene, Lawrence Epps and Soheila Sokhanvari, moderated by Wysing Curatorial Assistant Hannah Wallis. The guest speakers will reflect on their studio practice during 2020 so far, looking at how this will have changed in response to the recent global health crises that led to several months of lockdown.
This event will be streamed live via Wysing's Twitch channel, with the opportunity to ask questions via the Twitch chatbox.
Booking for this event has closed.
an arealist's take on love performance
30 July, from dawn at 4.39am
With Mae and collaborators.
A live-streamed performance from Wysing Arts Centre as part of the Test Space programme with Wysing studio artist Mae plus collaborators.
would you change your rhythm for me is a sonic exploration of re-written rhythms, wave signals...oscillations, stretched frequencies, a moon, quantum whispers...an aerialist's take on love, made with found objects, lo-fi devices, voice and conventional instruments approached as alien.
Booking for this event has closed.
Studio Artists Panel Discussion (Part 2)
5 August, 5–6pm
With Emanuela Cusin, Robert Foster, Bettina Furnée and Lucy Steggals.
A panel discussion on studio practices in 2020 streamed via Twitch with: Emanuela Cusin, Robert Foster, Bettina Furneé and Lucy Steggals, moderated by Wysing Curatorial Assistant Hannah Wallis. The guest speakers will reflect on their studio practice during 2020 so far, looking at how this will have changed in response to the recent global health crises that led to several months of lockdown.
This event will be streamed live via Wysing's Twitch channel with the opportunity to ask questions via the Twitch chatbox.
Booking for this event has closed.
Aliaskar Torkaliaskari in Conversation: Contingency as methodology in contemporary art and beyond. How to risk it when there is nothing left to lose?
12 August, 5–6pm
With Marty Fiati, Travis LaCouter, Bahar Noorizadeh and Lukas Stolz.
A panel discussion streamed live via Twitch with: Marty Fiati, Travis LaCouter, Bahar Noorizadeh and Lukas Stolz, led by Wysing studio artist Aliaskar Torkaliaskari.
Booking for this event has closed.
Access
Please get in touch with us to let us know if there is something you need to be able to participate in our events. For example: transcriptions, subtitles, audio description, or short breaks. Email Ceri Littlechild, Wysing's Head of Operations on ceri.littlechild@wysingartscentre.org.
1 to 31 May
Trace: to find something or someone that was lost
New Geographies and the East Contemporary Visual Arts Network (ECVAN) are delighted to announce Tracing the East, a series of digital events and new audio-visual content that reflect on the traces of New Geographies.
Tracing the East
New Geographies is a three year project which invited the public to nominate locations for ten site-specific art works across the East of England. 11 artists were commissioned to make ambitious new works. The commissioned artists were: Maria Anastassiou, David Blandy, Marcus Coates, Leah Millar, Cooking Sections, Ian Giles, Krijn de Koning, susan pui san lok, Studio Morison, Stuart Whipps and Laura Wilson. Each artist has worked closely on the realisation of their work with one of the New Geographies partner institutions.
Over the month of May 2020, Tracing the East will be an opportunity to come together with the artists and ECVAN to experience some of the works that were produced and discuss and reflect on three key themes that emerged from the ten commissions: Population, Landscape and History.
Tracing the East will include: ten podcasts, five films, one soundscape, one audio walk and a live online game. There will also be two live performances and three live panel discussions discussing themes of Population, Landscape, and History.
From 1 May 2020, material will be available to listen, browse and enjoy via the New Geographies website, here:
- The first 4 episodes from our series of podcasts from Studio Morison, Ian Giles, David Blandy & Maria Anastassiou
- Ian Giles’ Open Ramble East walking maps
- An audio walk by Cooking Sections, Moveable Estates, 2020
- Four films: David Blandy, The World After, 2019, Laura Wilson, Deepening, 2020, Stuart Whipps, Necessary Amendments: Homes for the People, 2019, Maria Anastassiou, Way My It Did I, 2019
- A poem by Mervyn Linford, The World After, 2019
Three live panel discussions will take place on Zoom on 4 May, 14 May and 28 May. In order to view live, you will need to book before the event via Eventbrite. Please follow the link below the event. Instructions for connecting to the discussion via Zoom will be emailed to you before the event.
Online Panel Discussions
Population
4 May, 6–7pm
Discussing the changing communities of the East in relation to the LGBTQ+ community, immigration and population change, how do communities adapt and respond to change? With Maria Anastassiou, Ian Giles, moderated by Dr Amy Tobin, Curator of Exhibitions at Kettle’s Yard.
Landscape
14 May, 6–7pm
From local to global, the effects of climate change in the landscape of the region is addressed through storytelling with David Blandy, Studio Morison (Heather), Cooking Sections, moderated by publisher, writer and curator, Sarah Shin.
History
28 May, 6–7pm
How can the past that inform our future? The use of symbols and references to histories, storytelling and myths – with Laura Wilson, susan pui san lok, Marcus Coates, Leah Millar, Krijn de Koning, moderated by independent Curator, Kate Phillimore.
David Blandy's The World After live role-playing game on Twitch
Saturday 16 May, 1–4pm
Join us on Twitch to watch David Blandy and 6 participants play The World After table top role-playing game live. The game is part of the exhibition originally commissioned by New Geographies and Focial Point Gallery.
Studio Morison Performance:
MOTHER-SHIP...
20 May, 6–6.30pm
Reconfigured quarantine version of MOTHER-SHIP - a performance presenting a mythic reading of MOTHER... as transformational vessel through a dancer’s characterisation of the ‘guardian’, with Sam Amos and Jacken Elswyth.
Access
Please get in touch with us to let us know if there is something you need to be able to participate in our events. For example: transcriptions, subtitles, audio description, or short breaks.
Season 1: 23 April to 29 May
Join us on online for the first season of TRANSMISSIONS, a new online platform established by Anne Duffau, Hana Noorali and Tai Shani. TRANSMISSIONS will be broadcast weekly via Twitch, on Thursdays at 9pm and Fridays at 9am. Each broadcast will last approx. 1 hour and 30 minutes.
Our collective isolation highlights that all forms of community are now more important than ever, and it is vital that we find mechanisms to support each other through this precarious time. In this extraordinary landscape that we have found ourselves in, it is clear that many artists, writers and thinkers are having exhibitions, opportunities and subsequent fees cancelled for the foreseeable future. In response to this, Anne Duffau, Hana Noorali and Tai Shani have established a new project called TRANSMISSIONS. This is an online platform which will commission artists to share their work within a classic DIY TV show format.
Content warning: some broadcasts contain adult themes and content
Episode 1
23 April, 9PM GMT
(REPLAY, 24 April, 9AM GMT)
w/ Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg / Bruce Bickford / CAConrad / Salvador Dali / Brice Dellsperger / Tessa Hughes-Freeland / Juliet Jacques / Sam Keogh / Jiji Kim / Quinn Latimer / Mark Leckey / Kalup Linzy / Sade Mica / Laure Prouvost / Christopher Soto / Patrick Staff / The Cockettes / TV party / Unarius Academy of Science / Su Hui- Yu /// Curated by Anne Duffau, Hana Noorali & Tai Shani
Episode 2: w/ Sophie Jung
30 April, 9PM GMT
(REPLAY, 1 May, 9AM GMT)
Sophie Jung, Leadeyes and Gentlament,
please put your ands together and and and, 2020
Not Not Hot (Annie Goodchild and Legion Seven) / Alexa Barrett / Carl Gent / Rebecca Lennon / Oisin Byrne / Alice Theobald / Dana Michel / Lindsay Seers / The Nicholas Brothers / Benedict Drew / Basil Brush / Jesse Darling with Isa Toledo / Perple Celotape / Tommy Cooper / Sarah Duffy / Inspector Columbo / Jenny Moore with F*Choir / Andy Kaufman / The Socialist Magician... and your hosts Sophie and the Monkey Cat.
Episode 3: w/ Tarek Lakhrissi – Your world is already ending
7 May, 9PM GMT (duration 45 mins)
(REPLAY, 8 May, 9AM GMT)
Tarek Lakhrissi is a visual artist and a poet based in Paris. His works have been exhibited in Auto Italia South East (London, UK), Hayward Gallery (London, UK), Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney, AU), Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France), Grand Palais - FIAC (Paris, FR), Lafayette Anticipations (Paris, FR), CRAC Alsace (Altkirch, FR), Artexte (Montreal, CA), Šiuolaikinio meno centras/CAC (Vilnius, LT), Espace Arlaud (Lausanne, CH), among others. He is a featured artist in the 22nd Biennale of Sydney NIRIN (2020).
Episode 4: w/ Johanna Hedva – Tom Cruise Studies with expert guests Vivian Ia and Matthew Miller
14 May, 9PM GMT
(REPLAY, 15 May, 9AM GMT)
Tom Cruise Studies is a meander of curiosity. There is no driving inquiry other than the question, "What's, like, up with Tom Cruise?" Hedva considers the various roles Cruise has played onscreen and in public, from religious zealot, to cocky upstart, to a man oppressed by his own masculinity, to couch-jumping love-nut, to an exiled actor who clawed his way back into Hollywood via a maniacal obsession with doing death-certain stunts. Joined by two expert guests, Hedva and Vivian Ia will consider the astrology charts of Cruise and L. Ron Hubbard, while Matthew Miller will share his theory that the Mission Impossible franchise is Cruise's vehicle for making public apologies to his ex-wife, Katie Holmes.
Episode 5: w/ STRAWBERRY JAM: A LITERARY HOUR with Mykki Blanco
21 May, 9PM GMT
(REPLAY, 22 May, 9AM GMT)
Join musician Mykki Blanco for an hour of music and poetry readings. Spoken word, lyrical breakdowns, a presentation on two 20th century American literary figures Bob Kaufman & Mina Loy as well as a first time listen to new unreleased musical project.
Episode 6: w/ CAConrad with invited poets
28 May, 9PM GMT
(REPLAY, 29 May, 9AM GMT)
CAConrad's latest book JUPITER ALIGNMENT: (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals, is forthcoming from Ignota Books in 2020. The author of 9 books of poetry and essays, While Standing in Line for Death (Wave Books), won the 2018 Lambda Book Award. They also received a 2019 Creative Capital grant as well as a Pew Fellowship, the Believer Magazine Book Award, and the Gil Ott Book Award. They regularly teach at Columbia University in New York City, and Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam. Please view their books, essays, recordings, and the documentary The Book of Conrad (Delinquent Films) online at http://bit.ly/88CAConrad
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Production Director: Lori E Allen
Trailer: Adam Sinclair
Music: Maxwell Sterling
Each artist included in TRANSMISSIONS will be paid a fee in return for their contribution. With a sense of community, all the money used to pay artists in season 1 has been kindly donated by established UK art institutions and commercially stable artists.
Season 1 is funded and supported by, ArtQuest+DACS, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Oscar Murillo Studio Somerset House Studios and Wysing Arts Centre.
ACCESS
A subtitled version of TRANSMISSIONS was live streamed on Twitch.
If you have questions about access needs, please email Wysing’s Head of Operations, Ceri Littlechild, on ceri.littlechild@wysingartscentre.org.
2020 Programme Launch
Saturday 29 February
Join us at Wysing and Wicken Fen on
29 February for the launch of our 2020 programme.
Helen Cammock – They Call It Idlewild
Naomi Harwin – Encounter
Studio Morison – MOTHER...
Click on the titles above for more information about the exhibitions.
Across the day, from 2–4pm and 5–7pm, we will launch three new projects: an ambitious structure by STUDIO MORISON at Wicken Fen nature reserve; a new commission by Turner Prize 2019 winning artist, Helen Cammock and a new installation by Wysing studio artist, Naomi Harwin, at Wysing.
Schedule:
2-4 pm Launch of STUDIO MORISON at Wicken Fen with refreshments
5-7 pm Launch with drinks and refreshments for Helen Cammock and Naomi Harwin exhibitions at Wysing
Join us for the whole day, or for part of it. The launch events are free to attend. If you require transport from Cambridge there are are paid ticket options available.
Wicken Fen Directions
To find MOTHER... please go to the main car park at Lode Lane, Wicken Fen, Ely, Cambridgeshire, CB7 5XP. There will be information at the visitors centre on how to find the structure. Access to MOTHER... is free and does not require entry payment. The car park costs £3 per day. For more information, please click here.
Travel Information
You are welcome to make your own way to each of the events, or there are 3 transport options available from Cambridge.
1. Wicken Fen and Wysing plus return travel - £16
12.50pm - Departs Cambridge train station to Wicken Fen
2pm - Arrival at Wicken Fen
4pm - Departure from Wicken Fen to Wysing
5pm - Arrival at Wicken Fen
7pm - Depart Wysing to Cambridge Train Station, arriving by 8pm
2. Wicken Fen plus return travel - £12
12.50pm - Departs Cambridge train station to Wicken Fen
2pm - Arrival at Wicken Fen
4pm - Departure from Wicken Fen to Cambridge Train Station, arriving by 5pm
3. Wysing plus return travel - £8
4.20pm - Transport departs Cambridge Train Station
5pm - Arrives to Wysing
7pm - Departs Wysing to Cambridge Train Station, arriving by 8pm
Please note that transport bookings will close at 4pm on Friday 28 February.
Access
If you have questions about access needs please contact Wysing's Head of Operations, Ceri Littlechild, on ceri.littlechild@wysingartscentre.org.
Please note that unfortunately the paths leading to MOTHER... at Wicken Fen are uneven and very muddy in places at the moment due to recent weather, so are not suitable for wheel chairs or scooters. There are disabled car parking spaces in the car park on Lode Lane.
An access guide for our 2020 Programme Launch is available here as a PDF, here as an HTML page, and here as a Word Document.
Boundary + Gesture Closing Event
Saturday 7 December, 12–4pm
To book tickets for the closing event, including return transport from Cambridge station, please click here.
Exhibition open: 12–5pm daily, 7 October to 8 December
On the final weekend of Boundary + Gesture, curator Taylor Le Melle and invited guests Sarah Keenan and Imani Robinson convene an afternoon of reading, walking and discussion.
Researcher and academic Sarah Keenan will lead a seminar that considers Le Melle's exhibition through their own academic research and writing. Following a lunch which we will provide, a meditative walk led by writer and art practitioner Imani Robinson and Le Melle will take in the routes and public footpaths surrounding Wysing that are referenced in the PSS text 'Untitled', which is included in the exhibition.
This event is free and open to all.
Schedule:
11.45am - Arrivals and welcome
12pm - Seminar – reading and discussion led by Sarah Keenan
1pm - Complimentary lunch and opportunity to view the exhibition
2pm - Walk – led by Taylor Le Melle and Imani Robinson
3pm - Closing comments and discussion
A copy of text that will read and discussed together can be found here.
Biographies
Sarah Keenan works at Birkbeck Law School, University of London, where she co-directs the Centre for Research on Race and Law. Her research and teaching are at the intersection of legal and political theory, geography and post-colonial studies. Her monograph Subversive Property: Law and the Production of Spaces of Belonging was published in the Routledge Social Justice series in 2015. She has recently completed a Leverhulme Fellowship on her current project “Making Land Liquid: The Temporality of Title Registration”. To go to Keenan's book click, here.
Imani Robinson is a London-based writer, live art practitioner, plant lover and prison abolitionist. They are one half of Languid Hands, a curatorial project initiated with their Very Close Collaborator, Rabz Lansiquot. In 2019 Languid Hands presented two projects: Towards a Black Testimony at Jerwood, U.K. and Stroom, NL.; and away, completely: denigrate at Narrative Projects, U.K. Imani was a member of sorryyoufeeluncomfortable (SYFU) Collective 2015-18 and completed an MA in Forensic Architecture at the Centre for Research Architecture in 2019. Recent personal projects include: Ditto & Ditto Take a Trip to Port Authority, a moving image work made with Halima Haruna; WELCOME NOTE IN A WELCOME SPEECH, a
collaborative performance with artist Libita Clayton; and The Black Drift, an ongoing series of workshops and performances exploring Black geographies and the psychic afterlives of transatlantic slavery. You can find some less academic and equally abstract writing by Imani in Dream Babes 2.0.
