26 to 28 November 2021 

Syllabus VI are back in Cambridgeshire for their final gathering, hosted by Wysing Arts Centre. 

Syllabus VI artists James Clarkson, Lauren Craig, Ufuoma Essi, Bettina Furnée, Olga Grotova, Helen Hamilton, Elsa James, Freya Johnson Ross, Daniel Trivedy and Sam Williams are returning to Wysing for their final gathering. 

Friday 

On the first day of the gathering, the artists will take part in Holding Space sessions, presenting new or in-progress work and ideas to the group. In the afternoon, the artists will walk to the nearby village, meeting alpacas on the way, before returning for a dinner hosted by Wysing. 

Saturday 

On Saturday morning, the group will take part in a publication-making workshop with Amanprit Sandhu. This will be followed by a session for the artists in collaboration with SPAM zine and press. After dinner, artists will gather outdoors for a fire and ritual led by Helen Hamilton.  

Sunday 
On the last day of the gathering, Jade Montserrat will lead a workshop in The Recording Studio Live Room. Based on prerecorded prompts sent to the artists, the group will collectively perform Jade’s score in the Studio.  

29 to 31 October

Syllabus VI are back in London for their next gathering, hosted by Studio Voltaire.

Syllabus VI artists James Clarkson, Lauren Craig, Ufuoma Essi, Bettina Furnée, Olga Grotova, Helen Hamilton, Elsa James, Freya Johnson Ross, Daniel Trivedy and Sam Williams are visiting Studio Voltaire in London

Friday

On the first day of the gathering, the artists will take part in facilitated work sharing sessions with Jess Chandler and Shama Khana and Beth Bramich (Flatness). In the evening, Studio Voltaire will host a meal for the artists and Studio Voltaire's cultural tenants.

Saturday

On Saturday morning, Florence Peake will lead a performance workshop p drawing on their previous performance works that include practices with objects and states of being connected to presence. This will be followed by a writing workshop with Daniella Valz Gen, exploring the element of Fire through poetry, somatic practice and observation and a dinner in Studio Voltaire's cafe.

Sunday
On the last day of the gathering, Adam Farah will present their work and lead a short workshop. Artist Advisor, Amanprit Sandhu will close the weekend with a debrief session.

9 to 10 October

Syllabus VI visit London for their next gathering, hosted by Iniva.

Syllabus VI artists James Clarkson, Lauren Craig, Ufuoma Essi, Bettina Furnée, Olga Grotova, Helen Hamilton, Elsa James, Freya Johnson Ross, Daniel Trivedy and Sam Williams are visiting Iniva in London

Saturday

The group will begin their weekend with a zine-making workshop in Iniva's Stuart Hall library with Hamja Ashan. This will be followed by a tour of the Tate Britain collection with Hassan Vawda and a screening of the Otolith Group's 'Hydra Decapita'.

Sunday

On Sunday, the group will visit Rita Keegan's 'Somewhere Between There and Here' at South London Gallery. This will be followed by a discussion with Keith Piper and a session with Artistic Advisor, Amanprit Sandhu.

3 to 5 September

Syllabus VI visit Birmingham for their next gathering, hosted by Eastside Projects.

Syllabus VI artists James Clarkson, Lauren Craig, Ufuoma Essi, Bettina Furnée, Olga Grotova, Helen Hamilton, Elsa James, Freya Johnson Ross, Daniel Trivedy and Sam Williams are visiting Eastside Projects in Birmingham.

Friday

After a check-in and introduction to Eastside Projects, artist Harun Morrrison will lead a walking workshop along the Birmingham canal network. Using the canals as a point of departure, the group will consider 'being-situated' and how this relates to itinerancy. Before dinner, the group will be introduced to Eastside's neighbours Stryx, Grand Union, Centrala and Recent Activity.

Saturday

In the morning, Syllabus artists will work with the Eastside Projects team on an exercise called 'Taking Space'. Each Syllabus artist has 25 minutes to take and use in any way they like: they can share work, ideas, texts, experiments, films, thinking, niggling problems, propositions, scores, instructions … 

In the afternoon the group will work with Modern Clay on a workshop, before a dinner in the gallery with guests.

Sunday

On Sunday, artist Samra Mayanja will lead a workshop in the form of a game that breaks and scatter the language we use around our own practice. The day will end with lunch and a debrief/planning session.

As part of the first ritual for this year’s Wysing Polyphonic festival, Under Ether, Ain Bailey will host a closed-door workshop in July for a group of long-term collaborators including: Phoebe Collings-James, Reece Ewing, Remi Graves, Onyeka Igwe, Jasleen Kaur, Harold Offeh, Nadine Peters. 

This closed door workshop will also connect with Ain Bailey’s exhibition at Wysing, Version, which is open every day until 22 August. Click here for more information about Version. 

For more information on Wysing Polyphonic, click here.

5 July — 12 July 2021

After several months of working online throughout the pandemic, Syllabus VI are visiting Bristol for an in-person gathering.

Syllabus VI artists James Clarkson, Lauren Craig, Ufuoma Essi, Bettina Furnée, Olga Grotova, Helen Hamilton, Elsa James, Freya Johnson Ross, Daniel Trivedy and Sam Williams are visiting Spike Island in Bristol for their first in-person gathering since September.

Friday

On the first day, the group will have a guided tour of Veronica Ryan's exhibition Along a Spectrum before an afternoon of Group Crits with curators Zoe Li and Nella Aarne. In the evening, the group will join Spike Associates for a chance to meet and share work.

Saturday

On Saturday morning,the group will work with Artistic Advisor, Amanprit Sandhu, on a workshop looking at the idea of contested space and experimental film. This will be followed by a workshop with Kim Knowles looking at moving image curating, programming and commissioning. In the afternoon, the group will work with Claudia Molitor on various listening excercises, before a social (and socially distanced) dinner and drinks. 

Sunday

On the final day, the group will spend some time planning together before having time to explore venues and organisations in the city, such as Arnolfini, EBC, D-UNIT, BEEF, Brunswick Club, Bricks, Feminist Archive South, M-Shed, Earth Art Gallery and Spike Island.

Syllabus V will be working with Wysing over the weekend of 11 to 13 December. Please note, we have already selected the participants for Syllabus V.

Syllabus V artists Sophie Blagden, Juliet Davis-Dufayard, Yuxin Jiang, Hwa Young Jung, Sarai Kirshner, Jack Lewdjaw, Sarah Maple, Duncan Poulton and Aliaskar Torkaliaskari will be working with Wysing for their final gathering as part of the Syllabus programme.

Friday

Working with partners from Eastside Projects, Iniva, Newbridge and Spike Island, the artists will share and discuss new work. In the afternoon, they will work with Curator Amanprit Sandhu on a workshop derived from bell hooks' text 'Living By a Love Ethic'.

Saturday

On the Saturday, the group will be working with Syllabus alumnus Chris Alton on a practice mapping excercise, designed to review recent work and to generate ideas for new projects. In the evening the group will be attending Artistic Advisor Barby Asante's Declaration of Independence performance, as part of the Brent Biennial. 

Sunday

On the final day of the programme, the artists will be working together on a collaboration based on the idea of overnight oats. Following this, they will be working with artist Lady Kitt on a workshop to make plans for a future beyond Syllabus. The day will end with a gratitude circle.

23 September 2020

 We’re looking forward to greeting the Syllabus VI artists for a socially-distanced meeting at Wysing.  

The selected artists for Syllabus VI are: James Clarkson, Lauren Craig, Ufuoma Essi, Bettina Furnée, Olga Grotova, Helen Hamilton, Elsa James, Freya Johnson Ross, Daniel Trivedy and Sam Williams. 

Syllabus VI is set to be markedly different from previous iterations of the programme. This year, the programme partners decided to make Syllabus free-to-access and to reframe much of the programme activity around contributions from the participating artists. Syllabus has also shifted to a hybrid online/offline model to contend with the challenges of Covid-19, with the programme consisting of multiple online meetings and shorter in-person gatherings at partner venues. 

This first weekend is themed around Conditions of Working and programmed by Artistic Advisors Jade Montserrat and Amanprit Sandhu.

Saturday 5 September and Friday 11 September

Online presentations from artists and partners, led by Jade Montserrat and Amanprit Sandhu.

Friday 23 September

Following an introduction from the artistic advisors about the chosen theme, 'conditions of working', Jade Montserrat will lead a group discussion of the Alice Walker text 'In Search of Our Mother's Gardens'. After lunch, Wysing's curator John Eng Kiet Bloomfield will lead a walk to nearby Bourne, giving the artists time to discuss plans for the year in pairs. Jade and Amanprit will close the day with a open discussion about these plans.

Saturday 24 September

In the morning, Jade and Amanprit will introduce the concept of embodied practice, before Amanprit leads the group in a reading of bell hooks 'All About Love'. After lunch, the group will work in pairs to brainstorm the conditions for working that they can create collectively over the coming months. The day will end with a silent walk around Wysing's site and and a closing discussion.

Friday 2 and Saturday 3 October

Online planning sessions led by Jade and Amanprit.

Syllabus V will be at Spike Island, Bristol, over the weekend 28 February to 1 March. Please note we have selected the participants for Syllabus V.