Taylor Le Melle is a curator and writer based in London who has programmed at: Serpentine Galleries, ICA London, Cafe Oto, Chisenhale Dance Space, Arcadia Missa, and Assembly Point (all London), L’IceBergues with Contrechamps Ensemble (Geneva) and McKenna Museum of Art (New Orleans). Taylor’s writing has been featured in: Art Monthly, Flash Art. Taylor is the Autumn/Winter 2018 Writer in Residence at Jerwood Visual Arts. Taylor also co-runs PSS with Rowan Powell. Together they have published projects by Daniella Valz Gen, Victoria Sin and Rehana Zaman (upcoming, 2019). Since April 2018, Taylor has been co-director of not/nowhere, an artist workers’ cooperative that hosts workshops, screenings, exhibitions and other events. not/nowhere’s mission is to ensure that local artists who use new media in their work can access film and media equipment, acquire skills to nourish their practices, and take pleasure in expressing themselves creatively.
Access
If you have questions about access needs please contact Wysing's Head of Operations, Ceri Littlechild, on ceri.littlechild(at)wysingartscentre.org.
Boundary + Gesture
Exhibition Launch: Saturday 5 October,
4–6pm. Curator's Tour: 3–4pm
To book return transport from Cambridge station for the Curator's Tour and launch, please click here.
Exhibition open: 12–5pm daily, 7 October to 8 December
Join us for the launch of our next exhibition Boundary + Gesture, curated by Taylor Le Melle. The exhibition features works by Aslan Ġoisum, Derica Shields, a major new commission by Dominique White, and publications from PSS.
As part of our 30th birthday programme, Le Melle developed the exhibition during their Art Fund supported residency at Wysing earlier in 2019 during which they convened a series of public events that explored notions of property and monetisation.
Boundary + Gesture presents works that situate explorations of gesture and property within landscapes of ‘the rural’. Developed as exhibition-as-research, this experimental exhibition format brings art works in conversation with archival material and texts.
A new commission by UK artist Dominique White will encompass the entirety of Wysing’s gallery and responds to research on Black subjectivity, shipwreck and the Sargasso Sea, navigating a dialogue between the body and material. Repurposing sails, combining fabrics with kaolin clay and galvanised steel, White’s sculptures channel the aquatic landscape as a site of possibilities, and a way of ‘escaping the body and destroying what was held captive’.
Aslan Ġoisum’s video works 'Volga' (2015) and 'Scythian Journey' (2019) will be presented in separate screening rooms, and consider the idea of testimony as well as proprietary law in relation to intimate and state histories of forced migration.
In Wysing’s reception, a polyvocal work by writer and researcher Derica Shields uses archival material surrounding 18th century court cases to create speculative histories. Reconfiguring museum display through sound, Shields will present three fraying, divergent oral fictions that examine property law as debated and lived during what is called Britain’s era of abolition.
PSS, Le Melle’s publishing project with editor/researcher Rowan Powell will present three new pamphlets that further expand on ideas within the exhibition. Rowan Powell presents a new text that links the history of land enclosures in Britain with a story recorded by French surgeon Ambroise Pare in his 1573 text On Monsters and Marvels. A joint new text by Le Melle and artist Aslan Guaimov frames his works in the context of global colonial histories. Using Le Melle’s preferred methodology of foraging existing content, the final text will excerpt writer, curator and artist, Imani Robinson’s essay and ongoing film project “Black Testimony” to accompany Dominique White’s new commission.
Biographies
Taylor Le Melle is a curator and writer. Recent writing has been featured in publications including: Sad Sack by Sophia al-Maria (Book Works); Che si può fare, Helen Cammock's exhibition catalogue (Whitechapel Gallery); Gender, Space (Macmillian) ed. Aimee Meredith Cox; as well as in periodicals such as Art Monthly and Flash Art. Taylor is a member of not/nowhere, an artist workers’ cooperative. Taylor was writer-in-residence at Jerwood Visual Arts in 2018 and curator-in-residence at Wysing Arts Centre in Spring 2019.
Aslan Ġoisum (Chechnya, 1991, lives in Grozny and Amsterdam) employs various artistic media – mainly the moving image, sculptural installation and paper-based techniques – that articulate the collective and individual upheaval marking the North Caucasus history. This inevitably entails analysis of the colonial legacy of the Russian Empire, in all its guises. Recent exhibitions include: Blood and Soil: Dark Arts for Dark Times, Contemporary Art Centre (Vilnius, LT, 2019); All That You See Here, Forget, Emalin (London, UK, 2018); How To Live Together, Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna, AT, 2017) and People of No Consequence, Museum of Contemporary Art (Antwerp, BE, 2016).
Rowan Powell is a writer, editor and PhD Candidate at University of California, Santa Cruz. Alongside Taylor Le Melle, Powell co-runs PSS, a publisher of printed material which has recently launched Daniella Valz Gen’s poetry chapbook Subversive Economies, Rehana Zaman’s Tongues and Victoria Sin’s Dream Babes 2.0.
Derica Shields is a writer and cultural worker from London. As part of a Triple Canopy commission, she is completing a multi-format oral history project centering on Black people's accounts of the UK welfare state. Bad Practice, her book project commissioned by Hannah Black is forthcoming from Book Works.
Dominique White (b. 1993, UK) weaves together the theories of Black Radical Thought with the nautical myths of Black Diaspora into a term she defines as the Shipwrecked; a reflexive verb and state of being. Her sculptures demonstrate how Black life could extend beyond its own subjective limits and act as beacons or vessels of an ignored civilisation defined as the Stateless; a realm in which the past, present and future have converged into a Black Future. White's research reaches back to the sound of Detroit's techno scene, where she continues to reference narratives (situated in space and underwater) depicted by Aux 88 (Tom Tom
and Keith Tucker), DJ Stingray (Sherard Ingram) and Drexciya (Gerald Donald and James Stinson). Recent exhibitions and presentations include Abandon(ed) Vessel at Kevinspace [solo] (Vienna, 2019), a solo booth presented by VEDA at Art-O-Rama (Marseille, 2019), Fugitive of the State(less) [solo] at VEDA (Florence, 2019), Flood-tide, Love Unlimited (Glasgow, 2018); The Share of Opulence; Doubled; Fractional, Sophie Tappeiner (Vienna, 2018); °c, Clearview.ltd (London, 2018); The Conch (April), South London Gallery (London, 2018); Signs | Beacons, Caustic Coastal (Manchester, 2018). White was an artist-in-residence at Curva Blu (IT) June to July 2019.
Access
If you have questions about access needs please Wysing's Head of Operations,
Ceri Littlechild on ceri.littlechild@wysingartscentre.org.
17 August, 12-5pm
Wysing's Annual Open Studios returns on Saturday 17 August when artists who are based at Wysing open their studios across the site.
To book return transport from Cambridge station for Open Studios, please click here.
Open Studios 2019
Nineteen artists work from Wysing's 11 acre rural site, fourteen of whom will be opening their studios to visitors: Damaris Athene, Philip Cornett, Fiona Curran, Emanuela Cusin, Lawrence Epps, Robert Foster, Bettina Furnée, Naomi Harwin, Penny Klein, Mae, Lucy Steggals, Shawn Stipling, Aliaskar Torkaliaskari and Caroline Wendling.
Come and have a look inside these artists' workspaces to see what goes on at Wysing every day in studios. Media includes painting, sculpture, video, photography and installation.
During Open Studios you will also be able to have a look at our current group exhibition 'All His Ghosts Must Do My Bidding' which is located in our gallery and across the site. You might also wish to attend a discussion between Wysing studio artist Bettina Furnée and producer and writer Laura Purseglove at 2pm at nearby All Saints and St Andrews Church, Kingston, where Bettina has a newly commissioned installation.
Tea, coffee and cake will be available to purchase onsite.
Visit our studio artists page here.
Visit the exhibition page here.
18 May – Coppice and Drought [offsite in Cambridgeshire]
23 May – Fuel and Property [online]
30 May – Network and Contact [Wysing Arts Centre]
We wanted to take the opportunity of our 30th anniversary to ask what Wysing’s role might be in addressing the urgent societal issues of our time. Taylor Le Melle has been in-residence at Wysing over the spring and has been developing a series of events as part of our anniversary programme.
“What is the nature of the resources at your disposal? What is the value of your labour? What is there to yield from an investment in depth? What is extracted from a transaction that is considered productive? What are the assets held within your networks? How do the material conditions of work structure intimate contact?”
The events will take place offsite in a nearby wood, online, and across Wysing’s site. We would like to invite you to save the dates.
For more information on 'Coppice + Drought', please click here.
For more information about 'Fuel + Property', please click here.
For more information about 'Network + Contact', please click here.
The 2019 Curator in-Residence is supported by Art Fund.
Biography
Taylor Le Melle is a curator and writer based in London who has programmed at: Serpentine Galleries, ICA London, Cafe Oto, Chisenhale Dance Space, Arcadia Missa, and Assembly Point (all London), L’IceBergues with Contrechamps Ensemble (Geneva) and McKenna Museum of Art (New Orleans). Taylor’s writing has been featured in: Art Monthly, Flash Art. Taylor was the Autumn/Winter 2018 Writer-in-Residence at Jerwood Visual Arts.
Taylor also co-runs PSS with Rowan Powell. Together they have published projects by Daniella Valz Gen, Victoria Sin and Rehana Zaman (upcoming, 2019).
Since April 2018, Taylor has been co-director of not/nowhere, an artist workers’ cooperative that hosts workshops, screenings, exhibitions and other events. not/nowhere’s mission is to ensure that local artists who use new media in their work can access film and media equipment, acquire skills to nourish their practices, and take pleasure in expressing themselves creatively.
Sold Out
20–22 June (20 & 21 June in London, 22 June at Wysing)
The Rural Assembly will take place at Whitechapel Gallery, London, and Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge.
The Rural Assembly draws on a series of public programmes and research that developed throughout 2018. It looks at contemporary artists and creative practitioners who are challenging the assumptions made about rural life and culture, providing a new vision of the countryside grounded in everyday experience and a critique of the rural-urban binary. This culminating assembly considers how artists respond to the established and imposed divides between the rural and the urban. From re-imagined farming practices and food systems to architecture, community projects and transnational local networks, this three-day assembly brings together artists, curators, historians and critics to discuss the role of art in a rural context, inviting a critical outlook at our relationships with the rural today.
For more information about the programme and for bookings, please click here.
Keynote Lecture: Whitechapel Gallery, Thursday 20 June, 7pm
The Rural Assembly will open with a key note lecture from Taiwanese artist and curator Wu Mali. Wali has developed a distinctive approach to working with communities across Taiwan, in projects that consider rural culture, land use, environmental concerns, and the shifting relationship between the rural and urban in Asia. .
Day 1: Whitechapel Gallery, Friday 21 June, 11.30am – 6pm
A full day of panels and seminars on embedded artistic practice in the rural, translocal networks, decolonising the rural and rural representations. To see the full schedule at Whitechapel Gallery, click here.
Day 2: Wysing Arts Centre, Saturday 22 June, 11am – 7.00pm
With a focus on artistic practice and experience in the rural, the second day provides a slower pace with walks, a collective lunch and performances, screenings and seminars.
Coach Departs Kings Cross. Arrives at Wysing 10.30am
11am Welcome and Introduction by Donna Lynas, Director, Wysing Arts Centre
11.15am Walks and Seminar (choice of three)
A) Open Ramble East - Ian Giles A walk led by artist Ian Giles and members of the Open Ramble East Project, considering the complex and often invisible experience of queer identities in rural places and landscapes. Open Ramble East members contributing to the Wysing walk include: Rachel Pimm, James McDermott, Alison Graham, Alice d'Lumiere and Graham Innes.
B) Caroline Wendling Together with locally based farmer William Bevan, Wendling leads a tour of his farm and other sites in Bourn, connecting to local histories, exchanges and experiences.
C)Seminar: Farmer to Farmer - Artist Asunción Molinos Gordo shares her project "De Campesino A Campesino " (Farmer to Farmer), in dialogue with farmer Simon Diss, to address questions of agroecology and peer-to-peer agricultural innovation across informal global networks.
1.30pm Lunch
2.30pm Artistic Utopias? Experimental practice from the Rural
This panel invites artists who self-organise projects from and for rural places, challenging the idea that the rural is a site for artists to ‘escape’ to. From an artist-run space in a remote part of Indonesia, to an experimental farm, to alternative communities around the world, how do artists experiment outside of ‘cultural centres’? Panelists: Ismal Muntaha (Artist, Jatiwangi Art Factory), Léonore Bonaccini and Xavier Fourt (Artists,Bureau d’Etudes) - Grace Ndiritu (Artist), chaired by Lotte Juul Petersen.
4pm Break (15 mins)
4.15pm Possibilities of Rural Belongings: Embodying Liminality
In advance of their performances later in the day, this conversation between artists Jade Monserrat and Harold Offeh, considers critical approaches and practices from the position of being Black British artists in rural environments. Chaired by curator Hansi Momodu Gordon.
5.30pm Performance – Jade Monserrat: Love. Love?
Developed as part of Montserrat’s ongoing Rainbow Tribe project, Love. Love?, emphasises renewal and a renewing of energy and materials against the backdrop of the rural. The works seeks to unsettle representational space, physical privilege, gendered connections of sexuality and empowerment. A somatic response to trauma and healing, the performance is a continuation of Montserrat's work to create transitional spaces and strategies of survival for the body.
6pm Performance – Harold Offeh: BodyLandscapeMemory
The second performance focusses on the presentation of Black bodies in the landscape. Moving away from stereotypes of the labouring or victimised body, the work will explore leisure, play and connections to the physical environment. Taking source material from popular culture: fashion photography, album covers and advertising, the piece presents a series of poses and gestures. Harold Offeh will be performing with collaborators Ebun Sodipo and Samra Mayanja.
6.45pm Coach Departs – arrive at King’s Cross at 8 – 8.30pm
The Rural Assembly is in collaboration with Whitechapel Gallery, th University of Aberystwyth, Manchester Metropolitan University, Myvillages and Istanbul Biennial. The Rural Assembly also forms part of the East Contemporary Visual Arts Network’s project New Geographies, chaired and coordinated by Wysing Arts Centre and supported by an Ambition for Excellence grant from Arts Council England.
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2–7:30pm, Thursday 30 May
Wysing Arts Centre
'Network + Contact' is an afternoon of talks and discussion hosted by curator-in-residence Taylor Le Melle, with artist/ composer free.yard and poets Momtaza Mehri and Dorothea Smartt.
Book your free place via Eventbrite here.
The event’s title references novelist and critic Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue and the adjacency of its two essays – the first mapping the displacement of a community which organised itself around sex and cinema, the second considering the varying qualities of social interaction within a niche group of cultural workers.
Inaugurating a period of study, 'Network + Contact' is borne of a desire to augment the existing arts and labour discourse with considerations on: intimacy, migration, workers’ rights, activism, culture, London, grief, film and performance, celebrity, friendship, collectives, boundaries.
By co-mingling examinations of dispossession and networking as it relates to class, (queer) sex, and labour (in the arts), the aim is to ruminate on questions of:
Why a paradigmatic understanding of historical movements might necessitate a study of the desires that circulated through those networks?
In what ways do the conditions of ones work life set parameters for the terms of one’s intimate exchanges?
How can the affects circulated within a group, unofficially, be traced within canonical studies of the work produced collectively by that group?
Invited guests have been asked to share an offering that will allow the group to reflect on boundaries in both professional and intimate contact.
Event Schedule
Timings may be subject to change on the day
2:00 Doors Open
2:10 Introduction by Taylor Le Melle
2:15 Dorothea Smartt
2:35 Discussion led by Dorothea Smartt / Taylor Le Melle
Break
3:00 Momtaza Mehri (Essay reading)
3:30 Q&A with Momtaza Mehri
Break
4:00 Group reading of Rizvana Bradley "Black Cinematic Gesture and
the Aesthetics of Contagion"
Break
5:00 free.yard
Dinner
6:15 Taylor Le Melle (Response)
6:35 Discussion led by Taylor Le Melle and free.yard
7:30 End
Due to unforeseen circumstances Professor Rizvana Bradley will no longer be able to participate in the event. The group reading session scheduled at 3.00pm will focus on one of Professor Bradley's essays'.
The programme has been devised with readings and presentations interspersed with breaks. Refreshments and food will be provided as part of the event.
'Network + Contact' is the last in the ‘False Economy’ series of events developed by Taylor Le Melle as part of their curator-in-residence period at Wysing Arts Centre.
The 2019 Curator in-Residence is supported by Art Fund.
Bookings
Places for the event are free but booking is essential. Travel tickets are available from Cambridge station on a pay-what-you-can basis (suggested contribution: £8), and should be booked along with the event ticket if required.
To book your place, please click here.
Access
If you have questions about access needs, please email Wysing’s Head of Operations, Ceri Littlechild, on ceri.littlechild@wysingartscentre.org.
Travel Bursaries
There are a limited number of travel bursaries avaialble up to £30.00. If in need of a bursary to cover your journey to Cambridge station, select a free ticket on eventbrite and email Amanprit Sandhu at amanprit.sandhu@wysingartscentre.org with a few sentences to voice your interest in the programme (we are not looking for you to detail your need). Bursaries will be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis.
Biographies
Adam Farah is an artist and composer born-n-raised in London and is a Capricorn Sun, Cancer Rising, Leo Moon. They also practise under and within the name free.yard.
Momtaza Mehri is a poet, essayist and meme archivist. She is the co-winner of the 2018 Brunel International African Poetry Prize. Her work has been widely anthologised and has appeared in Granta, Artforum, Poetry International, BBC Radio 4, Vogue and Real Life Mag. She is the former Young People’s Laureate for London and a columnist-in-residence at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's Open Space. Her chapbook sugah lump prayer was published in 2017.
Dorothea Smartt London-born of Barbadian heritage, is an internationally respected poet/live artist. She was formerly an Attached Live Artist at London’s ICA, and her most recent residencies were in Scotland and Barbados. Her collection Ship Shape (Peepal Tree Press), is an ‘A’ Level English Literature title. In recognition of her contribution to British cultural life, she was nominated for a Barbados 2016 Golden Jubilee Award. Her most recent publication, Reader, I Married Him & Other Queer Goings-On (Peepal Tree Press) is described as “…subversive, radical, and surprisingly panoramic...”. She is working towards a new collection, where she continues to rework standard narratives, this time re-imagining same-sex relationships and traditional religious practices, among the ‘West Indian’ workers constructing the Panama Canal.
Taylor Le Melle is a curator and writer based in London who has programmed at: Serpentine Galleries, ICA London, Cafe Oto, Chisenhale Dance Space, Arcadia Missa, and Assembly Point (all London), L’IceBergues with Contrechamps Ensemble (Geneva) and McKenna Museum of Art (New Orleans). Taylor’s writing has been featured in: Art Monthly, Flash Art. Taylor was the Autumn/Winter 2018 Writer-in-Residence at Jerwood Visual Arts.
Taylor also co-runs PSS with Rowan Powell. Together they have published projects by Daniella Valz Gen, Victoria Sin and Rehana Zaman (upcoming, 2019). Since April 2018, Taylor has been co-director of not/nowhere, an artist workers’ cooperative that hosts workshops, screenings, exhibitions and other events. not/nowhere’s mission is to ensure that local artists who use new media in their work can access film and media equipment, acquire skills to nourish their practices, and take pleasure in expressing themselves creatively.
Image credit: Image courtesy of free.yard
6–9 pm, Thursday 23 May
Online
'Fuel + Property' is an online symposium comprised of mostly found footage and will be broadcast on Thursday 23 May from
6–9 pm GMT.
The symposium reflects an attempt to use agriculture as a metaphor, a way towards finding clarity about the working conditions within culture.
Because fuel can be used in the process of performing work, and work itself is a transference of energy, the quality of what fuels any given instance of work should contain information about what we can expect to yield in any particular industry.
Fueled by content that has already been generated (where possible), this symposium contains reflections on the legal and ideological mechanisms of property, insights into what powers a performance, and assessments of the quality of possible work in the UK arts industry.
Excerpts are selected for both the content of the exposition and the characteristics of the voice delivering the message. Sonic recordings are spliced in between talks and lectures for auditory refreshment. The symposium is ultimately intended to be experienced as a gathering that doesn’t require the work of leaving the house; the invitation is to instead channel your energy toward attentive listening.
With thanks to Rowan Powell and Shenece Oretha.
New contributions from Amal Khalaf, Devin KKenny and Ima-Abasi Okon.
Contributions foraged from the previous work of Maya Angelou, Brenna Bhandar, Anne Carson, Cheryl Harris, Gail Lewis with Hortense Spillers, Marina Vishmidt.
Hosted by Taylor Le Melle with Jay Parekh.
Broadcast schedule
Introduction:
- Devin KKenny, Los Giros de la Sigiente
- Gail Lewis and Hortense Spillers
- Brenna Bhandar
- Devin KKenny, Los Giros de la Sigiente
- Maya Angelou
- Cheryl Harris
- Ima-Abasi Okon and Taylor Le Melle in conversation
- Marina Vishmidt
- Devin KKenny, Los Giros de la Sigiente
- Ima-Abasi Okon and Taylor Le Melle in conversation
- Cheryl Harris
- Ima-Abasi Okon and Taylor Le Melle in conversation
- Devin KKenny, 'Los Giros de la Sigiente'
- Anne Carson
- Gail Lewis and Hortense Spillers
- Amal Khalaf, Response
Outro:
- Devin KKenny, 'Los Giros de la Sigiente'
'Fuel + Property' is the second part of ‘False Economy’, a series of events developed by Curator in-Residence
Taylor Le Melle.
The 2019 Curator in-Residence is supported by Art Fund.
Biographies
Taylor Le Melle is a curator and writer based in London who has programmed at: Serpentine Galleries, ICA London, Cafe Oto, Chisenhale Dance Space, Arcadia Missa, and Assembly Point (all London), L’IceBergues with Contrechamps Ensemble (Geneva) and McKenna Museum of Art (New Orleans). Taylor’s writing has been featured in: Art Monthly, Flash Art. Taylor was the Autumn/Winter 2018 Writer-in-Residence at Jerwood Visual Arts.
Taylor also co-runs PSS with Rowan Powell. Together they have published projects by Daniella Valz Gen, Victoria Sin and Rehana Zaman (upcoming, 2019). Since April 2018, Taylor has been co-director of not/nowhere, an artist workers’ cooperative that hosts workshops, screenings, exhibitions and other events. not/nowhere’s mission is to ensure that local artists who use new media in their work can access film and media equipment, acquire skills to nourish their practices, and take pleasure in expressing themselves creatively.
Image credit: Image from ‘Training For Exploitation? Employability and Reclaiming Education’ by Precarious Workers Brigade, 2017
3–6pm, Saturday 18 May
Hayley Wood, Cambridgeshire (pick up at 2pm from Cambridge Station)
Join us for the first part of ‘False Economy’, a series of events curated by Taylor Le Melle.
From various encyclopaedic entries on coppice and drought:
Coppicing is a traditional method of woodland management which exploits the capacity of many species of trees.
The widespread and long-term practice of coppicing has been of significance in many parts of lowland temperate Europe.
In a coppiced wood, which is called a copse, young tree stems are repeatedly cut down to near ground level, known as a stool.
Typically a coppiced woodland is harvested in sections or coups on a rotation. A regularly coppiced tree will never die of old age; some coppice stools may therefore reach immense ages.
Drought is a shortage of water over an extended period of time. Droughts are a normal part of a climate cycle. They occur in all climate zones. Drought can be short or span years.
Socioeconomic definitions of drought associate the supply and demand of some economic good with elements of meteorological, hydrological, and agricultural drought. Its occurrence depends on the processes of supply and demand.
Drought definitions are of two types: (1) conceptual, and (2) operational. Conceptual definitions help understand the meaning of drought and its effects.
Mentioned in the 1086 Domesday Book, Hayley Wood was the first site to be purchased by the Cambridgeshire and Isle of Ely Naturalists' Trust in 1962. There are many ancient coppice stools in the wood; coppicing was practiced from at least the 13th Century.
The afternoon will feature a visit to Hayley Wood and readings from Daniella Valz Gen,
Evan Ifekoya and Priya Jay.
A bus will pick guests up from Cambridge station at 2.00pm and take them directly to Hayley Wood. You are invited to explore the wood at your own pace. Readings will begin at 4.30pm. The bus will pick guests up from the wood at 6pm and return them to Cambridge station.
Practical Information
You are encouraged to bring snacks and water, comfortable footwear, layers and waterproof clothing. The ground at Hayley Wood is flat, but uneven in places. This event will take place entirely outside and will proceed rain or shine. There are no toilet facilities in Hayley Wood.
Bookings
To book your place, please click here.
Places are offered on a pay-what-you-can basis with contributions going towards travel bursaries for the upcoming ‘Network+Contact’ symposium on 30 May (suggested contribution: £5).
For information on the other events in the series, please click here.
Travel Bursaries
There are a limited number of travel bursaries up to £30.00 available. If in need of a bursary to cover your journey to Cambridge station, select a free ticket on eventbrite and email Wysing’s curator John Bloomfield at
john.bloomfield@wysingartscentre.org with a few sentences to voice your interest in the programme (we are not looking for you to detail your need). Bursaries will be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis.
Access
If you have questions about access needs for the performance, please email Wysing’s Head of Operations, Ceri Littlechild, on ceri.littlechild@wysingartscentre.org
The 2019 Curator in-Residence is supported by Art Fund.
Biographies
Daniella Valz Gen is an artist and a poet born in Lima and living in London. Their work explores alterity and liminality with an emphasis on embodiment. Daniella practices tarot and ritual, and teaches Expanding Writing workshops. Recent publications include Subversive Economies (PSS Press), E.R.O.S Journal, SALT. Magazine, Montez Press Calendar Series, Paperwork Magazine and The Happy Hypocrite.
Evan Ifekoya’s practice explores ‘multiple scales of space and time’ through moving image and sonic installations. Blackness in abundance, a queer reconstituting of the body and the reparative potential of art propels their thinking.
Ifekoya’s recent work has been presented at: De Appel Amsterdam, La Casa Encendida Madrid Somerset House London and Tyneside cinema Newcastle (2019), Gasworks London and Camden Arts Centre (2018) Contemporary Arts Centre New Orleans as part of Prospect 4; Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh, KW institute, Berlin; New Art Exchange, Nottingham; Plymouth Arts Centre; ICA and Serpentine Galleries, London; Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire; (2017); Transmission Gallery, Glasgow; and Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town (2016). This year, Ifekoya was awarded the Kleinwort Hambros Emerging Artist prize.
Priya Jay is a researcher using curatorial, artistic and herbalist methods to develop a practice that is healing and experimental. She facilitates spaces of co-inquiry, honours embodied knowledge and is interested in non-linear pedagogies. Priya was most recently part of Arts Catalyst and The Otolith Collective's Undisicplinary Residency for her project 'co-scripture', and is currently a recipient of the 2018 Peer Forum at Camden Arts Centre. Priya has worked with Autograph ABP, Iniva, Barbican and Wellcome Trust, and is currently based in London.
Taylor Le Melle is a curator and writer based in London who has programmed at: Serpentine Galleries, ICA London, Cafe Oto, Chisenhale Dance Space, Arcadia Missa, and Assembly Point (all London), L’IceBergues with Contrechamps Ensemble (Geneva) and McKenna Museum of Art (New Orleans). Taylor’s writing has been featured in: Art Monthly, Flash Art. Taylor was the Autumn/Winter 2018 Writer-in-Residence at Jerwood Visual Arts.
Taylor also co-runs PSS with Rowan Powell. Together they have published projects by Daniella Valz Gen, Victoria Sin and Rehana Zaman (upcoming, 2019). Since April 2018, Taylor has been co-director of not/nowhere, an artist workers’ cooperative that hosts workshops, screenings, exhibitions and other events. not/nowhere’s mission is to ensure that local artists who use new media in their work can access film and media equipment, acquire skills to nourish their practices, and take pleasure in expressing themselves creatively.
An opera by artist-musicians,
Ravioli Me Away.
Live Broadcast: 30 March, 12 noon, ResonanceFM
Performance: 30 March, 6–8pm (sold out)
Join us for the performance of The View From Behind The Futuristic Rose Trellis, a bold and ambitious immersive live work and exhibition by Ravioli Me Away (Sian Dorrer, Rosie Ridgway and Alice Theobald). The performance will premiere on Saturday 9 February 5.30–7.30pm (sold out) and will be repeated on Saturday 30 March 6–8pm (sold out).
The surrealist, multi-media opera will take the audience on an audio enhanced journey as The Protagonist (the soul of humanity) searches for a body that can give it meaning. The Protagonist expresses the paradoxical sentiment that everyone is the main character in their own life. The View From Behind The Futuristic Rose Trellis is a colourful, comi-tragic take on individual and collective aspiration, explored and expressed through a genre-diverse score and the ever-present voice of The Narrator, a soprano singer situated amidst the audience.
Access
If you have questions about access needs for the performance or the exhibition, please email Wysing’s Head of Operations, Ceri Littlechild, on ceri.littlechild@wysingartscentre.org
Under 12s will not be admitted into the performance. Under 16s must be accompanied by an adult ticket holder who is responsible for them at all times.
24 November, 12pm–5pm
Artists Joe Moran, Tessa Norton, Rachael Rosen and collaborators invite you to join them for a presentation of new work and in-progress research. To book a place, including options with transport from Cambridge, go to our Eventbrite page here.
Residency Event
Schedule:
12pm: Gallery exhibition Warm Worlds and Otherwise is open. Lunch is available to purchase.
1pm: Welcome from Wysing Curators John Eng Kiet Bloomfield and Lotte Juul Petersen.
1.10pm: Tessa Norton with poet Lucy Mercer. Tessa Norton has been visiting Wysing throughout the year with her family, working on a publication inspired by the rupture to time that accompanies early parenthood. She will be joined by poet Lucy Mercer, winner of the White Review Poet's Prize, for a reading and a conversation. Among other things, they will be considering time, space, ghosts, grief, the limitations of the figure of the mother as imagined by contemporary literature and auto-fiction, and to what extent the parent and child relationship intersects with mysticism.
2.30pm: Break with coffee and light refreshments available from Beanissimo.
3pm: Rachael Rosen with Henry Rodrick. Rachael Rosen will present a live performance of pOrtals with collaborator Henry Rodrick. pOrtals is a collaborative world-building and storytelling exercise that has progressed through many iterations. For this presentation, Rosen will invite Roddick to explore the world of pOrtals, triggering an ever-evolving sound collage.
3.45-4pm: Break with coffee and light refreshments available from Beanissimo.
4pm: Joe Moran with Tora Hed, Moronfolouwa Odiamayo and Oihana Vesga. Joe Moran presents Before We Are Dead, a work-in-progress performance performed by Moran and dancers, Tora Hed, Moronfolouwa Odiamayo and Oihana Vesga, in counterpoint to new drawings and spray paint works. Throughout the year Moran’s research has dealt with expanded notions of choreography in drawing, extended and non-performative temporality in performance, and how a visual art framing may help unfix and disrupt dance’s historical linearity.
5pm: Event ends
The gallery exhibition Warm Worlds and Otherwise will be open throughout the event. The exhibition is artist Anna Bunting-Branch’s first major solo exhibition, staging an ambitious, experimental new work in Virtual Reality.
If you have questions about access needs, please email Wysing’s Head of Operations, Ceri Littlechild, on ceri.littlechild@wysingartscentre.org
For your information, when purchasing food, we only accept cash.
Joe Moran is a British-Irish choreographer with a wide-ranging practice incorporating touring theatre and gallery works, lecture-performance, works on paper and curatorial projects. His work tackles contemporary propositions in dance, performance and critical thought. Recent commissions and performances include Bluecoat (2018), Kettle’s Yard (2018), Sadler’s Wells (Sept 2017), Whitechapel Gallery (2017), Delfina Foundation (2016), Block Universe/fig-2 at the ICA (2015) in collaboration with sculptor Eva Rothschild, David Roberts Art Foundation (Frieze 2014), Nottingham Contemporary (2014), and The Place Prize (2013). Joe is Artistic Director of Dance Art Foundation through which his performance and curatorial work is produced, Dance4 Associate Artist, Sadler’s Wells Summer University Artist (2015-2018) and was a UK Associate at Delfina Foundation (2016). He curated Dance Art Foundation’s two-year research programme Why Everyone Wants What We’ve Got and organises its ongoing Dance Critical Theory Group. As a dancer Joe worked with many distinguished choreographers including Deborah Hay (USA), Siobhan Davies (Bank project UK), Florence Peake (UK) and Pontus Pettersson (Sweden). His adaptation of Deborah Hay’s solo At Once and lecture-performance on the work has toured widely in the UK and internationally.