Syllabus V artists Sophie Blagden, Juliet Davis-Dufayard, Yuxin Jiang, Hwa Young Jung, Sarai Kirshner, Jack Lewdjaw, Sarah Maple, Duncan Poulton and Aliaskar Torkaliaskari are visiting Bristol for their fourth retreat themed around the questions "How to decolonise this place, What does your work bring to the world and how? and what can we learn from Bristol’s underground music scene (past and present)?"

Friday

On Friday the group will meet with Al Cameron from the booking agency Qu Junktions for an introduction to Bristol's underground music scene. This will be followed by crits with Spike Island's curator Carmen Juliá and assistant curators Rosa Tyhurst and Tendai Mutambu and a screening of Gary Thompson's film about the Full Cycle record label. 

Saturday

On Saturday the group will join a seminar on 'Decolonial', led by Dr Edson Burton. This will be followed by workshops with Louise Shelley and Rehana Zaman and a dinner with guests from Bristol's Arts Community in Spike Island's Emmeline cafe. The group will be joined by Artistic Advisor Barby Asante for the day.

Sunday

For the final day of the gathering, the group will join a Slavery Trail Walk with Liz Gamlin before reconvening for a lunch and a session to reflect, feedback and plan.

Lunch and dinner will be provided throughout the gathering.

Syllabus V will be at The NewBridge Project, Newcastle, over the weekend of 6 to 9 December. Please note, we have already selected the participants for Syllabus V.

Syllabus V artists Sophie Blagden, Juliet Davis-Dufayard, Yuxin Jiang, Hwa Young Jung, Sarai Kirshner, Jack Lewdjaw, Sarah Maple, Duncan Poulton and Aliaskar Torkaliaskari are visiting Birmingham for their third retreat themed around the question "How can art help us generate energy and imagine alternatives?"

Thursday

On Thursday, there will be 1:1 tutorials with Artist Advisor Barby Asante, an opportunity to explore exhibitions in the city and an Open Deck at Earnest.

Friday

Friday will begin with an introduction to the NewBridge thematic approach, 'Deep Adaptation' and a communal meal with participants from the 'For Solidarity' project. In the afternoon, artist Ciara Lenihan and Lesley Guy will lead performance workshops and the group will take part in quickfire 'Show and Shut Up' crits.

Saturday

In the morning, NewBridge Director, Rebecca Huggan, and Programme Director, Niomi Fairweather will give an introduction to the 'For Solidarity' strand of NewBridge's programme from. After lunch, the group will spend time discussing the 'Show and Shut Up' crits from Friday.

Sunday

In the morning, there will be time for a Syllabus planning session. This will be followed by a guided deep-listening excercise from Nicola Singh.

Syllabus V will be at Eastside Projects, Birmingham, over the weekend of 31 October to 3 November. Please note, we have already selected the participants for Syllabus V.

Syllabus V artists Sophie Blagden, Juliet Davis-Dufayard, Yuxin Jiang, Hwa Young Jung, Sarai Kirshner, Jack Lewdjaw, Sarah Maple, Duncan Poulton and Aliaskar Torkaliaskari are visiting Birmingham for their second retreat themed around the question "How can we hold our differences and remain gently radical while working with others?"

Thursday

The group are invited to a screening of the Jarman Award films at Eastside Project with a Q&A with Hetain Patel.

Friday

The group will meet writer, researcher and curator of 'The Past Is Now: Birmingham and Empire', Sumaya Kassim for an introduction to Birmingham. In the afternoon, the Syllabus V artists will visit art spaces in Birmingham.

Saturday

In the morning artist Linda Stupart will lead a workshop around making art during a moment of climate change. In the afternoon the group will visit Modern Clay for a workshop before leading a self-organised session amongst themselves. In the evening, Eastside Projects will host a dinner for the group and invited artists and curators from Birmingham.

Sunday

On the final day, the group will work with artistic advisor Louise Shelley to plan future sessions and take part in a reading group around “Queer Love, Gender Bending Bacteria, and Life after the Anthropocene" by Eben Kirksey.

Biographies

Sumaya Kassim is a writer and independent researcher. She was one of the co-curators of the exhibition ‘The Past is Now: Birmingham and Empire’ at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (2017-2018). She chronicled this experience in her essay ‘The Museum Will Not Be Decolonised’ (Media Diversified, 2017) which has been made into a short film with filmmaker Arwa Aburawa. Her recent article ‘The Museum is the Master’s House: an Open Letter to Tristram Hunt’ (Medium, 2019) challenged the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum to question his assumptions about what it means to live in colonial aftermaths. Her understanding of museums and institutions is informed by her writing practice, particularly the role of memory and futurity in making ourselves and our communities. She is currently writing a novel and a set of essays on whiteness and institutions. @SFKassim

Linda Stupart is an artist and writer from Cape Town, South Africa. Their work has been shown at Tate Galleries; Lisson Gallery; Nottingham Contemporary; De La Warr Pavilion; The Horse Hospital; Arnolfini and Raven Row. They recently produced Some Men Have Mistaken Me for Death, a play at the ICA with Carl Gent about climate change, queer sex, and Ecco the Dolphin. They are a lecturer in the Fine Art department at BCU.

Modern Clay is a studio project set up in 2017 and since 2019 has been run by co-operative membership. It is based in Digbeth, Birmingham and is a working studio run by its eight artist members: Leah Carless, Kate Egawa, Mark Essen, Joanne Masding, Sophie McKinney, Suzi Osborn, Laurie Ramsell and Sarah Taylor Silverwood.

Modern Clay provides a studio research facility for the production of ceramics. The co-operative also has a responsibility to be a benefit to the community and does this though its core values: artists, education and public. The studio is working to explore the reciprocating actions of this relationship, from providing artists access to a ceramic studio to also providing the same access to charitable groups and other relevant educational projects.

19–22 September 
We are hosting the first retreat for Syllabus V, our collaboratively-produced alternative learning programme. 

The selected artists for Syllabus V are Sophie Blagden, Juliet Davis-Dufayard, Yuxin Jiang, Hwa Young Jung, Sarai Kirshner, Jack Lewdjaw, Sarah Maple, Duncan Poulton and Aliaskar TorkaliaskariThe weekend has been programmed by Artistic Advisors Barby Asante and Louise Shelley.

The weekend will be organised around three positions: Context, Knowledges and Togetherness.

We have planned this first retreat drawing from our own influences, contexts, our working lives and the urgencies we would like to attend to collectively.

Exercises and group conversations share affinities with dialectical methods of education, critical pedagogies, affective pedagogies, consciousness raising, workers education, ideas of cooperative organising, ‘unlearning’ and ‘the undercommons.’

Through critical, active spectatorship: watching, listening, thinking and talking collectively

We will propose to co-plan Syllabus V with you all, Syllabus as self-driven/ horizontalist/ anti racist/ anti- Empire/  experimental/ non-canonical/ independent/ critical/ dialogic/ inclusive/ subversive/ improvised/ co-didactic/ transformative/ emancipatory/

We look forward to spending this time and working together on the shape for Syllabus V

x Barby and Louise

Thursday

The first day of the programme takes 'context' as its theme. The group will participate in a mapping excercise and active listening workshop and will also draw up a list of collective agreements for the coming year.

Friday

On Friday, the group will be joined by representatives from the partner organisations for a day themed around 'knowledges'. The group will be asked to present work and will also participate in a listening session that takes cues from the poet and scholar Fred Moten.

Saturday 

The third day of the gathering will be dedicated to 'togetherness'. The day will begin with a walk, before the group start to discuss the planning of the programme. What knowledges do the group want to invite into the conversation and where can those knowledges be found? After dinnner the group will engage in a series of 'Fake Therapy Excercises', developed by Denise Ferreira da Silva and Valentina Desideri.

Sunday

On the final day of the gathering, the group will use a tarot reading as a method to address any problems, issues or situations anticipated by the group. 

Reading

A google folder is available for the artists holding texts by Yvonne Rainer, Fred Moten, Precarious Writers Brigade, Pauline Oliveros and others. These are the references drawn on for the first retreat. This is by no means a 'reading list’ but more to share our influences and salute our sources.

Barby Asante is a London based artist, curator, researcher and occasional DJ. Her work is concerned with the politics of place and the histories and legacies of colonialism making work that is collaborative, performative and dialogic. Her artistic practice explores the archival, makes propositions, collects and maps stories and contributions of people of colour using storytelling, collective actions, and ritual, to excavate, unearth and interrogate given narratives.  She resists the idea that the stories of "Other-ness" are alternatives to dominant given narratives, but are interruptions, utterances, presences that exist within, that are invisible, unheard, missing or ignored. By making these narratives visible, asking questions and making proposals she is interested in what these possibilities offer as we examine our present and envision our futures. Her current artistic research As Always a Painful Declaration of Independence : For Ama. For Aba. For Charlotte and Adjoa, is being realised in a series of project episodes. The project explores the social, cultural and political agency of women of colour, as they navigate historic legacies of colonialism, independence, migration and the contemporary global socio political climate,to think about propositions for their futures existence in a just world.  