Tessa Norton works primarily with text and events. Past projects and events include Marriage is Punishment for Shoplifting in Some Countries (Flat Time House, London), The Pure Ideology Personal Brand Workshop (Legion TV, London) and Lustre Fabrics (Saltaire Arts Trail, Yorkshire). Her art writing has appeared in various publications including The Wire, LAUGH, Hoax and Art Licks, and recent readings include Shady Todmorden and Liverpool Biennial.
Rachael Rosen Ltd Ed. is a transmedia artist from the UK who makes use of sound environments and possible play spaces to explore the fissure between author/ reader and online/offline environments. Rosen is known for her atmospheric live sound collage, as well as her ongoing project pOrtals, a world-building and storytelling exercise, which began in 2014 and has included collaborative output with Quantum Natives and Werkflow. She is currently studying an MA in Computational Arts at Goldsmiths; has previously been an artist in residence at Rupert, Vilnius LT (2017) and Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada (2016); performed commissioned work at HeK, Basel (2018), Issue Project Room, New York (2017), New Forms Festival, Vancouver (2016), and the ICA, London (2015); and presented work as part of group show, Vaporents, at VOIDOID Archive, Glasgow (2016).
Movement for Different Bodies:
An Inclusive and Accessible Workshop with Lou Coleman
Saturday 27 October, 12–3pm
This workshop is now full up. To join the waiting list, please click here.
Artist Leah Clements and collaborators Rebecca Bligh, Uma Breakdown, Elena Colman, Alice Hattrick and Lizzy Rose have formed a new network of art practitioners who identify as ‘crip’, disabled, or otherwise non-conforming to standard ideas of good health.
The group has invited Lou Coleman, a Feldenkrais Practitioner and performance artist to lead a public movement workshop open to everybody, particularly those who often feel excluded from dance and movement workshops. This movement workshop is intended as a safe space for all bodies and needs.
The Feldenkrais Method is a gentle yet powerful through-the-body movement approach that respects the incredible abilities of the nervous systems and the plasticity of the brain, helping the brain and body to work together. It is grounded in the belief that everybody can learn, grow and develop, regardless of abilities. The workshop will be embedded in these principles and those of inclusive practices.
If you have access requirements and would like to discuss these before the workshop, please contact Lou Coleman by email, loucoleman@yahoo.co.uk
The workshop will be held in a space that has level access with an accessible toilet. Personal Assistants are welcomed to join.
Please wear warm, layered clothing and bring a yoga mat or blanket for the workshop.
Lou Coleman has been involved in the design and development of inclusive and accessible ways of working since 2009. Among her portfolio she has worked with Candoco Dance (2010-11), StopGap Dance (2014, developing inclusive Feldenkrais practices). As inclusive arts based consultant for FanSHEN Theatre (2015) and Oily Cart (2013-14) on developing more ways to be inclusive for a wider range of audiences. Recently as Diversity Officer for We are Epic (2017-18), the consultancy included setting up of best practices around in inclusion and access within the structure of the organisation. As a qualified Feldenkrais Practitioner, Lou has a lively practice that includes children, teenagers and adults of all abilities, ages, access needs and backgrounds. Inclusion. It’s vital. It works better when it’s inherent in everything we do.
For more details on the crip theory group, click here.
Saturday 28 July, 2.00–4.30pm
Rachael Rosen is in residence at Wysing in 2018, working with a small team of coders and performers to develop a performance and playable archive for pOrtals; an ongoing collaborative world building and storytelling exercise.
As part of her residency at Wysing Arts Centre, Rachael is looking for 12 participants to take part in a mapping workshop. The workshop will share a number of listening, mapping and game techniques that have been used within her practice, especially in the case of her longstanding project, [pOrtals].
Starting from a memory map of the Wysing grounds created by Rachael and her guest collaborators, participants will work together and in smaller groups to playfully negotiate and translate descriptive sensory data in order to build on, explore and share new imaginings of the area. Participants will be asked to take on different roles similar to those found in role-playing games such as Games master), Player, Map maker, before discussing their findings with the larger group.
To give some additional context to the process Rachael will also encourage use of the workshop as an open forum, which may ask participants to consider questions such as, 'preconditioned approaches to gaming environments', 'subjective interpretations of text-based worlds', and 'transitions and the act of merging realities'.
At the end of the workshop, all participants will receive a digital hand-out including links to materials discussed, as well as an invitation to take part in a one-hour 1-2-1 session in the pOrtals world hosted by the artist.
The workshop does not require any previous experience or knowledge of these subjects, but an interest in collaborative storytelling and an inquisitive approach to exploring environments is a plus. To register your interest in participating in this workshops, please create an account, or sign in, here to complete a very short questionnaire. Capacity is limited so pre-registration is required.
Biographies
Rachael Rosen Ltd Ed. is a transmedia artist from the UK who makes use of sound environments and possible play spaces to explore the fissure between author/ reader and online/offline environments. Rosen is known for her atmospheric live sound collage, as well as her ongoing project pOrtals, a world-building and storytelling exercise, which began in 2014 and has included collaborative output with Quantum Natives and Werkflow. She has recently been an artist in residence at Rupert, Vilnius LT (2017); performed commissioned work at Issue Project Room, New York (2017), New Forms Festival, Vancouver (2016), and the ICA, London (2015); and presented work created during residency at The Banff Centre as part of group show, Vaporents at VOIDOID Archive, Glasgow (2016).
Henry Rodrick, a Swedish computer programmer and DJ. He studied Computer Science at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and electroacoustic music at EMS (the centre for Swedish electroacoustic music and sound-art). Before relocating to London, he spent several years connecting the dots between electronic dance music and experimental sounds on the Stockholm club scene. He has previously released music on labels such as Studio Barnhus, done a live mix live for Rinse FM, and is currently developing software systems for unconventional DJing and sound art, such as http://sourceofsomecertainty.com, a collaboration with Corinna Triantafyllidis, which was performed New River Studios.
Eimi Okuno is a Software Engineer from Tokyo. She completed her Fine Art studies at Central Saint Martins and the Slade School of Fine Art, before turning to Computer Science at University College London and accepting a position at the BBC. Having taken an untraditional pathway that joins robotics, multimedia arts and installation, she explores relationships between form and expectation. She has had work presented at The Meenan Sisters gallery in London (2011), and was shortlisted for Neil Gaiman's Calendar of Tales project. Since then she has been participating in hackathons across the UK and the US, bridging journalism with engineering.
Saturday 14 July, 12–5pm
Wysing studio artists invite you to visit their studios to see new work and to hear about projects in development.
Eighteen artists will be opening their studios and showing work in Wysing's reception and we also have a range of outdoor sculpture across our eleven-acre site.
Damaris Athene, Jack Cornell, Philip Cornett, Fiona Curran, Emanuela Cusin, Ben Doherty, Lawrence Epps, Robert Foster, Bettina Furnée, Naomi Harwin, Laura Hindmarsh, Paulette Mae, Soheila Sokhanavri, Shawn Stipling, Wilf Speller, Lucy Steggals and Caroline Wendling will all be showing work.
In additon, ARTIST at RISK (AR)-Residency artist, Tito Valery, who is at Wysing across the summer from Cameroon, will be presenting new work in our onsite Wysing Polyphonic recording studio.
The day is free and open to all.
Find out more about Wysing studio artists here.
thecafe@wysing is open for hot food plus a selection of sandwhiches, paninis and cakes will be open from 10am to 4pm.
The exhibition 'Making Everyday' for which Wysing's gallery has been transformed into an expanded pottery studio and from which Korean artists Hyunmin Chin, Jina Lee and Jungyou Choi have been working every day, is open from 12 to 5pm. More information about the exhbition is here.
The full list of permanent on-site works is here.
16 and 17 June, 1-5pm
Free
From 16 June Wysing’s gallery will be transformed into a space for making things; products that are easy to make, useful, and pleasing. Book your place to help us make things to be fired in our rare Anagama, wood-burning, kiln. Book your place at the workshops here.
If you'd like to help with the 48 hour firing, register your availability here.
Making Everyday: Workshops
The ‘in common ownership’ designs for the products have been developed over the past year and combine ideas and skills drawn from an UK-Korea exchange co-ordinated by Grizedale Arts and Wysing Arts Centre. Master potter Gyung-kyun Shin, black bamboo master Seonhui Choe, and chef Gae-hwa Lim, developed initial designs with UK designer/maker Tom Philipson and Grizedale Arts. These designs will be further evolved into a ‘family’ of products at Wysing by Korean designer Jungyou Choi, and potter, Hyunmin Shin, during a residency at Wysing in June and July.
The designs will make up a family of products for domestic use. Nests of bowls and bento boxes, chop sticks and spoons and many other fusions have been developed to be made with the simplest of means and homemade tools.
Potter, Hyunmin Shin, will be in-residence at Wysing refining the products and preparing Wysing’s onsite Anagama kiln for a spectacular 48-hour firing in early July. Wysing’s wood-fired Anagama kiln was built in 1998 by Japanese potter Izumihara Masanobu to a traditional Bizen, tear-drop shaped, design.
Over the course of three weeks, products will be made in Wysing’s gallery, where they will also be stored and dried, creating a working space and exhibition that will illustrate some of the key ideas behind the project, drawing on the Arts and Crafts movement, the Korean Intangible National Asset register and many other design revolutions.
During Saturday 7 July, a Study Day with invited speakers and contributors will explore the themes of materiality, craft and making, and there will be an opportunity to visit the kiln whilst the firing is taking place.
Further artists involved in the UK-Korea exchange programme will contribute to the thinking and inspiration behind the project, and the aesthetic presentation of their research over the past year. This includes UK artists Aaron Angell and Mark Essen who recently completed a residency in Korea, as well as Jina Lee and the Fairland Collective.
You are invited to join us over the weekend of 16 and 17 June to help make some of these products, working with designers and potters and using clay, which will be fired in Wysing’s Anagama Kiln.
The gallery will remain open every day from 16 June to 15 July and will include works in production, alongside research that has informed the object designs.
Making Everyday builds on a previous collaboration with Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, Joe Hartley and Sam Buckley. The UK-Korea residency exchange is funded by Arts Council Korea (ARKO) and Arts Council of England. With thanks to Ben Brierley and Lawrence Epps.
Saturday 14 April, 12.45pm–4pm
Join us to close our gallery exhibition more of an avalanche with an afternoon of talks and conversations expanding on the themes it raises.
To book a place, including options with transport from Cambridge, go to our Eventbrite page here.
more of an avalanche - closing event
This event will offer a final opportunity to view the exhibition, which closes on 15 April, and an occasion to expand on some of themes it raises: from sickness and crip theory, to the need for intergenerational conversations, and the dissolution of spaces for both critical conversation and club culture.
12pm – Arrivals including time to visit the exhibition and thecafé@wysing which is open 10am to 4pm.
12.50pm – Welcome.
1pm – Nick Aikens, Curator at Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven and co-curator of recent exhibitions 'The Place Is Here' and 'Rasheed Araeen: A Retrospective' will draw on his research to contextualise more of an avalanche and to revisit the key themes of the exhibition. Followed by a Q&A with Wysing curator John Bloomfield.
1.30pm – Taking their contribution to ‘more of an avalanche’ as a starting point, artist Raju Rage will be in conversation with Trishna Shah. Together they will discuss their research and experiences of activism that informed the work.
1.50pm – Break with time to visit the café.
2.20pm – Artist Leah Clements will discuss ideas and issues around sickness and ‘crip’ theory and talk about a new network of art practitioners who will be in residence later this year at Wysing.
2.40 pm – Current artist-in-residence Phoebe Collings-James will talk about the new work she is developing with Last Yearz Interesting Negro/Jamila Johnson-Small in relation to disobedience and sound as a weapon.
3pm – Music producer Elijah will present 'Last Dance', a timely and urgent investigation into the rapid changes affecting UK club culture, and the impact of those changes on music and youth culture.
3.20pm – Open conversation followed by a summing up from Nick Aikens.
4pm – Ends
Contributor Biographies:
Nick Aikens has been a tutor at the DAI Art Praxis since 2013. He is currently a curator at the Van Abbemuseum (since 2012). Recent and ongoing projects have focused on the 1980s and specifically the UK Black Arts Movement, and a retrospective / monograph on Rasheed Araeen. He leads the current research programme Deviant Practice at the Van Abbe. He is a Research Affiliate, CCC at the Visual Arts Department, HEAD, Geneva (since 2016) and a member of the editorial board for L’Internationale Online (since 2013). He was also recently a tutor at the Design Academy Eindhoven (2015-17).
Leah Clements is an artist based in London. Her practice is concerned with emotional experiences, the relationship between the psychological and the physical, and instances of self-loss into other people or worlds. Self/other boundaries and collective identities, the subconscious, and the impact of emotion on the body have been explored through collapse (prelude) at Muddy Yard (2017), we felt the presence of someone else at Jupiter Woods (2016), Beside Chisenhale Gallery Online Commission (2016), Beside at Chisenhale Gallery (2015), You Promised Me Poems, Vitrine (2015), and The Empath Project at Res. She is an artist in residence at space, London on the Art + Technology programme where she has been working on a VR game titled sick bed, and will be an artist in residence at Rupert, Vilnius in June 2018. During her residency at Wysing she has invited collaborators Rebecca Bligh, Uma Breakdown, Elena Colman, Alice Hattrick and Lizzy Rose to form a new network of art practitioners who identify as ‘crip’, disabled, or otherwise non-conforming to standard ideas of good health.
Phoebe Collings-James is a Jamaican British artist, born in London and living in New York. Her practice is intentionally messy and sprawling, focused on how we live with getting bodied. Her works take form in drawing, video, sculpture, text and music, with a distinctly corporeal approach. She burdens ubiquitous materials with a process of symbolic layering, all in order to explore emotional connections to the politics and erotics of violence, language and fear. Phoebe’s work has been exhibited internationally - exhibitions include Harlem Postcards, Studio Museum Harlem, ATROPHILIA, Company Gallery, New York, Just Enough Violence, Arcadia Missa, London, Choke on your Tongue, Artuner at ICI, London, The Flesh Is All You Have If You Mortify That There Is No Hope For You, Ritter Zamet Gallery, London and Blood on the Leaves Blood on the Roots, Preteen Gallery, Mexico City.
Elijah is an electronic music producer and co-founder of influential grime label Butterz, described by the Guardian as “one of the genre’s smartest operations”. He and the core artists (Flava D, Swindle & Royal-T) on the label he runs with his partner Skilliam have toured globally and have been a fixture across the club and festival circuit since 2010. He held a residency at London’s fabric from 2013-2016, and broadcasted weekly on the then pirate, now community station Rinse FM from 2008-2014. It’s seen him collaborate with all of the top tier artists in Grime such as Skepta, JME, Wiley, Kano and Stormzy. His work spans music programming, journalism, a&r and artist management, and shines a light on the artistic, social and economic challenges and opportunities for emerging artists. His podcast series Rhythm&Cash® explored these issues head on with MCs, Producers and Journalists talking openly about how they make a living. As Associate Artistic Director at Lighthouse, Elijah produces ‘Last Dance’ a series of talks, performances and online publications, that takes the debate on the road and into clubs and galleries in cities across the UK, for a timely and urgent look at the rapidly changing landscape for artists and creative communities.
Raju Rage is an interdisciplinary artist who is proactive about using art, education and activism to forge creative survival. They primarily use their non-conforming body as a vehicle of embodied knowledge; to bridge the gap between dis/connected bodies, theory and practice, text and the body and aesthetics and the political substance. They work in performance, sculpture, soundscapes and moving image, focusing on techniques of resistance and utilising everyday objects and everyday life experiences in communicating narratives around gender, race and culture. They investigate history, memory and trauma, with an emphasis on colonial legacy, its continuation and impact on the body. Raju Rage is based in London and has recently shown work visibility vs opacity at Dirty Politics Filthy Mouth, Framer Framed Amsterdam and Edinburgh's Artist Moving Image Festival, published in 'Decolonising Sexualties: Transnational Perspectives, Critical Interventions and presented at ‘Sediments and Arrhythmias: race, sense and sensation' at UCL on the body and the un/archive.
Trishna Shah aka Trishna I has been a roots reggae DJ and singer for over 15 years, building connections in the UK roots reggae soundsystem scene. She co-founded Uprizing - a Cambridge based promotions company who have organised events throughout the UK. She is a writer and contributor to Galdem magazine, and is part of Off Road Circus - an organisation that combines circus and social activism.
Saturday 10 March, 10am - 6pm
Various locations
As part of the project New Geographies, we would invite individuals, groups, friends or families (birth or chosen) to have their photograph taken in the landscape of Cambridgeshire.
Open Call for participation with Harold Offeh
Artist Harold Offeh is inviting people living and working in Cambridgeshire to select a specific landscape in their local area within which they would like to be photographed. They can choose any kind of pose, for example it might have a connection to family, from an old photo, film or album cover. Offeh recently moved to Cambridge, and as a relative newcomer, is interested in peoples’ relationship to their local landscape.
This open call comes from Offeh's project The Lounging Series.The series focuses on Offeh's re-enactments of reclining or lounging black men on 1980s album sleeves. The work was developed during a residency at Wysing last summer where the artist performed the poses in rural settings. The reclining figure has long been a familiar position in fine art from ancient times to the present.But what does the pose mean? Offeh's photographic series playfully looks at the social and cultural value of assuming a chosen pose in a landscape.
You may want to pose in a site that has been suggested for the new map of East of England as part of our New Geographies project here or suggest another site that you find personally interesting. Refreshments will be provided and following the photography session you will receive a copy of your photograph.
Please respond to the open call via email with subject line ‘Harold Offeh’ to info@wysingartscentre.org by 26 February. Please send your name and suggested location in Cambridgeshire. For any questions, contact Wysing Arts Centre by email or phone on 01954718881.
Harold Offeh uses performance, video, photography, learning and social arts practice. He often employs humour to confront the viewer with histories and stories. He is interested in learning from the experiences of re-creating and re-staging historical material artefacts and images.
New Geographies’ aim is to create a new map of East of England based on personal thoughts, reflections and stories of those who live here, rather than on historic or economical centres. During the Summer of 2017, we invited the public to nominate overlooked or forgotten places throughout Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Suffolk and received over 270 nominations. Further details can be found at www.newgeographies.uk
2 December 1-6pm
Join artists in residence Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, Imran Perretta and Morgan Quaintance for an event that includes the live recording of a radio show exploring the highs and lows of art and culture in 2017, screenings and presentations, and a live DJ set.
Book your free place via Eventbrite, alongside options to book travel, here.
Residency Event
To close their residencies Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, Imran Perretta and Morgan Quaintance have devised an event that shares some of the works and ideas they have been developing at Wysing.
12pm: Gallery and Cafe Abantu open.
1pm: Welcome and event introduction.
1.10pm: Morgan Quaintance will stage a live recording of 'Studio Visit', a one-hour interviews-based radio show broadcast monthly on Resonance 104.4FM. Featuring a panel of invited guests including John Douglas Millar, Shama Khanna, Amanprit Sandhu and Erica Scourti, this special end-of-year episode, titled 'That Was the Year That Was', will survey the highs and lows of art and culture in 2017. Followed by a discussion.
2.30pm: Break with food and drinks available to purchase in the onsite cafe.
3pm: Maryam Monalisa Gharavi will present the work Eva's Face (video installation, 2017) that explores one woman's experience with facial paralysis. The work exists in a larger constellation of Gharavi's recent film works concerning the instrumentalisation of the face in ways of knowing, corporeal encounters between self and other, and ultimately, the limits and freedoms of embodied personhood. This will be followed by a discussion.
4.15pm: Break.
4.30pm: Imran Perretta will perform a live DJ set, surveying forms of experimental UK bass music including new tracks written during his residency period at Wysing.
5.30pm: Drinks available to purchase in reception.
6pm: Ends.
The exhibition Andromedan Sad Girl will be open throughout the event, 12-6pm. Cafe Abantu is open from 10am to 4pm.
Contributor Biographies
Shama Khanna is an independent curator, writer and educator based in London. Recent collaborations include: warehouse.industries (Berlin & London); 'Shades of Opacity' at Jerwood Visual arts (London); texts for Art Monthly, LUX and Aorist journal which she co-edits with 7 other writers.
John Douglas Millar is a writer based in London. His first book Brutalist Readings: Essays on Literature was published by Sternberg Press (Berlin) in 2016.
Amanprit Sandhu is an independent curator and writer based in London. She has most recently worked on projects for Art on the Underground and Art360, DACS Foundation. She is co-founder of the curatorial collective DAM Projects.
Erica Scourti was born in Athens, Greece and is now based in London and Athens. Her work across video, text and performance explores personal experience translated through contemporary interfaces and institutions.
Live performance event
Saturday 4 November, 2-5pm
Please note that this event contains adult content and is not suitable for under 18s.
This event is now sold out and the waiting list is now full. We kindly ask anyone with a ticket who can no longer attend to cancel their ticket on eventbrite, or to contact us.
Andromedan Sad Girl Performance Event
As part of their exhibition, Florence Peake and Tai Shani have developed a live performance event, followed by an in-conversation with Dr Amy Tobin of the University of Cambridge, on feminism and the collaborative nature of the exhibition.
Peake and Shani will perform two separate works simultaneously within the installation:
The first is a reading from Tai Shani's on-going project, Dark Continent Productions, an experimental and expanded adaptation of Christine de Pizan's 1405 pioneering feminist book, The Book of the City of Ladies, within which Pizan builds an allegorical city for notable women drawn from a medieval conception of history, where fact, fiction and myth are blurred. Read by actress Gemma Brockis.
At the same time, Peake will perform with dancer Eve Stainton - interpenetrating waves of energy constellating in time and space, a vocal and movement score that demonstrates some of the methodologies used in the wall paintings and looks at penetration from an energetic perspective and how bodies are porous to their environments.
Running Times
2pm Arrival & Welcome in Wysing's reception
2.10pm Viewing of the show
2.30pm Performances in the gallery
3pm Break
3.20pm In conversation in the open studio
4.10pm Discussion
5.00pm End
Refreshments will be available to purchase from Café Abantu in reception
Florence Peake’s practice encompasses visual art, dance and performance. As a trained dancer Florence Peake’s background in choreography and painting stimulates a studio practice that is both diverse and immersive. Peake is often working performatively to incorporate drawing, painting and sculptural materials. Florence Peake’s work has been shown nationally and internationally; she is a recipient of the Jerwood Choreographic Research project, 2016. Her solo performance piece, Voicings, has toured to Sara Zanin Gallery, Rome, 2017; the Serpentine Gallery, Mysterical day, 2016; Somerset House for Block Universe performance festival, 2016. Solo exhibitions include: WE perform I am in love with my body Bosse and Baum Gallery 2017, The Keeners Solo show at SPACE 2015; Hall of the swell, Gallery Lejeune, 2015; The BALTIC, Newcastle ensemble piece MAKE. Group exhibitions include: Walled Gardens in an Insane Eden, curated by Marcelle Joseph 2017, Hayward Gallery, a 3 month performance installation as part of Mirrorcity, 2015; National Portrait Gallery, performing group work Paper Portraits, 2015. She has done commissions from: Whitechapel Art Gallery; Yorkshire Sculpture Park; Modern Art, Oxford; Chapter Arts, Cardiff; Harris Museum, Preston; David Roberts Art Foundation, London.
Eve Stainton‘s ongoing practice with The Uncollective over the last four years has been focussed on collaboratively using movement, choreography and performance/improvisation to develop a space where politics can engage with and provoke dialogue around instinct, aesthetics and desire. The Uncollective's work has been presented at venues including: The Place, Yorkshire Dance, Royal Academy of Arts, Tangente Danse Montreal, Chisenhale Dance Space, Paris Fashion Week, TripSpace, RichMix, Guest Projects, Lake Studios Berlin, Greenwich Dance, Adelaide Fringe and other venues in Montreal, Canada. Eve has worked freelance for artists/companies/platforms including: Compagnie ECO (Sicily), Oreet Ashery, Goldfrapp, Sonia Boyce, Dog Kennel Hill Project, Susannah Hood (Montreal), Eleesha Drennan, Gary Clarke, Vivienne Westwood, Eva Kotàtkova, Jacopo Miliani, Florence Peake, Holly Blakey, Fashion Week (London, Shanghai, Paris, Berlin).
Tai Shani's multidisciplinary practice, comprising performance, film, photography and installation, revolves around experimental narrative texts. These alternate between familiar narrative tropes and structures and theoretical prose to explore the construction of subjectivity, excess and affect and the epic as the ground for a post-patriarchal realism. Shani's on-going project Dark Continent Productions that proposes an allegorical city of women is an experimental and expanded adaptation of Christine de Pizan's 1405 pioneering feminist book, The Book of the City of Ladies within which Christine builds an allegorical city for notable women drawn from a medieval conception of history, where fact, fiction and myth are blurred. This non-hierarchical approach also determines the construction of the characters and narrative of Dark Continent. Shani has presented her work extensively in the UK and abroad, recent exhibitions and commissions include, including Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm (2016); RADAR commission, Loughborough University, (2016), Serpentine Galleries (2016); Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2015); Southbank Centre, London (2014-15); Arnolfini, Bristol (2013); Matt’s Gallery, London (2012) and FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais and Loop Festival, Barcelona (2011); The Barbican, London (2011); ICA, London (2011)
Amy Tobin is an art historian and writer. Her research looks at the history of feminist-influenced art and the possibilities of feminist futures. She completed her PhD at the University of York in 2017 with a thesis titled 'Working Together, Working Apart: Feminism, Art and Collaboration in Britain and North American, 1970–1981'. She has taught Modern and Contemporary Art and Theory at the Universities of York and Birmingham and Goldsmiths. Her research is published in British Art Studies, MIRAJ and Tate Papers and she has contributed chapters to Collaboration and its (Dis)Contents, (Courtauld Books Online, 2017), Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and Experimental Film in the 1970s (IB Tauris, 2017), Feminism and Art History Now (IB Tauris, 2017) and A Companion to Feminist Art (Blackwell, 2017 [forthcoming]).
Thursday 19 October
2-4pm
Join us for informal presentations by our autumn residency artists, Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, Imran Perretta and Morgan Quaintance.
Autumn Residency Artists Presentations
Join Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, Imran Perretta and Morgan Quaintance for informal presentations on their work and to hear about what they plan to do during their residencies at Wysing this autumn.
The three artists work across writing, publishing, curating, music and video. Find out more about their work here.
Why not come and have lunch in our café and join the talks afterwards? The cafe serves a range of hot food, including vegetarian and vegan options.
Please book your free ticket for the artist presentations here.
Saturday 19 August, 6.30–9pm
Current residency artists Harold Offeh, Tai Shani and Maxwell Sterling invite you to join them for an evening of newly developed performances and on-going research. Transport from Cambridge is available here.
Please note that this event contains adult content and is not suitable for under 18s. Part of the event will be outside on Wysing's site, so please wear appropriate clothing and footwear.
Harold Offeh will be in conversation with Dr Zach Blas discussing shared research interests from Edouard Glissant's concept of "opacity", through to technology that documents the body and ideas around "hyper-subjectivity".
Tai Shani will invite the actress Maya Lubinsky to read from her feminist horror film, I Am Paradise, a fleshy Promethean myth told in space but not in time. The text forms part of Tai's on-going project Dark Continent Productions, an experimental and expanded adaptation of Christine de Pizan's 1405 pioneering feminist book, The Book of the City of Ladies, within which Pizan builds an allegorical city for notable women drawn from a medieval conception of history, where fact, fiction and myth are blurred.
For his residency at Wysing, Maxwell Sterling is observing, experimenting and re-synthesizing the human voice, as a way of de-coding and studying its profound role as a communications device and musical instrument. Maxwell has been recording with youth choir Harringey Vox and drawing on an archive of late night conversations compiled by artist Max Hawkins for the Call in the Night app. Maxwell's research will culminate in a performance with vocalist Teresa Winter (The Death of Rave). Live voice and instrumentation will converse with recorded voices, creating a dialogue between permanence and transience, fragility and beauty, ancient and modern.
Schedule
6.30 pm: Informal welcome with light refreshments
6.45 pm: Harold Offeh in conversation with Dr. Zach Blas
7.30 pm: Break with light refreshments
7.45pm: Tai Shani reading of I Am Paradise. Read by Maya Lubinsky
8.15pm: Maxwell Sterling live performance with Teresa Winter
8.45pm: Closing reception with light refreshments
9pm: Ends
Biographies
Maxwell Sterling is a composer and musician whose work ranges from film soundtracks to live performance, studio albums to ballet scores. With a background in jazz improvisation and film music, his work is often focused on how music is used as a mode of communication and signifier of emotions. In 2016, he released his debut album, ‘Hollywood Medieval’ which explores the role of synthesis and digital sounds and their effect on us emotionally. Sterling collaborated with artist Linder and curator Kathy Noble on Art Night 2016, Destination Moon, You must not look at her! which featured a live tableaux of dancers, two choirs, a string ensemble and two drummers. Sterling currently works between Los Angeles and the UK.
Tai Shani’s multidisciplinary practice, comprising performance, film, photography and installation, revolves around experimental narrative texts. These alternate between familiar narrative tropes and structures and theoretical prose in order to explore the construction of subjectivity, excess and affect and the epic as the ground for a post-patriarchal realism.
Harold Offeh was born in Accra, Ghana and grew up in London. He works in a range of media including performance, video, photography, learning and social arts practice. Offeh often employs humour as a means to confront the viewer with historical narratives and contemporary culture and is interested in the space created by the inhabiting or embodying of history. He has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally. In 2017 he will be exhibiting as part of Untitled: art on the conditions of our time at New Art Exchange in Nottingham, UK and Tous, des sangs-mêlés at MAC VAL, Museum of Contemporary Art in Val de Marne, France. He lives in Cambridge and works in Leeds and London, UK.
Dr. Zach Blas is an artist and writer whose practice engages technology, queerness, and politics. Blas’s recent works respond to technological control, biometric governmentality, and network hegemony. Facial Weaponization Suite (2011-14) consists of “collective masks” that cannot be detected as human faces by biometric facial recognition software. Contra-Internet (2014-present) explores subversions of and alternatives to the internet and is supported by a 2016 Creative Capital award in Emerging Fields.
Teresa Winter is a musician from the Yorkshire coast who makes bedroom pop. Her music is comprised primarily of wordless vocals and other kinds of sounds made with synthesisers, field recordings and various instruments. Teresa's musical explorations began a couple of years ago as a distraction from studies when her heart had been mercilessly broken, she found it to be a strangely life affirming experience. Teresa has recently been preoccupied with the permeation of death and life, and the absence of vocabulary around loss. The Death of Rave will release her next record, Untitled Death.
Maya Lubinsky grew up in London, Israel and New York, her life and work still span these three homes. Maya completed her theatre training at ArtsEd, London, and established herself acting in theatre, television, film and in the fine art context. Her collaborations with artists such as Tai Shani, Anja Kirschner and Gail Pickering have featured in art galleries including Tate Modern, Barbican Centre, Hayward Gallery, ICA, Arnolfini, the Kunstverein in Stuttgart and the Artists Space gallery in New York. In 2007 Maya joined the theatre company Punchdrunk in devising and performing Masque of the Red Death at the Battersea Arts Centre. When Punchdrunk opened Sleep No More in New York City's Off-Broadway, they invited Maya to join them there as part of the original cast of the show, now in its fourth year. Maya co-wrote Peter Burr's performance art piece Special Effect, which premiered at the Museum of Moving Image in New York. She co-wrote and acted in the film Moderation by Anja Kirschner, which premiered in the 2016 Berlinale.
Saturday 8 July, 2pm-6pm
For the last weekend of our gallery exhibition, Mene Mene Tekel Parsin, Wysing's studio artists will be welcoming the public to their studios to see new work and to hear about projects in development.