Barby’s recent exhibitions include, Intimacy and Distance, Diaspora Pavilion, Venice (2017), The Queen and The Black Eyed Squint, Starless Midnight (2017/18) and Declaration of Independence (2019), BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Arts. She is currently a Doctoral Candidate in CREAM (Centre for Research in Education, Arts and Media) at Westminster University.  Barby has also taught on fine art programmes in London, Berlin, Gothenburg and Rotterdam and is currently Visiting Lecturer on Contemporary Practice at the RCA and teaches a programme on decolonial arts practice called How We Get Free on the BA Fine Art Critical Practice at Goldsmiths. She is a PhD co founder of agency for agency a collaborative agency concerned with ethics, intersectionality and education in the contemporary arts who are mentors to the sorryyoufeeluncomfortable collective. Asante is also on the board of the Women's Art Library and 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning.

Louise Shelley is the Cubitt Curatorial Fellow for 2018/19 where she is running a 15-month public programme working from the structure of Cubitt as an artist-run co-operative and how a gallery in this context can develop politicised and collective ways for working, pedagogy and presentation. Previous to Cubitt she was the Collaborative Projects Curator at The Showroom, London, where she ran the Communal Knowledge programme. Communal Knowledge was a series of collaborative projects to propose and activate approaches to critical engagement with The Showroom’s social and cultural surroundings. Louise is also a member of the Cinenova Working Group, a non-profit, volunteer-run feminist film distributor.

Syllabus IV will be at Eastside Projects, Birmingham, over the weekend of 1 to 5 August. Please note, we have already selected the participants for Syllabus IV.

Syllabus IV artists Scott Caruth, Libita Clayton, Jessica Coleman, Bettina Fung, Laura Hindmarsh, Beth Kettel, David Lisser, Alicja Rogalska, Kirsty Russell and Abigail Sidebotham are visiting Birmingham for their final retreat with the theme of 'Future Survival'.

Thursday

The group arrive in Birmingham and have a day to install work at Eastside Projects, with the assistance of Eastside Projects staff and technicans. 

Friday

Friday will be spent sharing and discussing work with the partners and Artistic Advisors, Helen Nisbet and Sonya Dyer. In the evening, the group will attend Digbeth First Friday.

Saturday

Saturday will begin with a practical workshop led by Ben Messih and Rosalie Schweiker about cooperation and survival in hostile environments, such as art institutions and the UK migration system. Based on their shared experience of running a post office with primary school children, Ben and Rosalie will come up with a shared set of strategies that the group will be able to apply in their everyday lives. 

After lunch, there will be a short reading group on three texts: Jan Verwoert's 'Exhaustion & Exuberance', Maya Angelou's 'A Day Away' and Sheila Ghelani's 'Will engaging in this activity...'

This will be followed by a group walk with contributions from Hardeep Pandhal, Celine Condorelli, Kelly Large and Adham Faramawy and a dinner at Eastside Projects.

Sunday

Sunday will close with a workshop from Artistic Advisors, Helen Nisbet and Sonya Dyer, and workshops inspired by the work of Lois Weaver and Octavia Butler.

10–11 July

Artist's workshop programme with Benedict Drew, Anne Hardy, Tom Richards, Aura Satz and Imogen Stidworthy.

Resonant Frequencies is one of DRAF’s (David Roberts Art Foundation) autumn 2019 programme elements and encompasses a three-part project concerning sound, noise and hearing. The first element of the project is a peer-to-peer workshop programme spread over six days in July, September and October. The programme offers a group of specially selected artists the opportunity to develop their practice at a mid-career stage, collaborate and experiment. We bring together artists from a sound art background or who consider sound to be a crucial element in their work.

The first two days of the workshop were hosted by Wysing Arts Centre on 10 and 11 July 2019. Participating artists were: Benedict Drew, Anne Hardy, Tom Richards, Aura Satz and Imogen Stidworthy

Wednesday

Sound artist and expert in the field of sound recording Jez Riley French hosted ‘The act and art of located sound’, a day with theoretical and practical sessions on field recording. The morning covered the basic elements of various field recording techniques, extended methods, the prime importance of listening and the materiality of sound. In the afternoon, Jez and the participants conducted field recordings in and around the site. The day concluded with a listening session to review the recordings made and discuss.

Thursday

Sound technician and sound artist Lottie Poulet hosted a day of technical training in Wysing’s recording studio. The morning session looked into equalisation and the 4-hour afternoon session explored mixing and mastering.

Biographies

Benedict Drew works across video, sculpture, music and their associated technologies. He creates large-scale installations, often concerned with ecstatic responses to socio-political anxiety. Solo exhibitions include The Trickle-Down Syndrome, Whitechapel Gallery, London; KAPUT, QUAD Gallery, Derby; Walker Gallery, Liverpool; THE ANTI ECSTATIC MACHINES and Heads May Roll, Matt’s Gallery, London.

Anne Hardy works with large scale installation, audio, film and photography. Hardy’s constructed environments situate us in precise relationships to physical worlds charged by psychological states. Her immersive FIELD work installations are sensory and fluctuating spaces that introduce a shift in perception - a temporary reconfiguring of reality exploring transience and impermanence as a transformative, potentially spiritual, space that can expand our awareness of the worlds we inhabit.

Tom Richards is an artist, musician, DJ, researcher and instrument designer. He has walked the line between sonic art, sculpture and music since graduating with an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art in 2004. Richards has built his own idiosyncratic modular electronic music system, with which he creates slowly evolving and heavily textured polyrhythmic improvisations.

Aura Satz’s work centres on the trope of ventriloquism in order to conceptualise a distributed, expanded and shared notion of voice. Works are made in conversation and use dialogue as both method and subject matter. She has completed several works on women in electronic music such as Daphne Oram, Laurie Spiegel, and Pauline Oliveros. Satz is interested in notation systems, and methods of writing sound or musical transmission.

Imogen Stidworthy’s work focuses on the voice as a sculptural material in investigations into different forms of language and relationship. She works with people who inhabit the borders of language, whose relation to language is affected by conditions such as aphasia or the effects of overwhelming experiences. Often combining the staged and the observed, Stidworthy makes films and installations and uses a wide range of media including sculptural objects, print, and photography.

DRAF (David Roberts Art Foundation) is an independent, non-profit organisation for contemporary art dedicated to the transformative forces of the art encounter. DRAF has welcomed over 100,000 visitors to thought-provoking and challenging international programmes including exhibitions, commissions, performances and discussions, since it was founded in 2007. To date, DRAF has partnered with over 100 museums, institutions, and not for profit organisations and collaborated with over 1,000 artists, cultivating networks in order to amplify the impact of art in the UK and beyond.

Syllabus IV will be at Iniva, London, over the weekend of 7–9 June. Please note, we have already selected the participants for Syllabus IV.

Syllabus IV artists Scott Caruth, Libita Clayton, Jessica Coleman, Bettina Fung, Laura Hindmarsh, Beth Kettel, David Lisser, Alicja Rogalska, Kirsty Russell and Abigail Sidebotham are visiting London for their fifth retreat framed around speculative fiction, working with archives, and “unlocking” future possibilities.

Friday

Friday will be spent in Iniva's new building where Iniva's Library and Archive Manager, Tavian Hunter, will lead the group on a zine-making workshop. There will also be screenings from Iniva's collection.

Saturday

Saturday will feature a lock-picking workshop with Irena Krüger, focued on the social history of lockpicking. This will be followed by a talk and discussion with curator and writer Taylor Le Melle. In the afternoon, there will be an artist talk and reading group with artist Victoria Sin and a group meal at Adulis Restaurant and Bar.

Sunday 

Sunday will be spent at South London Gallery and Tate Britain, where Hassan Vawda will deliver a tour and talk on fictionalising history.

Biographies

​Victoria Sin is an artist using speculative fiction within performance, moving image, writing, and print to interrupt normative processes of desire, identification, and objectification. This includes: Drag as a practice of purposeful embodiment questioning the reification and ascription of ideal images within technologies of representation and systems of looking, Science fiction as a practice of rewriting patriarchal and colonial narratives naturalized by scientific and historical discourses on states of sexed, gendered and raced bodies, Storytelling as a collective practice of centering marginalized experience, creating a multiplicity of social contexts to be immersed in and strive towards. Drawing from close personal encounters of looking and wanting, their work presents heavily constructed fantasy narratives on the often unsettling experience of the physical within the social body. Their long-term project Dream Babes explores science and speculative fiction as a productive strategy of queer resistance, imaging futurity that does not depend on existing historical and social infrastructure. It has included science fiction porn screenings and talks, a three-day programme of performance at Auto Italia South East, a publication, and a regular science fiction reading group for queer people of colour.

Taylor Le Melle is a curator and writer based in London. Taylor’s writing has been featured in anthologies such as: Gender, Space (Macmillian) ed. Aimee Meredith Cox as well as in periodicals such as Art Monthly. With artist Imran Perretta, Taylor has initiated not/no.w.here, an artist workers’ cooperative. Taylor co-facilitates the Art Magazines Reading Group and alongside Rowan Powell, Taylor runs PSS, a publisher of printed material which has recently launched Daniella Valz Gen’s poetry chapbook Subversive Economies and Victoria Sin’s performance relic, A View From Elsewhere.

Hassan Vawda is the Guides Coordinator at Tate and a co-chair of Tate’s BAME network. He is also an artist involved in programming and projects across multiple disciplines and an Aziz Foundation Scholar studying Community Development, looking at inclusion/exclusion within cultural and creative spaces, particularly faithbased creative expression. Currently finishing his MA in Applied Anthropology & Community & Youth Work at Goldsmith’s University of London, he will start his PhD at Tate in October 2019.

Syllabus IV will be at S1 Artspace, Sheffield, over the weekend of 26–29 April. Please note, we have already selected the participants for Syllabus IV.

Syllabus IV artists Scott Caruth, Libita Clayton, Jessica Coleman, Bettina Fung, Laura Hindmarsh, Beth Kettel, David Lisser, Alicja Rogalska, Kirsty Russell and Abigail Sidebotham are visiting Sheffield for their fourth retreat with the themes 'Peripheries, Communities and Ecologies'.

Friday

Friday will begin with artist presentations for three of the Syllabus artists, who will be joined by S1 artists Ashley Holmes and Lea Torp Nielsen, and Bloc Projects curator Dave McLeavy. After lunch, artist Sophie Hope of Manual Labours, will lead  a workshop exploring the concept of the staff room – what does it mean to people and who has access to it? In the evening, the artists will meet for a dinner of Eritrean and Ethiopian food.

Saturday

On Saturday, artist Serena Lee and curator Louise Shelley will lead a full-day workshop imagining futures of language through collective reading, writing and making. In the evening, the artist will be treated to a dinner of South East Asian vegetarian and vegan food.

Sunday

Sunday will begin with four more artist presentations, followed by a sauna session with Warmth roaming sauna. 

Monday

An extra, optional day will include a walk in nearby Edale.

Reading

• Chris Kraus, Social Practices: Lost Properties
• Louise Ashcroft, DIY.DIWO.DIA in Art Monthly issue 424
• Manual Labours Manual #4, Building as Body: Introduction
• Spaces of Commoning, Artistic Research and the Utopia of the Everyday: Introduction

Biographies

Manual Labours is a research project exploring physical and emotional relationships to work, initiated by Jenny Richards and Sophie Hope. This project reconsiders current time-based structures of work (when does work start and end?) and reasserts the significance of the physical (manual) aspect of immaterial, affective and emotional labour. Sophie Hope’s practice based research focuses on the relationships between art and society. Sophie has developed practical projects through which to research cultural policy, labour conditions and community art histories. These include a three-year participant-led investigation into socially engaged art and a largescale community performance in a Dutch new town.

Serena Lee layers cinema, performance, voice, image and text to map a political grammar of harmony. Modelling belonging and power through polyphony, she practises and collaborates internationally. Serena is a member of the Read-in research group, a self-organised collective that experiments with the political, material, and physical implications of collective reading and the situatedness of any kind of reading activity. 

Louise Shelley is the current Curatorial Fellow at Cubitt, London. She was previously Projects Curator at The Showroom, London where she coordinated the Communal Knowledge programme, a series of collaborative projects with local and international artists to propose and activate approaches to critical engagement with The Showroom’s social and cultural surroundings. The programme produced work, events and alliances that addressed the role of art operating within and responding to themes including pedagogy, work/labour, feminist legacies, precarity, the dialectic of social re/production, class and gender. 

Syllabus IV will be at Studio Voltaire, London, during the weekend of 1–3 February. Please note we have selected the participants for Syllabus IV.

Syllabus IV artists Scott Caruth, Libita Clayton, Jessica Coleman, Bettina Fung, Laura Hindmarsh, Beth Kettel, David Lisser, Alicja Rogalska, Kirsty Russell and Abigail Sidebotham are visiting London for their third retreat with the theme 'Voice, Playfulness and Politics'. 

Friday

Following a breakfast and Welcome in McDermott & McGough’s The Oscar Wilde Temple, Artist and musician Jenny Moore will lead a four–hour workshop based on her own compositions and those of other female artists. The group will experiment with vocalisations, singing and listening as tools for collaboration and production. Vocal exercises such as ‘aural tuning’ will explore embodied knowledge, melody as a source of mantra and locking into rhythms to physically understand the potential of political performance and protest but also transformative social interactions. The day will end with an optional trip to a sauna.

Saturday

Day Two will include an introduction to live action role-play with Jamie Harper, a theatre director and game designer who specialises in Nordic-larp. This will be followed by an introduction to white voice techniques with Monika Walenko and a dinner.

Sunday

Day Three will comprise artist presentations in the morning, followed by a writing workshop with artist, writer and musician Morgan Quaintance.

Reading

• Charles Fernyhough, ‘Chorus of Me’ in The Voices Within 
• Cookie Mueller, ‘Secrets of the Skinny’
• Sharon Hayes, In My Little Corner of the World, Anyone Would Love You, 2016 
• Francois Bonnet, ‘The Sound Object’ in ‘The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago’.
•Jacob Mallinson Bird, ‘Touching Synchrony: Drag Queens, Skins and The Touch of the Heroine’
 Didier Anzieu, ‘The Wrapping of Sound’ in ‘The Skin Ego’ 

Biographies

Jenny Moore is a Canadian artist-musician based in London whose interdisciplinary practice is noisy and embodied, feeding on her roles as singer, conductor, composer, drummer, performance artist. She plays in the dance-punk band Charismatic Megafauna, leads feminist choir F*Choir, and has recently released an album for 10 voices and 2 drummers called Mystic Business originally commissioned for Wysing Polyphonic Music Festival. Moore collaborates with a group of artists as Bedfellows, leading workshops, performances and talks about consent, desire and life long sex education.

Jamie Harper is a theatre director, play designer and performance researcher. He trained on the Directors’ Course at LAMDA and went on to win the JMK Directors’ Award and National Theatre Cohen Bursary which led to a year as Resident Director at the National Theatre Studio. In 2013, he received a Churchill Trust Travelling Fellowship to research the intersection of game design and drama at University of Miami and, following this project, he has made several participatory performance works that incorporate play including: Archipelago, The Lowland Clearances and The City Limits for Camden People's Theatre, People Vs Democracy at the Free Word Centre, Moving Up (with artist Adam James) for Serpentine Galleries, Nudge, Washing Machine for the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and Migrations of Cool at the Arebyte Gallery in Hackney Wick. He is an active member of the Nordic Larp (live action role-play) community and has presented larp works at international festivals including Grenselandet in Oslo, Blackbox CPH in Copenhagen and Minsk Larp Festival in Belarus. He is currently undertaking a practice-led PhD in participatory performance at Newcastle University.

Morgan Quaintance is a London-based artist, writer and curator. His moving-image work has been shown recently at LIMA, Amsterdam, Kunstmuseum, Bonn; Jerwood Space, London; the 14th Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, London Film Festival 2018, November Film Festival, The Palace International Film Festival, and Videonalle.17.

Monika Walenko Is a vocalist and accordian player with the Warszawa Wschodnia ("East Warsaw Ensemble"). The group aims to preserve the unique vocal styles and traditional repertoire of the Eastern-Slavonic music culture, mostly polyphonic. Warszawa Wschodnia is a mainly vocal ensemble, documents, reconstructs and performs Polish, Ukrainian and Russian traditional folk music. Amongst the repertoire of the group are songs recorded during field trips in Ukrainian Polesia, southern Russia, and in Polish regions of Kurpie, Kujawy and Mazowsze. The group performs regularly at festivals and music venues including Crossroads Festival in Krakow and recently at Café Oto and Pushkin House in London

Syllabus IV will be at Spike Island, Bristol during the weekend of 6–9 December. Please note we have selected the participants for Syllabus IV.

Syllabus IV artists Scott Caruth, Libita Clayton, Jessica Coleman, Bettina Fung, Laura Hindmarsh, Beth Kettel, David Lisser, Alicja Rogalska, Kirsty Russell and Abigail Sidebotham are visiting Bristol for their second retreat with the theme 'Strategies of Resilience'.

Friday

The group are beginning the retreat by visiting a sauna, before convening at Spike Island for a day of workshops and planning with partners and artistic advisors Sonya Dyer and Helen Nisbet. In the afternoon the group will visit Caraboo before a dinner, hosted by East Bristol Contemporary.

Saturday

The group will relocate to a farmhouse for the rest of the weekend, where they will be joined by Andrea Luka Zimmermann for day-long workshop.

Sunday

The group will be joined by Hamish MacPherson for a day of physical workshops.

Reading

Hamja Ahasan, Shy Radicals: The Antisystemic Politics of the Militant Introvert,(Second Edition, 2018, Bookworks, London) 

Audre Lorde, "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action", Paper delivered at the Modern Language Association's "Lesbian and Literature Panel," Chicago, Illinois, December 28, 1977. First published in Sinister Wisdom 6 (1978) and The Cancer Journals (Spinsters, Ink, San Francisco , 1980).

Biographies

Andrea Luka Zimmerman is an artist, film maker and cultural activist, exploring an often unexpected intersection of public and private memory, in particular in relation to structural and political violence.

Andrea's films have been nominated for the Grierson Award, The Aesthetica Art Prize, the Golden Orange, the Jarman Award, and the Glashuette original documentary award at the Berlin Film Festival (2017). Exhibitions and projects include Civil Rites, London Open, Whitechapel Gallery (2018), Tyneside Cinema Gallery, Newcastle, UK, (2017/18) Common Ground, Spike Island, Bristol (2017), Real Estates (co-curated with David Roberts), PEER with LUX, London (2015). Andrea is the co-founder of the artists' collective Fugitive Images and was the winner of the Artangel Open Award 2014 for the collaborative work Cycle with Adrian Jackson (Cardboard Citizens).