Twelve artists will be opening their studios and showing work in Wysing's reception and we also have a range of sculpture across our eleven-acre site. The following artists will be showing work: Phil Cornett, Alison Gibb, Laura Hindmarsh, Bettina Furnee, Naomi Harwin, Florian Roithmayr, Robert Foster, Soheila Sokhanvari, Wilf Speller, Ash Summers, Lucy Steggals and Caroline Wendling.
The day is free and open to all.
The full list of permanent on-site works is here. Find out more about our studio artists here.
Cafe Abantu is open from 9am to 6pm and the gallery exhibition Mene Mene Tekel Parsin is open from 12 to 5pm.
22 June, 6-8pm
Somerset House Studios
A screening programme at Somerset House Studios, London, accompanies the exhibition Mene Mene Tekel Parsin.
Places are free but spaces is limited. Book your place here.
The exhibition Mene Mene Tekel Parsin brings together a number of works by international artists who employ words and language to illuminate and obfuscate, fully cogent of the propagandist deployment of slogans and the seductively tall tales of advertising copy, including work by Sarah Boulton, Stanley Brouwn, Jesse Darling, Gordon Hall, Evan Ifekoya, Sulaïman Majali, Imran Perretta, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Özgür Kar, Claire Potter, Rosa Johan Uddoh, Hannah Weiner and Constantina Zavitsanos.
A programme of live works by Gordon Hall, Elaine Mitchener and Claire Potter were presented at the launch of the exhibition.
This accompanying screeing programme includes works by Sonia Boyce, Hamishi Farah, Carolyn Lazard, Miloš Trakilović and Anna Zett.
6.15pm Welcome and introduction
Anna Zett, Text to Speech, 2015
Duration: 9:38
Miloš Trakilović, XYZ, 2016
Duration: 6:46 mins
Carolyn Lazard, Improved Techniques, 2013
Duration: 4 mins
Hamishi Farah, Study, 2016
Duration: 10 minutes
7pm Break
Sonia Boyce, Exquisite Cacophony, 2015
Duration: 35 mins
Curated by Jesse Darling and supported through public funding from Arts Council England.
Drawing course led by artist Caroline Wendling
Thursday 15 June, 10am-12noon
£15 per ticket
Exploring Through Drawing
This course, led by Wysing studio artist Caroline Wendling, will study different ways of drawing, using both traditional and contemporary drawing techniques to explore different ways of seeing.
The course is both a one-off event and a taster session for a more expanded five-week course that is being developed by Caroline Wendling and which will start this September.
This two-hour session takes food as its starting point and will begin in Wysing’s onsite café, Café Abantu, with a practical exercise including drawing around food and objects directly onto a tablecloth. The next activity will involve exploring Wysing’s site through drawing activities. The course will end with a sharing and discussion of the drawings back in the café.
The course is aimed at people with no drawing experience who would like to try out different kinds of drawing techniques within a supportive group and who would enjoy the opportunity to draw outdoors.
Caroline Wendling has been based at Wysing for a number of years and she is an experienced art teacher; regularly running courses and workshops for adults and children at all levels of ability. In Caroline’s work she explores ideas of place and belonging through drawing, print and three-dimensional constructions, attempting to give material form to the complex interconnectedness of our internal landscapes in relation to the space we inhabit.
Course price: £15. Drawing materials provided. Food is available to purchase from the café. To book your place please visit Wysing's Reception or click here.
Cafe Abantu is open from 9am to 4pm and the gallery exhibition Mene Mene Tekel Parsin is open from 12 to 5pm.
9 June, 8pm-3am
DIY Space for London, London SE15 1TF
£5
Purchase advanced tickets here
Wysing Arts Centre present an all-inclusive night of DJing and dancing, with Women's Beat League, SIREN DJs and particpants from WBL's study week at Wysing..
Women’s Beat League is a Portland, Oregon collective dedicated to teaching and co-learning DJing and music production skills with a focus on representing female-identified and nonbinary views in electronic music. Following a week long retreat at Wysing Arts Centre, Felisha, Daniela, Alyssa and Kathleen will be joined by friends old and new, for a night at DIY Space for London.
This is a safe space prioritised for women and non-binary individuals, but all DIY Space members and their guests are welcome. Join DIY space for London here for £2 a year. Membership takes 48 hours to process.
Alyssa Beers DJs as Nishkosheh, the yiddish word for so-so. Her sets are inspired by up-all-nighters and brass monkeys, overflowing with rippin’ guitars, cheery acid chuggers, and unexpected turns. Her penchant for smooth is matched by her need for the bizarre, drawing influences from a wide array of leftfields from island funk to moody techno. In addition to her work as a founder of Women’s Beat League, she also toils as a community facilitator with her efforts in Pushboard – a weekly events newsletter, and S1 – a local art & music space in Portland, Oregon.
Kathleen Hong is a DJ interested in the intersections of sound and resistance within a decolonial context. She is a part of the music programming team at S1, Portland.
Daniela Karina is a DJ and community organiser focused on highlighting marginalized voices. She finds inspiration in emerging transcultural sounds and reinvented ancestral rhythms, bringing the fringes of diasporic club music to the upper left United States. She is cofounder of Women’s Beat League and staff at S1.
Felisha Ledesma is an artist and organiser based in Portland, OR. Felisha is the Executive Director of S1, an artist-run center that strives to provide engaging, relevant, and critical visual art, performance and education programming. In 2015 Felisha co-founded Women's Beat League with the goal of representing femme and nonbinary electronic musicians. And in 2016 Felisha co-founded the S1 Synth Library which is dedicated to providing education and access around modular synthesis to local, national, and international artists by hosting regular workshops, open library hours, and an artist-in-residence program. Felisha's focus has been providing low or no cost access to art and education in a supportive, nontraditional learning environment.
SIREN is a collective that started a year ago in London, with the purpose of creating a space for those under-represented in dance music on lineups and in crowds. Their parties, zines and radio shows aim to be musical and political platforms for women and non-binary people, as well as a space to critique current trends within electronic music and create alternatives. SIREN are not a DJ collective but many do DJ and focus on the exploring the broadest sense of techno - from electro to minimal, acid to breakbeat.
Find out more about the Study Week here and Women's Beat League here.
You are invited to join the artists, and invited contributors Ghislaine Leung and Rebecca Shatwell, to discuss subjects including the radical potential of informal conversation, the temporal process of memory, and issues around translation and poetry.
The day includes a brunch hosted by residency artist Raju Rage followed by walks and talks within the grounds of Wysing and the surrounding countryside.
The walk will be at a gentle pace and will last a maximum of 2 hours. Please wear appropriate footwear and clothing suitable for the day's weather. Please also bear in mind we will be using public footpaths which may not be accessible for pushchairs, wheel chairs or for those with other access needs. The brunch will include gluten-free and vegan options.
Travel from Cambridge station is available for this event. Book here.
Full Schedule
12 – Welcome from Wysing's curators, John Bloomfield and Lotte Juul Petersen, in Wysing's reception
12.15 – Brunch and discussion hosted by residency artist Raju Rage
13.30 – Open conversation led by residency artist Claire Potter and artist and writer Ghislaine Leung on Wysing's site
14.15 to 16.15 – Walk in the local countryside, including breaks for reflection and conversation, led by residency artist Pallavi Paul and Director of AV festival Rebecca Shatwell
16.15 – Open discussion with tea/coffee in Wysing's reception
17.00 – End of the day
Artist and writer Ghislaine Leung, lives and works in London and Brussels. Recent solo projects include The Moves at Cell Project Space, London, 078746844 at WIELS, Brussels, Soft Open Shut at Studio Voltaire, London and group projects Hollis & Moneyat Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and ICA, London, Violent Incident, Vleeshal, Middelburg, Prosu(u)mer, EKKM, Tallinn andPerformance Capture, Stedelijk, Amsterdam. Recent writings in How To Sleep Faster, LA.NL, Amsterdam and Pure Fiction's Dysfiction, Frankfurt with her collection of writings Partners forthcoming in 2017. Leung is editor of Versuch Press and member of PUBLIKATIONEN + EDITIONEN. She was resident at WIELS, Brussels 2015 and Hospitalfield, Arbroath in 2016.
Rebecca Shatwell is Director of AV Festival, Newcastle upon Tyne. She curated the past four editions of the biennial Festival of contemporary visual art, film and sound, including the most recent Meanwhile, what about Socialism? in 2016. She has curated solo exhibitions with artists including James Benning, Torsten Lauschmann, On Kawara, Jessica Warboys, Claire Fontaine, Pallavi Paul and Cyprien Gaillard, in addition to performances with Roee Rosen, Phill Niblock, Test Dept, Bruce McClure and Charlemagne Palestine amongst many others. Festival film programmes have focused on artists including Naeem Mohaiemen, Eric Baudelaire, Lav Diaz, Ben Rivers and Duncan Campbell. Shatwell studied history at Oxford University before completing an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, London. Previous roles include curating public programmes at CCA, Glasgow and founding alt.gallery an independent space for sound art. She is on the board of directors of Pavilion, an arts commissioning organisation in Leeds. The next edition of AV Festival takes place in March 2018, www.avfestival.co.uk
Claudia Firth is currently a PhD researcher at Birkbeck College, University of London in Cultural and Critical Studies, Department of English and Humanities. Her PhD is a non-linear history of three moments of post-economic crises (30’s, 70’s and the present). Her research interests include the art and politics of listening, tools and machines, shared knowledge production, political subjectivity and the sharing economy. She has a background as a visual artist and has facilitated workshops of different kinds in both arts and activist arenas. She has worked with the Precarious Workers Brigade, the Radical Housing Network and other activist groups. She also lives in a housing cooperative. Her writings include articles for Nyx, the journal for the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, Dandelion, the journal at Birkbeck College and DIS online magazine. She has forthcoming articles in journals Parallax and Ephemera.
For more information on the Spring residency artists click here.
Production Workshops
with Ravioli Me Away
21–23 April, daily 12–5pm
Ravioli Me Away are a music/performance group comprising of artists and musicians Sian Dorrer, Rosie Ridgway and Alice Theobald.
Ravioli Me Away have been working together since 2013, have released two albums, and performed at various festivals, arts and music venues across the UK and Europe. Following a recent research and development residency at Wysing, Ravioli Me Away are producing their first large-scale immersive performance work – View from Behind The Futuristic Rose Trellis which will be premiered at Wysing in 2018 and tour to venues and galleries including BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead and Nottingham Contemporary.
As part of the work, Ravioli Me Away are looking for participants to help them explore the role of the chorus within the theatrical construct, and how it relates to the collective and the individual. This three-day workshop will be a collaborative exploration with open discussions, practical group exercises, simple role play and improvisation including singing, acting and audio recording. The aim of these fun and open workshops is to potentially contribute and generate material for the final production. Please be aware that workshops may be filmed and audio recorded.
Workshops will run from 12 to 5pm across the three days. Ravioli Me Away are looking for ideally twenty people to participate, and a commitment of a minimum of one day is requested. The workshops are suitable for participants age 18 and over. Food and refreshments will be provided throughout and no previous singing or acting experience is required!
To register your interest in participating in these workshops, please create an account, or sign in, here to complete a very short questionnaire. Capacity is limited so pre-registration is required. The deadline for pre-registration is midnight Monday 17 April.
View from Behind The Futuristic Rose Trellis is a live multimedia production which will seek to speak for the world in a material and emotional sense. The correlation between the performance and process will be evident throughout the final piece and will cut between film, theatre, dance and live music. The production will attempt to address the big questions in life from an analytical yet comical perspective. The work is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.
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Saturday 25 March
During 2017 Wysing are committed to exploring ‘many voices’ across all our programmes within the over-arching title Wysing Polyphonic.
Opening the Channels: Resolutions
Launching the Wysing Polyphonic residency programme and responding to Wysing's All Channels Open exhibition, this study day will consider what steps can be taken to "open the channels" and what is at stake in seeking to include "many voices".
For the study day, spring residency artists Pallavi Paul, Claire Potter and Raju Rage will be joined by invited contributors Taylor Le Melle, Annie Jael Kwan and Wail Qasim, all of whom will present a "resolution", a proposal for how institutions, artists and the public might ready themselves to confront 2017 with "all channels open". These resolutions will consist of short presentations, readings, performances or screenings to allow for an expansive and open discussion. Breaks throughout the day will allow attendees to visit the All Channels Open exhibition.
Travel from Cambridge station is available for this event. Book here.
12pm: Exhibition and cafe open
1.55pm: Introduction to the Study Day from Wysing curators.
2.00pm: Presentations from Taylor Le Melle and Raju Rage followed by questions
3.10pm: Reading by Claire Potter
3.30pm: Break
4 pm: Presentation from Pallavi Paul followed by questions
4.30pm: Presentations from Annie Jael Kwan and Wail Qasim followed by questions
5.30pm: Open discussion
6pm: Ends
Contributor Biographies
Annie Jael Kwan is an independent curator, writer, researcher and producer based in London. She founded the curatorial partnership, Something Human, in 2012, to focus on her interests in the critical ideas and explorations surrounding movement across borders. Something Human has worked with partners including Barbican Centre, Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent University and the Live Art Development Agency, and has delivered projects the UK, Rome, Venice, Belgrade, Skopje, Lisbon and in Singapore.
Taylor Le Melle is a curator, writer and researcher, based in London. Taylor is a part of C.R.E.A.M. and PSS Press.
Wail Qasim is a writer, critic and activist based in London, primarily taking part in campaigns for racial justice. Their work has covered philosophy, politics, art, culture, immigration, protest and deaths in custody for The Guardian, The Independent, VICE UK and the London Review of Books blog. Wail is also a regular contributor to Novara Media.
For more information on the Spring residencies, click here.
Saturday 19 November, 2–8pm
Electricity flows from motherboards into muscle memory. Neurones fire into logic gates across silicon synapses. We must become a part of the system, in order to overcome it. Welcome to the arcade.
For podcasts of the event, click here.
Meeting the Machine Half-Way
For their Study Day, Meeting the Machine Half-way, current artists-in-residence Larry Achiampong, David Blandy and Gary Zhexi Zhang will be joined by curator Morgan Quaintance, artist Angela Washko, journalist Evan Narcisse, gamer and artist Danielle Nelson (Zakuta/Izanami) and researchers Carleigh Morgan and Nathaniel Zetter, to take part in a programme of talks, demonstrations and a live gaming tournament.
The Study Day will draw on the experiences of professional game-players, researchers and artists in order to explore the history of video gaming culture and to think critically about our embodied relationship to technology, race and sexuality.
There will be a Super Smash Bros (Wii U version), 2014, tournament and a Street Fighter II: Champion Edition, 1992 'winner-stays-on' tournament.
Games will be available to play from 1pm and refreshments will be available from cafe abantu for early arrivals. Early registration for the Super Smash Bros tournament is advised.
2pm – Introduction from Lotte Juul Petersen, Artist and Programmes Curator, and John Bloomfield, Assistant Curator.
2.15pm – Morgan Quaintance on the social context of arcades.
2.45pm – "Cybernetic Communities": Nathaniel Zetter, Carleigh Morgan and Gary Zhexi Zhang in conversation.
3.30pm – Discussion and Q&A.
4pm – First rounds of Super Smash Bros tournament and Street Fighter tournament. Refreshments available from café abantu.
5pm – "A Gamer's Life": Danielle Nelson, David Blandy and Larry Achiampong in conversation.
5.45pm – International gamers' chatroom: Angela Washko and Evan Narcisse in online conversation, moderated by David Blandy and Larry Achiampong.
6.30pm – Discussion and Q&A.
7pm – Final rounds of Super Smash Bros and Street Fighter tournaments. Refreshments available from café abantu.
8pm – Ends.
Artist biographies
Larry Achiampong and David Blandy share an interest in popular culture and the post-colonial position; examining communal and personal heritage within their collaborative practice and using performance to investigate the self as a fiction. Achiampong and Blandy, as individual artists, have been exploring issues surrounding race and culture for many years, albeit from completely different cultural backgrounds. They have been collaborating as Biters and on the Finding Fanon series for over two years, resulting in a body of work including digital imagery, performance and video. Over the past three years, they have exhibited and performed internationally including at Fabrica, Brighton; Iniva, London; Modern Art Oxford; Spike Island, Bristol; ICI/Savvy Contemporary, Berlin; and Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle. Their films are distributed by LUX and David Blandy is represented by Seventeen Gallery, London.