The artist's films include Erase and Forget (2017, 88mins) an inquiry into the nature of human conscience and the limits of deniability, which premiered at the 2017 Berlin Film Festival and in the UK at the London Film festival. Estate, a Reverie (2015, 83mins) tracks the passing of the Haggerston Estate in East London and the utopian promise of social housing it once offered, with a spirited celebration of extraordinary everyday humanity. Taskafa, Stories of the Street (2013, 66mins) explores resistance and co-existence through the lives of the street dogs of Istanbul and is voiced by John Berger. Andrea has made several commissioned short films for Film & Video Umbrella, Channel 4's Random Acts and Tintype Gallery. Andrea is also a founding member of Vision Machine (collaborators on Academy Award® nominated feature documentary The Look of Silence).

Andrea grew up on a large council estate and left school at 16 and after moving to London in 1991, and later studied at Central Saint Martins for a PhD.

Hamish MacPherson I am a London-based choreographer. I use performances, workshops, larps, games and other things to create environments for people to think, learn and be together. These structures are often decentralised and self-organising, combining physical activity and conversation and have dealt with themes like somatic citizenship, resentment, care and the future. My work somehow reflects my positions as a white European, able-bodied, heterosexual cismale. I have an MRes in Choreography and Performance from Roehampton University and an MA in Human Ethics and Global Values from Kings College, London.

For a while I’ve been thinking about care as an aesthetic, choreographic and political practice. As a negotiation of constantly fluctuating needs, capacities and interests. I am particularly interested in care that is disengaged, hostile, reluctant or otherwise complicated and problematic. Another line of enquiry of mine is THIS MOVEMENT, looking into literal and metaphorical movements. It takes different forms for example talks, interviews, workshops and interventions.

20-23 September 
We are hosting the first retreat for Syllabus IV, our collaboratively-produced alternative learning programme. The artists are: Scott Caruth, Libita Clayton, Jessica Coleman, Bettina Fung, Laura Hindmarsh, Beth Kettel, David Lisser, Alicja Rogalska, Kirsty Russell and Abigail Sidebotham. The Artistic Advisors this year are Sonya Dyer and Helen Nisbet.

Empathy

Thursday 20 Sep
Day of Introductions programmed by Wysing Arts Centre

In the Open Call, we described Syllabus IV as a “collaboratively produced programme”. It’s a collaboration between the ten Syllabus artists, but also between the Artistic Advisors, the six partner organisations and all of the people who work for them. This first day will be for you to get to know the people you will be working with over the next ten months.

The morning will see arrivals and icebreaker activities led by Wysing

Desert Island Syllabus
In pairs, we will take turns interviewing each other following the classic Desert Island Discs format. Imagine that you are about to spend the next ten months not with Syllabus, but stranded on a desert island. Which 8 pieces of art, music, literature or theory would you want to take with you?

Lunch

Ask Us Anything
This is your chance to find out about the partner organisations and the people that work for them. Syllabus artists will split into three interview panels and will have a chance to brainstorm a series of interview questions before quizzing individual members of each partner organisation. 

The afternoon will have a walk to the nearby village of Bourn followed by dinner with partners

In the evening, watch a film from the Artist Advisor's list, think of questions for ‘Question Time!’ or just relax in the farmhouse.

Friday 21 Sep
Welcome from the Artistic Advisors

3 Things
The Artist Advisors ask all artists to think of 3 Things that tell us something about themselves. These should not be about artist practice, but instead should symbolize who you are, what you think about, what you like. They can be funny, sad, clever, daft, very literal or very abstract. Each artist will have one minute to talk about all of their 3 Things on Saturday. Please prepare in advance and bring images, a power point, or the Things themselves if this is possible.

After lunch, the Syllabus artists will present their work to eachother and the partners followed by a walk.

The evening sees Question Time! Artists will be asked to submit questions anonymously and some (potentially not all) will be picked from a hat and read at set points. Questions will also be posed by the Artist Advisors. Artists are invited to write questions on a piece of paper, which will be put into a box prominently displayed in the farmhouse. This is followed by dinner in the farmhouse.

Saturday 22 Sep

You Are A... Workshop led by the Artistic Advisors 
Developing the theme of empathy, the Artist Advisors will propose a series of scenarios that artists will work together in groups to develop a response to. Specially, this exercise is designed to get the group to think about the various ways in which interactions between artists, curators, administrators and other facilitators affect the trajectory of their practice – sometimes unknowingly. Can we generate mutual empathy?
 

Question Time! followed by Clips n Chat - A discussion on Empathy led by the Artistic Advisors

Lunch 

3 Things followed by a group reading of Audré Lorde, ‘“Notes from a Trip to Russia”

Question Time! followed by a break and then dinner in the Farmhouse

Sunday 23 Sep

Brunch and planning for the next two retreats, then departures

Please note that we have selected the artists for this year's Syllabus IV programme.

To receive information on the next round of Open Calls for this and other programmes at Wysing, please subscribe to our e-bulletin, click here. 

17 July — 22 July 2018

The final retreat of Syllabus III, entitled 'Breaking Up is Hard to Do', is hosted by Wysing Arts Centre. Please note that we have selected the artists for this year's Syllabus III programme.

Syllabus III artists Frederica Agbah, Chris Alton, Conor Baird, Ilker Cinarel, Phoebe Davies, Freya Dooley, Rose Gibbs, Jill McKnight, Ben Sanderson and Karis Upton return to Wysing for their final retreat, entited 'Breaking Up is Hard to Do'.

Thursday: It's Not You, It's Me

The group will install work in Wysing's gallery. In the evening Syllabus artist Phoebe Davies will lead a listening session exploring break ups.

Friday: We Need to Talk

The group will share and discuss new work with the partners in Wysing's gallery. They will be joined that evening by local curators and artists for a dinner in Wysing's reception.

Saturday: I've Met Someone Else

Artist Advisors Jesse Darling and Harold Offeh will lead a further closed crit session in the morning. This will be followed by a visit from ToMA (The Other MA), who will share work with the group and join for a BBQ in Wysing's farmhouse.

Sunday: We Can Still be Friends

In the morning, Syllabus artist Frederica Agbah will lead a workshop entitled 'Acceptance Commitment Therapy and Strategies for Getting Unstuck' aimed at sharing skills related to depression, anxiety and stress. In the afternoon, the group will be joind by artist Tai Shani for 'Getting Back Out There', a workshop looking at future projects.

Biographies

The Other MA (TOMA) is an alternative art education model set up in 2015 by practicing artist, Emma Edmondson, working in partnership with Metal. Designed to fit the everyday lives of contemporary artists TOMA is a response to the barriers that some face in accessing many traditional art MA models (work & family commitments, cost, geography).Ten students are selected each year by a panel of tutor mentors, previous artist participants and representatives from Metal. Once selected, TOMA artists directly steer the study programme (working with administrative support from Metal) choosing those who come to teach on it and the topics explored. TOMAartists also host public facing projects and exhibitions as part of their time on the course. TOMA is currently based at Metal in Southend.

Tai Shani’s multidisciplinary practice, comprising performance, film, photography and installation, revolves around experimental narrative texts. Shani creates violent, erotic and fantastical images told in a dense, floral language which re-imagines female otherness as a perfect totality, set in a world complete with cosmologies, myth and histories that negate patriarchy. 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.

Tai Shani was born in London. Shani has presented her work extensively in the UK and abroad, recent exhibitions and commissions include, including Wysing Arts Centre (2017); Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm (2016); RADAR commission, Loughborough University, (2016), Serpentine Galleries (2016); Tate Britain (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).

Reading List

Essential

Sesshu Foster, How is the Arist or Writer to Function (Survive and Produce) in the Community, Outside of Institutions?, Poetry Magazine, August 2017. Link here

Suggested

Sol Le Witt, "Letter to Eva Hesse", 9 September 1928. Link here 

Martin Herbert, Tell Them I Said No, Sternberg Press, 2016. 

Astrud Gilberto, "How Insensitive", 1965 on The Astrud Gilberto Album, link here

The White Pube & Shape Arts, “How To Get an Exhibition”, link here

See also responses to the above article: Sonia Boué, “The Art World is Social”, 5 July 2018, here and here.

Evan Ifekoya, Raisa Kabir, Raju Rage, Rudy Loewe, “Surviving Art School: An Artist of Colour Toolkit”, link here

Raju Rage, Under/Valued Energetic Economy, an exhibition at Jupiter Woods, 14–29 July, here 
See also: Documentation of the work in more of an avalanche, Wysing Arts Centre, here

21-24 June

Syllabus III will be at Iniva in London during the weekend of 21-24 June. Please note we have selected the participants for Syllabus III.

Syllabus III artists Frederica Agbah, Chris Alton, Conor Baird, Ilker Cinarel, Phoebe Davies, Freya Dooley, Rose Gibbs, Jill McKnight, Ben Sanderson and Karis Upton are visiting Iniva in London for their next retreat.

Thursday
18.30-20.30 Research Network Reading Group This reading group will focus on the concept of 'cure', and its relationship to radical self-care, through the writings of Black lesbian poet Audre Lorde and queer disability activist Eli Clare. All readings are read together in the group, you don’t need to read them in advance. Please note this event is open to the public. Full details can be found here. 

Friday
Morning Q&A session with Trevor Mathison at Iniva’s Stuart Hall Library
Trevor will screen ‘The Last Angel of History’ by Black Audio Film Collective (45 minutes). He will then speak about his work with BAFC and his more recent projects, in particular Dreamed Native Ancestry, an installation and programme critically addressing and re-thinking contemporary issues around race, migration, biopolitics and culture, through an Afrofuturist science fiction narrative and deep history perspective. 

Afternoon introduction to the Stuart Hall Library collection with Stephanie Moran/ zine-making workshop
This is an opportunity to explore the collection, in particular the zine collection. Paper, glue, scissors will be provided. Feel free to use the photocopier.

Evening performative workshop with Larry Achiampong at Iniva’s Stuart Hall Library
The focus will be centred on listening, followed by a short session looking at audio sampling and beatmaking and how sampling is important to Larry’s practice. The artists are asked to bring a vinyl record/an audio track and be prepared to play one track (5mins). Each artist will have time to talk about the track, what they are listening to at the moment, or what sound means to them (artistically or otherwise).

Saturday
Morning meditation led by Syllabus III artist Fred Agbah

Screening of films in the Stuart Hall Library collection

Afternoon performative workshop with Evan Ifekoya 

This session will explore the idea of 'abundance' as it relates to Evan’s life and creative work. It's the starting point for their upcoming exhibition at Gasworks. Evan will start the session by
doing a short presentation on the subject of abundance. The artists are asked to bring something in that relates to responds to this word - it could be a sound, an image, an extract of text or a physical object.

Sunday
Morning Q&A session with Barby Asante at Camden Arts Centre

Barby will present her practice which explores the archival, makes propositions, collects and maps stories and contributions of people of colour using storytelling, collective actions, and ritual, to excavate, unearth and interrogate given narratives. By making these narratives visible, asking questions and making proposals she is interested in what these possibilities offer as we examine our present and envision our futures. 

Bios

Trevor Mathison is an artist primarily working with audio and digital media. He has been a member of noted artistic collectives such as Flow Motion, and the Black Audio Film Collective. Established in 1982 by a group of Black British and diaspora artists and film makers, BAFC produced an extraordinary body of films and mixed media projects that investigated black identity and culture in Britain. Mathison’s radical approach to sound was crucial to BAFC’s work from the very beginning. Combining the history of black musics with elements of dub, musique concrète and industrial noise, his soundtracks (which he once called 'post-soul noise’) move with ease across cultural and generational divisions. He also works as part of Dubmorphology and Mission//Misplaced Memory.

Larry Achiampong's solo and collaborative projects employ imagery, aural and visual archives, live performance and sound to explore ideas surrounding class, cross-cultural and post-digital identity. Achiampong has exhibited, performed and presented projects within the UK and abroad including Tate Britain/Modern, London; The Institute For Creative Arts, Cape Town; The British Film Institute, London; David Roberts Art Foundation, London; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Bokoor African Popular Music Archives Foundation, Accra; Logan Center Exhibitions, Chicago; Prospect New Orleans, New Orleans; Diaspora Pavilion – 57th Venice Biennale, Venice; and Somerset House, London. He completed a BA in Mixed Media Fine Art at University of Westminster in 2005 and an MA in Sculpture at Slade School of Fine Art in 2008. He lives and works in London and has been a tutor on the Photography MA programme at The 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.

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.
Ifekoya’s recent work has been presented at: Contemporary Arts Centre New Orleans as part of Prospect 4; Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh, New Art Exchange, Nottingham; Plymouth Arts Centre; Serpentine Galleries, London; Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire; (2017); Transmission Gallery, Glasgow; and Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town (2016). Recent performances have taken place at Brunel Museum as part of Block Universe in collaboration with Victoria Sin, Camden Arts Centre (2018), ICA London and KW institute, Berlin (2017) and Jerwood Space, London and Whitstable Biennial (2016). Ifekoya was an Art Foundation Fellow in Live Art, 2017.
Forthcoming is a solo exhibition ‘Ritual Without Belief’ at Gasworks Gallery, London opening July 2018 and a public art commission with Studio Voltaire and Lambeth Council, part of Clapham Public Realm Programme to launch Autumn 2018.

Barby Asante is a London based artist, curator, educator and occasional DJ. Her work is concerned with the politics of place, space, identity and the histories and legacies of colonialism making work that is collaborative, performative and dialogic. Her current artistic research As Always a Painful Declaration of Independence : For Ama. For Aba. For Charlotte and Adjoa, is being realised in a series of project episodes. The project explores the social, cultural and political agency of women of colour, as they navigate historic legacies of colonialism, independence, migration and the contemporary global socio political climate, through performative actions that engage with historic spaces, archives and collections. Asante has also taught on fine art programmes in London, Berlin, Gothenburg and Rotterdam. She is co-founder of agency for agency a collaborative agency concerned with ethics, intersectionality and education in the contemporary arts who are mentors to the sorryyoufeeluncomfortable collective. Asante is also on the board of the Women's Art Library and Associate Curator at 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning.

24 to 27 May

The next retreat as part of our Syllabus III programme is hosted by programme partner S1 Artspace in Sheffield. Please note we have selected the participants for Syllabus III.

Syllabus III artists Frederica Agbah, Chris Alton, Conor Baird, Ilker Cinarel, Phoebe Davies, Freya Dooley, Rose Gibbs, Jill McKnight, Ben Sanderson and Karis Upton are visiting Birmingham for their sixth retreat, hosted in Sheffield by S1 Artspace.

Thursday
The artists will have 1:1 sessions with this year's lead artists, Jesse Darling and Harold Offeh. In the evening, dinner at Foodhall will be accompanied with a session of Youtube Cinema.

Friday
Harold Offeh will lead a performance workshop entitled "The Body as a Tool". The workshop will explore the idea of using the body as material, a tool or a weapon. The session will explore a number activities, starting with some warm up exercises like Erwin Wurm's One Minute Sculpture and Allan Kaprow's scores. The group will do some physical actualising, loosely based on Augusto Boal's actions. These will involve making tableaux of particular concepts and ideas using our bodies, posing and gestures. We will re-visit the question, what's your problem? but other questions and statements are welcome. This will be followed by Selfie Choreography, where participants are invited to use a selfie stick (provided) and smartphone (not provided - individuals needs to bring their own) as an apparatus to capture the body, space, movement and gesture. The session will conclude with Choreograph Us, a workshop where the group individually generates a series of instructions that are then used and performed collectively. The aim is to create a series of experiences that the group can speak to and discuss.

In the afternoon, Social and cultural historian Dr Helen Smith will lead a walking tour of one of Sheffield’s oldest industrial districts Kelham Island. The island was formed in the 1180s when a channel was created to carry water from the River Don to the Town Corn Mill. Much of the early history of the island after this time is unknown until 1637 when the town armourer, Kellam Homer set up a grinding workshop and waterwheel on the island. In the 1800s, other industries began to spring up in the Kelham area and Kelham Island itself became a host for all kinds of manufacturers including Kelham Iron Works. In the 1890s the site was bought by the City. The Iron Works buildings were demolished and an electricity generating station was built in their place, to provide power for the City’s new tram system. The power station was in operation until the 1930s, after which the buildings were used as storage space and workshops. After the tour, the group will return to S1 to explore some of the themes raised in Helen’s book, Masculinity, Class and Same-Sex Desire in Industrial England, 1895-1957.

In the afternoon Syllabus and Tough Matter will host a multi-disciplinary live event at Delcious Clam, which will explore the construction (and queering) of gender as well as Sheffield’s industrial past and post-industrial present through performance, voice and video. 

Saturday

In the morning, artist Imran Perretta will host a conversation discussing the cultural construction of masculinity in urban environments in relation to music scenes and political events/particular moments in history. In exploring how personhood is formulated by visual cultures, Perretta will draw on his own teenagehood of watching grime videos in the mid 2000s.

This will be followed by a vocal facilitation workshop with Randolph Mathews, which will explore three main exercises: 1. Evolution of sound: primitive animal sounds and how they occupy different spaces of the body. 2. Vocal chord range: exploring the “different instruments in our vocal range". 3. Exploring unvocalised words or phrases.

For Saturday's dinner, South Street Kitchen are making a vegan and vegetarian feast. The food is Middle Eastern inspired, and will be big sharing bowls of goodness for everyone to help themselves. There will also be some wine provided with dinner. 

Sunday

The weekend will close with a drawing workshop over breakfast and a reflective planning session.

Biographies

Helen Smith

Helen is a social and cultural historian who is fascinated by masculinity, sexuality, class and the impact that region had on people's identities in the 20th century, particularly in the north of England. Smith works in Lincoln but lives in Sheffield, which remains an inspiration due to its industrial past and strong workingclass identity. Her first book, Masculinity, Class and Same-Sex Desire in Industrial England, 1895-1957 was published in 2015 and while still working on those ideas, she is also beginning a new project on work, youth culture and the impact that the de-industrialisation of the 1970s and 80s had on gender identities.

Imran Perretta

Imran Perretta’s work addresses biopower, marginality and the (de)construction of cultural histories. His multi-disciplinary practice encompasses the moving-image, sound, performance and poetry. Recent exhibitions include Unintended Consequences: Jerwood/FVU Awards at Jerwood Space, London, SHIFT at RCA Dyson Gallery, London, Mene Mene Tekel Parsin at Wysing Arts Centre, UK; brother to brother for JVA Solo Presentations, Jerwood Space, London; it wasn't a crash, in the usual sense, Arcadia Missa, London; Pale News (in collaboration with Milo van der Maaden) commissioned by the Chisenhale Gallery and performed in Victoria Park, London. Perretta is based in London.