Gary Zhexi Zhang is an artist and writer whose work is concerned with private and political narratives of the virtual. Recent screenings and exhibitions include Would You Like Help at EMBASSY Gallery, Edinburgh and Tenderflix Film Festival at ICA, London. He is a regular contributor to Frieze and Elephant magazines, and recently graduated with a Masters of Philosophy in Criticism and Culture from Cambridge University.
Contributor biographies
Carleigh Morgan is a Fulbright scholar, artist, writer, and researcher exploring the cybernetic sutures between bodies and machines, with particular emphasis on the diagrams of production, communication, and coordination that enclose gamers and their technologies in a chimerical apparatus. Personal interests include using or critiquing wetware, quantified life, AI, virtual reality, biohacking, neuroenhancement, indie games, deeptech startups, object-oriented erotica—and sending romantic dispatches to machine learning bots on Twitter. Carleigh graduated from King's College London in 2016 with an MA in Contemporary Literature, Culture, and Theory and is currently a research assistant at the Centre for Digital Culture, scheming about the automation revolution, the gig economy, and networks of capital accumulation.
Danielle Nelson is an artist and fighting game player having played at a competitive level since 1999. Danielle plays a number of games but is best known for playing Guilty Gear and Tekken. Danielle has worked with Namco, assisting with tournaments and writing character guides in the Official Tekken 5 Guide and helped officially promote the release of BlazBlue in the UK. Danielle has also been selected to participate in the Official Tekken 7 European qualifier, with the winner invited to compete in the grand finals in Japan.
Morgan Quaintance is a London-based writer, musician, broadcaster and curator. Born in South London, he is a regular contributor to Art Monthly, Art Review, Frieze, Rhizome.org and a number of curatorial sites and blogs. He is a contributing editor for E-Flux’s online publishing portal Art Agenda, is a founding member of the curatorial collective DAM PROJECTS, and is the 2015/16 curatorial fellow at Cubitt Gallery, London. As a presenter he currently works with the BBC’s flagship arts programme The Culture Show, and is also the producer of Studio Visit, a weekly hour-long interviews-based programme, broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM, featuring international contemporary artists as guests.
Angela Washko is an artist, writer and facilitator devoted to creating new forums for discussions of feminism in the spaces most hostile toward it. Since 2012, Washko has also been facilitating The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft.
Nathaniel Zetter is a PhD candidate in the faculty of English at Cambridge University. His doctoral research tracks the conceptual exchanges between sport and war in literary texts and in cultural discourse, with a particular focus on the contemporary period. Recent papers on video games include "Perception and Periodization: Video Game Perspective as Symbolic Form" and "Gaming at Work".
Saturday 29 October, 2–6pm
Murray Edwards College, Huntingdon Road, CB3 0DF
Join us for a series of talks and a panel discussion with artists, writers and scientists as they discuss Joey Holder's current solo exhibition at Wysing, Ophiux.
Ophiux Symposium
Taking Holder’s new film, also entitled Ophiux, as a starting point, invited artists, scientists and writers will discuss and question the constitution of the 'human' and 'animal' biology, exploring the technology around genetic data collection and manipulation.
We are delighted that the two scientists whose research has provided the starting point for the work in the exhibition will be presenting at this symposium: Dr Katrin Linse, Senior Biodiversity Biologist, the British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge and Dr Marco Galardini, Computational Biologist, European Bioinformatics Institute at the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Cambridge. The event also includes a presentation from artist Katja Novitskova and artist, writer and publisher Jamie Sutcliffe.
Bookings for the event can be made here.
We are also extending our opening hours at Wysing for anyone wishing to see the exhibition before the symposium, from 11.30am. Plus we are offering transport from Cambridge Station to the exhibition at Wysing then onto the symposium. Details can be found here.
Schedule
2pm, Welcome, Eliza Gluckman, Curator of New Hall Arts Collection at Murray Edwards College, Joey Holder, artist and Lotte Juul Petersen, Curator at Wysing Arts Centre.
2.10pm, Screening of Joey Holder's new film Ophiux which contains unseen footage from deep-sea expeditions showing the harvesting of organisms for their unique genetic information. The film stimulates current digital technologies used to read genetic data and utilise this for our own evolution.
2.30pm, Dr Marco Galardini will give a presentation on evolution and how we can use it to understand differences between individuals.
3.10pm, Katja Novitskova will make a presentation on alien-world and frontier-environment exploration in relation to big data and image production, from the perspective of her work as an artist.
3.50pm Break, tea and coffee available.
4.10pm, Dr Katrin Linse will give a presentation on biodiversity, phylogeography and evolution of the Antarctic marine.
4.50pm, Roundtable discussion with all of the contributors, chaired by Jamie Sutcliffe, writer, artist and publisher with Strange Attractor Press.
5.30pm, Plenary presentation by Jamie Sutcliffe.
6pm, Ends
Biographies
Dr Marco Galardini is a computational biologist interested in microbiology. He holds a PhD in genetics, microbiology and bioinformatics from the University of Florence, where he has studied the genomes of several strains of the plant symbiont Sinorhizobium meliloti. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Pedro Beltrao's lab at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Wellcome Genome Campus, Cambridge, where he is developing models to predict the impact of
genetic differences among different strains of the model gut bacterium Escherichia coli, in collaboration with microbiologist Nassos Typas (EMBL, Heidelberg).
Joey Holder received her BA from Kingston University (2002) and her MFA from Goldsmiths (2010). Recent solo/duo exhibitions include Lament of Ur, Karst, Plymouth (w/ Viktor Timofeev);
TETRAGRAMMATON, LD50, London (w/ John Russell); BioStat., Project Native Informant, London (2015) and HYDROZOAN, The Royal Standard, Liverpool (2014). Recent group exhibitions include The Uncanny Valley, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2015); Sunscreen, online and at Venice Biennale (2015); A Plague of Diagrams, ICA, London (2015), WEC - Whole Earth Catalyst, The Composing Rooms, Berlin (2015); h y p e r s a l o n, Art Basel Miami, (2014);
Vestige: The Future is Here, Design Museum, London (2013) and Multinatural
Histories, Harvard Museum of Natural History, Massachusetts, USA (2013). Holder was a finalist for the Dazed Emerging Artist Award (2013) and was nominated for the VordembergeGildewart Award (2016).
Dr Katrin Linse is a Senior Biodiversity Biologist, the British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge and been a marine benthic biologist with seventeen years’ research experience in the biodiversity, phylogeography and evolution of Antarctic marine invertebrates. She is part of the team designing the first georeferenced Antarctic benthos database, resulting in new Antarctic provinces and an updated biogeography for the Southern Ocean, which is now applied to different taxa. She is involved in the research on phylogenetic relationships of current Antarctic species and their evolutionary histories and has significantly contributed to the discovery of high biodiversity in the bathyal and abyssal Antarctic deep sea, as well as in the recent discovery of the first hydrothermal vents in the Southern Ocean. She has participated in thirteen shipboard expeditions of which four studied hydrothermal habitats in the Southern Ocean.
Katja Novitskova lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin. Novitskova researches ongoing ecological transformations of matter, social and informational processes in the present world, developing personal strategies to render its future forms. With a background in visual semiotics, graphic design and new media, her works range from digital collages to sculpture and installation, collaborative projects and artist publications. In her installation Pattern of Activation (Loki’s Castle) she imagined how robotic deep sea explorers merged with the alien extremophile life forms at Loki’s Castle hydrothermal vent site into a new hybrid ecosystem. www.katjanovi.net
Jamie Sutcliffe is a London-based writer, artist and publisher with Strange Attractor Press. He is co-editor of Ian Breakwell’s DIARY, forthcoming with Occasional Papers, and comprises one half of the Pond Scum Light Show.
Saturday 3 September, 2 - 9.45pm
For the third and final event in our Summercamp series, artist Sonia Boyce has developed the day-long symposium and live music event Two steps to the Left… in collaboration with current artist-in-residence Evan Ifekoya.
Find a podcast of this event here.
Summercamp Symposia - 3 September
The symposium sits within Wysing’s over-arching programme for 2016 Wysing Poly, which explores the legacy of the Polytechnic as a site of radical art practice in the UK in the 1970s and 80s.
In keeping with the theme of the radical art practice of the 1970s and 80s, Two steps to the Left… takes US artist Adrian Piper’s groundbreaking interactive performance Funk Lessons (1982-85) as a point of departure, to explore dance and movement as a political act; asking what role does dance and music play in the creation of momentary communities, of dissent and assent.
Two steps to the Left… will include presentations, workshops and discussions including contributions from artists and academics including Ain Bailey, Adelaide Bannerman, Sonia Boyce, Yassmin V Foster, Evan Ifekoya, Melika Ngombe Kolongo and Zinzi Minott and live music performances from Ain Bailey, ORETHA, and Nkisi.
This symposium is now full but you are welcome to join us from 8pm for DJ sets by Ain Bailey, ORETHA and Nkisi.
Wysing's cafe is open from 10am to 4pm serving a range of hot and cold food, teas and coffees.
2pm – Welcome from Wysing Director Donna Lynas. Introduction and overview from Sonia Boyce
2.30pm – Thinking enough to let it go, a guided movement improvisation devised and led by Zinzi Minott and Evan Ifekoya, followed by an in-conversation and discussion.
3.30pm – Yassmin V Foster's presentation will highlight and discuss the ability to recognise black dance, even when it is not being performed by a ‘black’ body, momentarily suspending the concept of blackness. To illuminate a better description of the form, enhance dance competence, and the value of the art. Ultimately questioning, not what we know, but how we know it? Followed by questions and discussion
4.30pm – Short break
4.45pm – Adelaide Bannerman gives a presentation on Adrian Piper’s Funk Lessons (1982-85) with guided active listening and dancing. Followed by questions and discussion
5.30pm – Ain Bailey gives a presentation on spaces for collective gathering. Followed by questions and discussion
6.30pm – Melika Ngombe Kolongo gives a presentation on NON, a politically minded collective and record label dedicated to music being created by African artists and the diaspora.
7pm -– Wrap up with input from Leyla Reynolds from Gal-Dem who will be live blogging/illustrating throughout the day via the Wysing Instagram account
7.15pm – Nigerian food available at £5 per person, by Eko Kitchen, Cambridge
8pm – DJ set by Ain Bailey
8.30pm – DJ set by ORETHA
9pm – DJ set by Nkisi
9.45pm – Taxis leave for Cambridge station
Ain Bailey is a sound artist and DJ. She is currently a doctoral candidate at Birkbeck, University of London, where she recently completed a Leverhulme Trust Artist-In-Residence. Her compositions encompass field recordings and found sounds and are inspired by ideas and reflections on silence and absence, architectural urban spaces, and feminist activism. Her electroacoustic compositions are created for a variety of forms, including multichannel and mixed media installations, moving image soundtracks, live performance and dance. Works include the soundtrack for the film Oh Adelaide!, a collaboration with Sonia Boyce. Between 2013 and 2015, Oh Adelaide exhibited at the Glassell School of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, CCA-Glasgow, Tate Britain, The Kitchen, New York, and the Whitechapel Gallery. Bailey has created soundtracks for the award winning video Red She Said, 2011, by Kerstin Schroedinger and Mareike Bernien; Jimmy Robert's Abolibibelo performance at Migros Museum, Zurich, Switzerland, 2015 and Descendances du Nu performance and installation at CAC-Synagogue de Delme, Delme, France, 2016. Commissions have come from mouvoir: a Cologne-based dance company, to create sound works for inclusion in the productions Beautiful Me and Cactus Bar, which toured extensively throughout Europe. In 2014, Bailey collaborated with the MichaelDouglas Kollektiv and composed and performed a soundtrack for a new dance production Here Is You And Not Me, Cologne, Germany. Recent compositions include a suite entitled AGORA, 2015, which were presented in situ at the British Museum, St. George’s, Bloomsbury and The Rio cinema in Dalston.
Adelaide Bannerman has worked predominantly freelance as a project manager, curator and consultant for UK arts institutions working transnationally with critical and creative practitioners, for the past 18 years, including the International Curators Forum (ICF), Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts), African and Asian Visual Artists Archive (AAVAA), Tate, Live Art Development Agency, and Arts Council England. She is currently the Archive Coordinator at Autograph ABP, working on the three-year photography research project, The Missing Chapter and her research interests are focused on valorising performative gestures and engagements with live and visual performance art, and privileging the process behind individual and group autonomic practices. Since 2010, Bannerman tentatively explored, noted and when possible, co-opted movement and improvisatory methods as part of her curatorial practice.
Sonia Boyce (MBE, RA) emerged as an artist in the early 1980s as a key figure in the Black-British art scene, with artworks that spoke about race and gender. Since the 1990s out of the spontaneous performances of others she uses the documented process to make multi-media artworks. Recent exhibitions include: Speaking in Tongues, CCA-Glasgow (2014);S/N: Signal to Noise, Whitney Museum of Modern Art/The Kitchen, New York (2015);Liberties – 40 Years Since the Sex Discrimination Act, Collyer Bristow Gallery, London (2015); and, All the World’s Futures, 56th Venice Biennale (2015). Boyce is Professor of Fine Art at Middlesex University, Chair of Black Art and Design at the University of the Arts London and is the Principal Investigator for a 3-year AHRC-funded project ‘Black Artists and Modernism’. In 2016, she was elected as a Royal Academician.
Yassmin V Foster is all things movement and dance. Her career spans practice, production and research. She is influenced by her heritage and experience of black culture, in particular the artistic expression of dance and music. Yassmin has contributed to the arts and cultural sector in the Britain since 1992, she is a champion for interdisciplinary, cross-cultural and multi art form collaborative journeys, and advocates for dance as intangible cultural heritage. She combines her artistic flare with sound knowledge and experience in finance, arts management and statistical analysis. Affording her upward mobility in producing work that is aesthetic, social and economic. Yassmin works in live arenas, for online media and outdoor events to develop artists and audiences. Since graduating from MA Choreomundus - International Master in Dance Knowledge, Practice and Heritage in 2015, Yassmin continues to present her research, which has featured as part of: Collegium for African Diaspora Dance conference - Duke University (North Carolina, US); Black Dance Research Project - Lyric Theatre Hammersmith (London), funded by Arts Council England; Framing the Critical Decade: After the Black Arts Movement conference - Bristol University (Bristol); and ADAD Open Stage event - Pegg Studio Theatre (Bristol).
Melika Ngombe Kolongo was raised in Belgium, but she’s now based in London, where she’s adopted the name Nkisi and serves as one-third of the international triumvirate piloting NON, a politically minded collective and record label dedicated to music being created by African artists and the diaspora. In comparison to the sounds being created by her partners Chino Amobi and Angel-Ho, Nkisi traffics in higher tempos, melding elements of techno and electro with African melodic sensibilities into energetic dancefloor weapons. Beyond her own music and DJing, her work with NON has quickly garnered plenty of attention, as the crew’s web-savvy approach, international membership and outspoken politics have found an audience, giving a voice to like-minded children of the diaspora around the globe.
Evan Ifekoya’s current work investigates the possibility of an erotic and poetic occupation using film, performative writing and sound, focused on co-authored, intimate forms of knowledge production and the radical potential of spectacle. Recent exhibitions include A Quiet Violence of Dreams at Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town; Okun Song at StudioRCA, London, 2016; All Of Us Have A Sense Of Rhythm, David Roberts Art Foundation, London; Embodied Spaces, FramerFramed, De Tolhuistuin, Amsterdam – both curated by Christine Eyene, Studio Voltaire OPEN, London, all 2015; and 30 years of the Future, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, 2014. Recent performances and screenings include Sticky Black: A Broadcast at Jerwood Space and A Score, A Groove, A Phantom: The Extended Play at Whitstable Biennale 2016. Collaborative projects include Collective Creativity: Critical reflections into QTIPOC creative practice and Network11. Ifekoya currently lives and works in London.