Randolph Matthews

Randolph Matthews is a vocal performer, facilitator and coach from London who is inspired by the belief that the power of the voice can change people’s lives. Performing and recording unaccompanied or with his band, Randolph's vocal performances span over two decades where he has collaborated with artists for both the Jazz, blues and contemporary music scene. His training in voice started at Goldsmiths College and then lead him to the United States in 2004 to study Voice Movement Therapy, working with the voice in an explorational context in different communities. He is passionate about ensuring that people are able to access what the voice can do in an inspired way and that the use of evidence-based techniques are used across his practice. Randolph works with clients of all ages in both community and music industry settings.

Tough Matter

Tough Matter is a collaborative project co-founded by artists Ashley Holmes and Vicky Hayward. It is a platform that facilitates experimentation, collective activity and conversations around music and visual arts. Material produced as part of the project includes a series of artist commissions, interviews, live shows and radio broadcasts.

 26-29 April

For the next retreat as part of our Syllabus III programme, Studio Voltaire will host the group at Glasgow International. Please note that we have selected the artists for this year's Syllabus III programme.

Syllabus III artists Frederica Agbah, Chris Alton, Conor Baird, Ilker Cinarel, Phoebe Davies, Freya Dooley, Rose Gibbs, Jill McKnight, Ben Sanderson and Karis Upton are visiting Glasgow International for their fifth retreat, hosted by Studio Voltaire.

Thursday - Syllabus lead artist Jesse Darling will host 1:1 sessions for the group during the day. In the evening the group will attend a choice of events from the Glasgow International programme.

Friday - Jesse Darling and Glasgow International Director, Richard Parry, will introduce the group to the festival. In the afternoon, the group will attend an artist's talk from Jamie Crewe and will have time to visit exhibitions.

Saturday - Ellie Harrison and Ross Birrel will deliver workshops in the day. An evening communal dinner will coincide with a session of "youtube cinema" before the group attend Social Event curated by Love Unlimited.

Sunday - Practice Mapping delivered by Syllabus artist Chris Alton followed by a reflection on the weekend

Contributor Biographies

Ellie Harrison​ is an artist & activist based in Glasgow (UK). Her work takes a variety of forms: from installations and performance / events, to lectures, live broadcasts & political campaigns. Using an array of strategies, Harrison investigates, exposes and challenges the absurd consequences of our capitalist system: from over-consumption, inequality and alienation, to privatisation and climate change – and explores the impact free-market forces are having on our society, and our individual day-to-day lives. As well as making playful, politically-engaged work for galleries and public spaces, Harrison is also the founder and coordinator of the national Bring Back British Rail campaign – which strives to popularise the idea of re-nationalising our public transport system – and is the agent for The Artists’ Bond – a life-long speculative funding scheme for artists, now with 160 members across the UK. Since 2013, Harrison has been Lecturer in Contemporary Art Practices at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, she is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and is engaged in an active critique of higher education.

Jamie Crewe​ is an artist, a singer, and a vicious changeling who lives in Glasgow. They graduated from Sheffield Hallam University in 2009 with a BA in Contemporary Fine Art, and from Glasgow School of Art in 2015 with a Master of Fine Art. They have presented two solo exhibitions — Female Executioner, Gasworks, London (2017), and But what was most awful was a girl who was singing Transmission, Glasgow (2016) — and have been involved in recent group exhibitions in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Copenhagen, and Vienna. Their book GLAIRE was published in 2017 by by Ma Bibliothéque, and they have presented their performance work Potash Lesson (2016) in Glasgow, London, Berlin and Belfast. Jamie is currently developing a new moving image work, commissioned by the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, as well as working towards a solo exhibition at Tramway, Glasgow, for September 2018.

Mother Tongue (Tiffany Boyle) ​ is a research-led, independent curatorial practice working locally and internationally, formed in 2009 by Tiffany Boyle and Jessica Carden. They have since then collaboratively produced exhibitions, film programmes, discursive events, essays and publications, working with galleries, museums, archives, festivals and national organisations, primarily in Scotland and Sweden. Mother Tongue’s practice in exhibition-making intersects with research interests – including, but not limited to – post-colonialism, language, translation, heritage, race, indigenousness, migration, and movement. Mother Tongue are recent recipients of a grant from the Paul Mellon Centre, London, to undertake archive and collection research into the presence and exhibition histories of artists of colour in Scotland towards a future ‘AfroScots’ exhibition project. They have undertaken residencies in Scotland, Sweden, Finland and Barbados, and participated on the 2011/12 CuratorLab programme at Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm. Commissioned by the British Council Scotland, Mother Tongue is a partner within the cohort for the inaugural Tilting Axis Fellowship, a one-year opportunity for a Caribbean-based practitioner to undertake across the region and in Scotland designed in collaboration with the CCA Glasgow, David Dale Gallery and Hospitalfield, as well as our Caribbean partners. Mother Tongue’s projects are frequently accompanied by writing, from ourselves and writer’s commissions, both critical and creative texts. These have been published in English and Gaelic, and translation has played a prominent role also – from Swedish and Portuguese - as examples into English. They have written foroutlets including MAP magazine and Africa is a Country, and published with Palgrave Macmillan.

Richard Parry ​is the current Director of Glasgow International, following his appointment in 2017. Previously Parry was Curator-Director of the Grundy Art Gallery between 2013 and 2017, where he curated and organised over 25 exhibitions. Following the group exhibition Sensory Systems (2015), Parry was awarded an Art Fund New Collecting Award and in 2016 curated NEON: The Charged Line, the largest exhibition of neon-based art yet staged in the UK.

Ross Birrell ​lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. Birrell employs a range of media including film, sculpture, installation, music, text, events and publications to produce works which interweave contexts of poetry, philosophy, politics, and place. He works both solo and collaboratively in gallery-based installations, site-specific projects, concerts and publications. Birrell’s ongoing Envoy project of site-specific actions across the globe, responds to traditions of radical politics and utopian literature and is published in An Envoy Reader (LemonMelon, London, 2014). Other works explore classical musical forms in personal, poetic and political contexts which often form the basis of recitals, films and audio installations, including: Duet (2013) a work for two violas performed by Palestinian and Israeli musicians; Sonata (2013) a composition for piano trio, performed in the Non-Catholic Cemetery, Rome; A Beautiful Living Thing (2015) performed in the Mackintosh building in the aftermath of the fire; and Fugue (2017), a work developed in collaboration with Syrian violinist and composer Ali Moraly for documenta 14.

1 - 4 Februrary

The next retreat as part of our Syllabus III programme, entitled 'Labours of Love' is hosted by programme partner Eastside Projects, Birmingham. Please note that we have selected the artists for this year's Syllabus III programme.

Syllabus III artists Frederica Agbah, Chris Alton, Conor Baird, Ilker Cinarel, Phoebe Davies, Freya Dooley, Rose Gibbs, Jill McKnight, Ben Sanderson and Karis Upton are visiting Birmingham for their fourth retreat, hosted by Eastside Projects, entitled 'Labours of Love'.

Thursday 
The artists will attend New Art Gallery Walsall's exhibition openings for 'Wilderness' – a group show curated by Zoe Lippett; 'Artists Rooms: Vija Celmins'; and 'Mike Nelson: Lionheart'. 

Friday
Don’t make art by yourself. Make it with others. From others. For others. Part 1 - A series of active, collective discussions, led by Syllabus participants beginning with a focussed question or proposition for the group to discuss, unpick or unravel together.

Workshop: Scuola Senze Fine (School Without End) - Led by Syllabus III artist Rose Gibbs, this workshop takes the film Scuola Senze Fine as a starting point to explore friendships between women and the practice of finding a voice and narrating the self. Scuola Senze Fine was a peer led alternative education program that emerged out of the adult education courses provided to factory workers and housewives in Italy in the 1970s. Many of the women had left school at 15 or 16 and these courses provided them with the opportunity to form new friendships and enjoy education for education’s sake.

The artists will explore the political context of the film through a number of texts and do a short practical exercise in the method of consciousness raising as developed by The Milan Women’s Bookshop Collective.

In the evening is Digbeth First Friday with openings across the area. More info is available here. 

Saturday
Breakfast reading group led by curator Lucy Lopez - Text: Exhaustion and Exuberance: Ways to Defy the Pressure to Perform by Jan Verwoert. This will be a slow reading group. This is as much to engage in reading it together and speaking out loud as anything else, and to take away the pressure of having something thought through to say: it's more about immediate reaction and figuring it out together.

Don’t make art by yourself. Make it with others. From others. For others. Part 2. The afternoon sees a writing workshop of wild figuring led by artist Holly Pester.

Attraction and terror. Trembling and wonderment. Strangeness and intimacy. Only the sacred phenomenon of love can still give us an idea of what that solemn encounter can have been - Aimé Césaire from Poetry and Knowledge.

In Holly's workshop we will encourage the quirks, fascinations, obsessions and curiosities that haunt and propel our work like musical microbes, to speak. Our aim will be to open out our thought processes by considering them through experimental analogs, in order to translate what we desire to know, into method.