Shenece Oretha (ORETHA) is an artist, DJ and noisemaker from London. Her mixture of music and samples explore the ways in which DJing is a form of storytelling and lecturing, and allows a commune between the present and other space/time. Some recent events she has participated and collaborated on, in her converging capacities as artist and DJ, are Swaying Feels with Black Sirens (2016); Sounding the Great Hall at Goldsmiths (2016); Video Vexens at HUB16 (2016); SOUNDS LIKE at the ICA (2016) and Against the Theatre of Distance in the Winkelwiese Theatre, Zurich (2016).
Leyla Reynolds is the in house artist and fully time arty woman at gal-dem.com, a magazine written by over 50 women of colour for all to enjoy. She is also a recent Politics graduate from the University of Bristol and a freelance illustrator. Her visual work concerns the political and her written work also concerns the political and its impact on creating radical practices of art. She is currently research assistant to the upcoming book Framing the Critical Decade: After the Black Arts Movement.
Zinzi Minott is a Laban Graduate, a Random Dance intern and scholarship receiver. She has received choreographic commissions from immigrants and animals, Rokeya, Rich Mix, and The Iranian Arts Festival, and a recipient of ImpulsTanz danceWeb Scholarship -2015. Her work considers political themes of colonialism, race and the Black British identities, how dance is used as a mode of resistance and political protest as well as contemporary globalisation contributing to discourse of the body through the body. She is a co- founder along with Hamish MacPherson, and Jamila Johnson- Small of The Rebel Man Standard, which along with her creation “Movement for Queers” was described as “One of the best things in Dance” by Judith Mackrell in the Guardian Newspaper. In 2016 she was artist is Residence in at LADA (UK) Roehampton (UK) EMERGE (USA) and taught, and spoke at the Collegium of African Diasporic Dance (CADD) at Duke University (USA). As well as taking her work 30 skanks (and other revolutionary dances); a collaboration with Charlotte Cooper, on an American tour. She received choreographic commissions from Precipice Award, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Calligram Foundation/Allie Furlotti and Black Creative Collective: BrownHall -2016. She is an Artist in Residence on Tate schools workshop programme at Tate Modern and Britain 2016/17 and will be artist in Residence at Duke University 2018. She is currently working on a new work “What kind of Slave would I be? WKOSWIB?” investigating dance, race, the archive and her own slave narrative.
Radio (Study) Day
Sunday 21 August, 12–5pm. Live online event
For their Radio (Study) Day from Wysing, current artists-in-residence Henna-Riikka Halonen, Evan Ifekoya, Lawrence Lek and Laura O’Neill will take radio broadcasting as a starting point for exploring the potential of the listening subject.
Find a podcast of this event here.
With access to huge amounts of information online through podcasts and ‘how to’ videos, the act of learning is becoming an increasingly individualistic and solitary experience. Radio broadcasting however offers both the solitary experience of listening, and access to the temporal experience of live radio production. It also offers access to a temporary shared community of fellow listeners.
Historically a powerful tool for connecting people and bridging distance, Radio (Study) Day will also pose questions about the role of radio today and its relationship to digital technologies. Four different programmes broadcast throughout the day will draw on the artists' diverse research to address ideas around staging, scripting and fakery and the four artists, alongside invited contributors, will draw on speech, music and sound to think about the critical and creative possibilities of listening in an ocular-centric society.
For Radio (Study) Day the artists will take over the Wysing homepage, inviting
audiences to listen and participate via a live radio stream. The day will be broadcast again by Resonance FM on Monday 29 August, 12–5pm.
Schedule
12pm – Lawrence Lek introduces the Radio (Study) Day and presents Sino-Futurism, a new work in two parts: a live soundtrack and commentary for an unmade film about a fictional artist AI and an essay on Sino-Futurism, combining spoken word with fragments of cinema history. Followed by a discussion with fellow residency artists.
1.15pm – Laura O’Neill introduces Bending Over Backwards, a new work described as "pure presencing affecting affectable bodies; a mapping of rhythm interspersed with film, curved down with soft selves/around the bend". Bending Over
Backwards features a mixed sourced text from poet Greg Nijs. Followed by a discussion with fellow residency artists.
2.30pm – Henna-Riikka Halonen
introduces Pareidolia, a new work where the writing and re-writing of a film script and a soundtrack becomes a spatial play with walls and borders, teasing out the universal through the personal. Confusing the time zones, truth and fiction in order to grasp the ever unreachable right now of right now, Pareidolia is a search for an image or imagination in a realm where the only sense we have is hearing.
Featuring Dr Jeanette Baxter and artist Arnaud Moinet and followed by a discussion with fellow residency artists.
3.45pm – Evan Ifekoya introduces This Catalogue of Poses, a radio play-in progress exploring the daily lives of four figures in a photograph, some of whom are more alive than others. Beginning at a spectral house club night in London, the characters dialogue across as if inhabiting the past and future simultaneously. Original score devised in collaboration with aigrefou
(Netherlands/Morocco). Followed by a discussion with fellow residency artists.
4.45pm – The four artists re-convene for the last fifteen minutes of broadcasting.
5pm – End.
Artists' Biographies
Henna-Riikka Halonen has worked on and produced many large scale video and performance projects and commissions and has shown her work widely in international exhibitions and festivals such as Research Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2015; You Imagine What you Desire, Biennale of Sydney 2014; Eden The Pow(d)er of Fear, Lilith Performance Studio, Malmo, Sweden; Fictitious Entry, Uqbar, Berlin; Eyebeam Art + Technology Center, New York; Gallery Factory, Seoul, Korea; Saison Video, France; Transmediale, 2012, Berlin; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Festival De Nouveau Cinema, Montreal; Incheon International Biennale, Korea and ARTE TV Channel (France/Germany). Halonen lives and works in Helsinki and her residency has been made possible through the support of Frame Finland, HIAP and The Finnish Institute in London.
Evan Ifekoya’s current work investigates the possibility of an erotic and poetic occupation using film, performative writing and sound, focused on co-authored, intimate forms of knowledge production and the radical potential of spectacle.
Recent exhibitions include A Quiet Violence of Dreams at Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town; Okun Song at StudioRCA, London, 2016; All Of Us Have A Sense Of Rhythm, David Roberts Art Foundation, London; Embodied Spaces, FramerFramed, De Tolhuistuin, Amsterdam – both curated by Christine Eyene, Studio Voltaire OPEN, London, all 2015; and 30 years of the Future, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, 2014.
Recent performances and screenings include Sticky Black: A Broadcast at Jerwood Space and A Score, A Groove, A Phantom: The Extended Play at Whitstable Biennale 2016. Collaborative projects include Collective Creativity: Critical reflections into QTIPOC creative practice and Network11. Ifekoya currently lives and works in London.
Lawrence Lek uses architectural fabrication and video game software to produce virtual worlds, video performances and immersive installations, often based on real places. His work deals with the uncanny experience of simulated presence, and how themes of desire, memory, power, and immortality drive our encounters within virtual realms. Recent projects include QE3, Glasgow International 2016 at Tramway; Secret Surface, KW Berlin; Software, Hard Problem, Cubitt Gallery; The Uncanny Valley, Wysing; Unreal Estate, Royal Academy; Performance as Process, Delfina Foundation; Sky Line for Art Licks Weekend 2014 Digital Commission. Lek is a resident artist at The White Building and winner of the 2015 Dazed Emerging Artist Award and ICA/Tenderflix Artist Video Award and Jerwood/FVU 2016 Award.
Laura O’Neill will be a 2017 resident artist at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. Past projects include; Composite, Brussels, 2016; ICA Film Biennale, 2016; Focal Point Gallery’s Big Screen, Southend-on-Sea, 2016; Bikini Wax, Mexico City, 2015; ICA, London, 2015; Camden Art Centre, London, 2015; Baltic 39, Newcastle, 2014; Liverpool Biennale, 2014; Spike Island, Bristol, 2013 and a recent film commission from Mexico City Metro.
Laura O'Neill would like to thank: Agnieszka Szczotka, Alejandra Arrieta, Alex McNamee, Alistar Baldwin, Amanda Espinoza, Andy Hart, Andrea Herrada Main, Antony ward, Annesylvie Henchoz, Alfredo Salomón, Alice Turner, Ben Joe, Benito Mayor BeMaior, Canan Batur, Christian Tonner, Chloe Latimer, Danny Oakes, Diego Flores, Dwayne Coleman, Ella Bear, Elizabeth Bear, Ellie Pratt, Euan Latimer, Evan Ifekoya, Fleur Melbourne, Francis Drayson, George Morris, Girolamo Marri, Gleb Vysotski, Guy Oliver, Hanae Wilkes, Ian Robert Slater, Javier Calderon, Jemma Egan, Jess Bryan, Jessie Denny-Kaulbach, Jill Mcknight, Joe Begley, Jonathan Surples, Joss Heierli, Jorge Bobadilla, Justin Fitzpatrick, Julie F Fox, Julia Frank, Karolina Magnusson Murray, Kate Jackson, Kathlene Stevenson, Keith Winters, Kostantinos Pettas, Laura Kelsall, Laura Mcmullen, Lara Kenworth,y Leo Cohen, Linda O’Neill, Linda Nagajeva, Louise Ginsgberg, Lucia Quevedo, Luis Ramirez Pedraza, Luke Stevens, Luli Perez, Magdalena Firlag, Matilda Moors, Matthew Ferguson, Marcos Castro, Martha Hivid, Mike Bear, Mina Azmy, Minsun Lee, Monica Valcarcel-Saez, Natalie Price Hafslund, Natalie Woodward, Neil Hass, Nicole Vinokur, Nils Alix Tabeling, Owain McGilvary, Paula Smolarska, Rachael Bear, Rachael Szaloky, Roj-Azud Zorlu, Ruby Bear, Samantha Harvey, Sean Lavelle, Sophie Latimer, Rodrigo Garcia Dutra, Tanya Moulson, Valentina Pini, Vera Karlsson, Victoria Grenier, Willem Wilke, William Darrel and Yan White.
Do It With Others - Art and Solidarity in the Age of Networks
Saturday 6 August, 12-5pm
The day is devised and led by Furtherfield (Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett) with contributions from artists Gretta Louw and They Are Here (Helen Walker & Harun Morrison) and writer Tim Waterman.
Find a podcast of the event here.
Summercamp Symposia - 6 August
For the second event in our Summercamp series we have invited Furtherfield to develop and lead the day-long symposium, Do It With Others - Art and Solidarity in the Age of Networks.
Furtherfield create online and physical spaces and places for different kinds of people to come together to get involved with contemporary arts and digital technologies. It was founded by artists Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett in 1996 and is a dynamic, creative and social nerve centre where upwards of 26,000 contributors worldwide have built a visionary culture around co-creation – swapping and sharing code, music, images, video and ideas.
Do It With Others - Art and Solidarity in the Age of Networks will explore art as a commons (defined as the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society) in the age of networks and neoliberalism. It will ask how practices, circulation, appreciation and stewardship of the arts can be emancipated for all. Presentations and discussions include work drawing on the summer programme at Furtherfield's Gallery and Commons lab, exploring tensions between digital inclusion and cultural diversity in the digital global hegemony.
Schedule
12pm- Arrival. Wysing has a café onsite which will be open throughout the day for food and drink. The cafe will be open from 10am
12.20pm - Introduction to the day by Ruth Catlow
The first part of the day will address the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society
12.30pm - Marc Garrett, Unblocking proprietary systems. Marc Garrett, presents his research into different types of grassroots culture and the ways in which they actively re-examine, critique, and hack their way around the controlling conditions of black boxes, proprietary systems and techno-cultural production. These cultures (their tactics and strategies) return control to the users and remodels relationships between the individual and the institutional edifice: in academia, in the arts, technological fields of practice, and as part of everyday life.
1pm -Tim Waterman, Situating the Commons.Tim Waterman, landscape architect and theorist, will discuss how the negotiation of the commons takes place in two distinct realms that are increasingly reaching into and shaping one another: the long history of the landscape commons both in cities and in the countryside, and across digital networks. In both realms we find the continued project of the enclosures, appropriating forms of collectively-created use value and converting it, wherever possible, into exchange value.
1.30pm - Ruth Catlow, DIWO to DAOWO - Collaborative arts and the blockchain. The DIWO (Do It With Others) campaign for emancipatory, networked art practices was instigated by Furtherfield in 2006 and it is informing an artistic engagement with new blockchain technologies; to organise, cooperate, p2p and at scale to transform approaches to contemporary economic and social challenges.
2pm - Open discussion moderated by artist and curator Gretta Louw
2.30pm - Break
This part of the day will draw on the summer programme at Furtherfield's Gallery and Commons lab, exploring tensions between digital inclusion and cultural diversity in the digital global hegemony.
3pm - Gretta Louw, Networking the Unseen. Networking the Unseen, which is currently on view at Furtherfield gallery, is the first exhibition of its kind to focus on the intersection of indigenous cultures and zeitgeist digital practices in contemporary art. Featuring art works – installations and digital media – made in collaboration with artists from the Warnayaka indigenous art centre in Central Australia. Artist and curator Gretta Louw, will discuss postcolonial digital arts practice in relation to the exhibition and event series that brings together concepts and experiences of remoteness and marginalised cultures, with art-making in contemporary society.
3.30pm - They Are Here, Finsbury Park Network. Combining DIY digital culture with socially engaged activity, Helen Walker & Harun Morrison of They Are Here are collaborating with local residents and organisations across Finsbury Park. Working with recently published open source software, they will establish an online network independent of cellular networks and the World Wide Web. They are exploring ways of integrating this network with local community garden activity; enabling data from these microhabitats to affect the communication system.
4pm - Open discussion moderated by Ruth Catlow
4.45pm - Closing remarks by Marc Garrett
5pm - End of the day
Contributor Biographies
Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett are artists, curators, organisers and writers who works with emancipatory network cultures, practices and poetics. They are co-founder/directors of Furtherfield an artist led international community hub for art shows, labs and debates around critical questions in arts, technology and society. Furtherfield's Art Data Money programme seeks to develop new economies for arts in the network age.
Catlow's artistic commissions include Time Is Speeding Up at 20-21 Visual Arts Centre; Sociality-machine at Tate Britain; Play the Web We Want at Southbank Centre; Rethinking Wargames- 3 Player Chess, currently on tour as part of Free Play with ICI. Catlow is named by the Foundation for P2P alternatives in their list of 100 women Co-creating the P2P society. Garrett is the curator of the upcoming exhibition Monsters of the Machine at the LABoral Centre of Art in Spain. He is in the last phase of an Art History Phd at the University of London, Birkbeck College.
Gretta Louw is a multi-disciplinary artist and writer exploring the potential of art as a means of investigating cultural and psychological phenomena, particularly in relation to new technologies and the internet. Born in South Africa, she grew up in Western Australia and is currently based in Germany. Her work has been exhibited widely - in New York, Berlin, Jakarta, and Tel Aviv, amongst others - including in a number of public institutions such as the Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Stadtgalerie Mannheim, and Kunstverein Ludwigshafen.
They Are Here is a collaborative practice steered by Helen Walker & Harun Morrison. We are currently based in Birmingham and London. We have worked together as They Are Here since 2006, often extending our collaboration to include those from all walks of life. Our work can be read as a series of context specific games. The entry, invitation or participation can be as significant as the game's conditions and structure. Through these games, we seek to create ephemeral systems and temporary, micro-communities that offer an alternate means of engaging with a situation, history or ideology. They Are Here work across media and types of site, particularly civic spaces. Institutions we have developed or presented work include: Arnolfini, Camden Arts Centre, CCA Glasgow, Chisenhale Gallery, Grand Union, South London Gallery, Tate Britain, Tate Modern, STUK (Leuven, Belgium), VIVID and Whitechapel Gallery. www.theyarehere.net
Tim Waterman lives in London and is Senior Lecturer and Landscape Architecture Theory Coordinator at the University of Greenwich. He is also a thesis tutor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. He is the honorary editor of Landscape: The Journal of the Landscape Institute, for which he writes the regular column ‘A Word …’. He is also also Research Associate for Landscape and Commons at Furtherfield. He writes for Landscape Architecture Magazine (LAM) and The Architects’ Journal and is the author of Fundamentals of Landscape Architecture, and is currently at work on two edited collections for Routledge. Landscape and Agency, with Ed Wall (forthcoming 2016) and the Routledge Handbook of Landscape and Food with Josh Zeunert (forthcoming 2017).
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