This work might be seen as a de-professionalising turn from writing in order to pay a debt to our research objectives, to a nervous labour of writing that’s an augury of idea and feeling. In other words, rather than claim the objects that fascinate us in our writing – by directly writing about them– how might we translate our fascinations into style and voice, therefore becoming both politically situated by, and in fantastical relation to, our materials.

Dinner with invited guests will round out the evening.

Sunday
Rabimmel, rabammel, rabum: Rosalie Schweiker and Sofia Niazi workshop.
Rosalie Schweiker has invited Sofia Niazi to join her in delivering this workshop, which will be about professional, unprofessional and semiprofessional representations of artistic work. What is the difference between presenting your work on a website, on instagram or in a zine? And what would happen if your smart statements PDF got turned into absurd paper lanterns?

The Function of Art workshop led by Director Gavin Wade

A final reflective/planning session with lead artist Harold Offeh. 

Please note that we have selected the artists for this year's Syllabus III programme.

To receive information on the next round of Open Calls for this and other programmes at Wysing, please subscribe to our e-bulletin, click here.

8-10 December 
"The Body and Movement"

Please note that we have selected the artists for this year's Syllabus III programme.

Syllabus III artists Frederica Agbah, Chris Alton, Conor Baird, Ilker Cinarel, Phoebe Davies, Freya Dooley, Rose Gibbs, Jill McKnight, Ben Sanderson and Karis Upton are visiting Bristol for their third retreat, hosted by Spike Island.

Friday

Talk with Nav Haq via Skype Discussing ‘Rave and Its Influence on Art and Culture’ exhibition which engaged critically with the historical rave movement of 1980s and 1990s and contemporary art

Introductory session with Rory Pilgrim, followed by lunch

In the afternoon, Rory will lead a Movement Workshop

"A Political Body is a Sensitive Body", a screening and discussion led by Wysing's Assistant Curator, John Bloomfield

In the evening, we will visit FOLLOW THE STARS TO BRUNSWICK: MEMBERS SHOW Brunswick club BEEF (Bristol Experimental and Expanded Film)

Saturday

TO STRIKE A POSE IS TO STRIKE A THREAT led by Sabel Gavaldon

Introductory presentation: Mapping out practices, mapping out bodies

‘Tongues Untied’ by Marlon T. Riggs, 1989 Screening of this seminal film followed by a discussion

ELEMENTS OF VOGUE. A CASE STUDY IN RADICAL PERFORMANCE. Conceived as a tool box, the presentation will unpack a series of crucial yet often overlooked notions such as ‘Realness’, ‘Camp’, ‘Gesture’, ‘Pose’, ‘Disidentification’ and ‘Signifying’

4.40pm – Echoes finale performance at Spike Island: Young In Hong - Free and open to the Public. Full details on Spike Island's website here.

This is followed by a Q&A with Young In Hong at 5:45pm

The evening will see a dinner at Spike Island with invited guests and contributions by the Syllabus III artists

Sunday

A day at the Feminist Archive South, led by DM Withers. Withers will introduce the archive and the kinds of political bodies found there and use the text by Alexis Pauline Gumbs's 'Evidence' (from Octavia's Brood) to think about how one might play with temporal perspectives to read archives from a historical time that is radically different to our own, in terms of values, and social relations - the time after 'silence broke' (to use her imaginary).

The focus will be on three pieces of 'evidence' that relate to immigration activism, and the artists will be invited to recontextualise these sources as evidence from a time 'before silence broke'. Artists will be invited to explore what kinds of statements / performative responses could be made about the sources to mobilise them as political bodies (or to mobilise political bodies), and in so doing contest the normalisation of values that continue to be embedded in contemporary society. Furthermore, what imaginaries might the materials help us to reclaim / recuperate, for example, practices of resistance.

After lunch, Syllabus III artist Chris Alton will lead a mapping session

Reading List

Guattari, G. D. (1986). What Is a Minor Literature?

Gumbs, A. P. (2015). Evidence. In A. M. Imarisha, Octavia's Brood. AK Press and the Institute for Anarchist Studies.

Hebdige, D. (1983). Posing... Threats, Striking... Poses: Youth, Surveillance, and Display.

Biographies

Nav Haq is Senior Curator at M HKA, Antwerpen. Haq has organsed numerous solo exhibitions with artists such as Hassan Khan, Cosima von Bonin, Imogen Stidworthy, Kerry James Marshall and Shilpa Gupta. Group exhibitions have included Superpower: Africa in Science Fiction (2012); Museum Show– a major historical survey of (semi-fictional) museums created by artists (2011); and Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie: Class Hegemony in Contemporary Art, co-curated with Tirdad Zolghadr (2006-09). In 2014 he co-curated the group exhibition Don't You Know Who I Am? Art After Identity Politics at MuHKA, and is preparing exhibitions of works by Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin and Otobong Nkanga for autumn 2015. 

Rory Pilgrim (Bristol, 1988). Rory's work is based on emancipatory concerns, in which personal and political questions are brought together to explore questions of time and connections between activism, spirituality, music and community with others. Strongly influenced by the origins of activist, feminist and socially engaged art, Rory works with a wide range of media including live performance, film, text, workshops and musical composition. Rory obtained a BA from Chelsea College of Art, London and was a participant of the De Ateliers residency programme between 2008-2010 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Recent Solo Shows include Rowing, London (2017), Plymouth Art Centre (2017), Flat Time House, London (2016), Site Gallery, Sheffield (2016), Andriesse-Eyck Gallery, Amsterdam NL (2015) and sic! Raum für Kunst, Luzern CH (2014). Groups shows, performances and screenings include Block Universe, UK (2017) GAK, Bremen DE (2017), Guangzhou Triennial, CN (2015), Land Art Live, Almere NL (2015), MING Studios, Boise USA (2015), Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht NL (2014) Kunst Werke, Berlin DE (2013) and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2012).

Sabel Gavaldon is a curator based in London. His last exhibitions took place: 1) in a derelict factory in the outskirts of Barcelona, while using fiction to place the viewer before the remains of a forgotten civilization; 2) in constant motion and just for one day, entertaining the possibility of artworks and audience never encountering one another; 3) as part of a curatorial laboratory in the Basque Country, with a focus on gardening as a model to experiment with collective forms of exhibition-making. In 2016, he was nominated for the ICI New York Independent Vision Curatorial Award. He is now working towards the exhibition "Elements of Vogue: A Case Study in Radical Performance", which opens in November 2017 at CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, in Madrid.

Young In Hong is a visual artist, her artistic practice embraces a range of disciplines of textiles, drawing, installation, performance, art in public space and artist book making. Young In often conducts research-led practices, her research interests are undervalued cultural practices, politics of intuition, and the practice of ‘equality’. For her performance projects, Young In works in collaboration with art institutions, curators, performing artists and the ordinary public. Here, collective memory embedded in an unwritten history is a central theme, which often leads the artist to focus on historical archival images of specific events in South Korea. Young In’s practice has been introduced at Turner Contemporary, Margate (2017), Block Universe, London (2017), La Triennale di Milano (2016), Grand Palais, Paris (2016), Cecilia Hillström Gallery, Stockholm (2013/2016), ICA (2015), Gwangju Biennale (2014/2004), Delfina Foundation, London (2014), Kukje Gallery, Seoul (2013), Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2011).

DM Withers research addresses questions of cultural memory and transmission, technology and inscription, political economy and the digital. Feminist archives and debates about generational transmission have often been the focus of their research and are examined in their book Feminism, Digital Culture and the Politics of Transmission: Theory, Practice and Cultural Heritage which won the 2016 Feminist and Women’s Studies Association Book Prize. Recently, DM has turned to the pedagogy of community digital archives, in particular how archives can be spaces to acquire digital literacies, create collaborative knowledge and support the formation of new social relationships. Withers has curated exhibitions and written several articles exploring the theoretical, cultural and historical legacies of women-centred social movements of the 1970s and 1980s. The Feminist Revolution: the Struggle for Women’s Liberation (Smithsonian Books), a co-written, archivalillustrated history of this era, will be published in 2018. 

13 to 15 December

The application deadline for this retreat has now passed. The selected artists are Rebecca Allen, Katriona Beales, Anna Bunting-Branch, Ami Clarke, Sonya Dyer, Candice Jacobs, Wilf Speller and 555-5555.

Wysing Arts Centre, The Mechatronic Library, FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, Liverpool) and QUAD invite applications for Worlds Among Us, a two-part project to support artists to work with new digital technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and Game-Engines.  

Philosopher Thomas Metzinger describes consciousness as a "tunnel through reality": a low-resolution simulation of an inconceivably richer physical reality. Our sensory organs developed for survival, rather than to depict the world as it truly exists, and so we see and hear only what we need to of reality. Even then, small amounts of information are augmented and rounded up, like a low bitrate mp3 turned up loud. Our tools are limited even before they are misused. 

If our nervous system imposes a tunnel on reality, ideology only serves to further narrow the view. At a moment when, with technologies such as Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and Game-Engines, new worlds are waiting to be created, there are existing worlds we do not sense at all.   

Worlds Among Us invites proposals for projects that seek to use these new technologies to look again at the worlds we do not see. How can creating new worlds, virtual experiences and augmented perspectives help us see more of what already exists?

For the first stage of the project, eight artists will be selected for a three-day 'clinic' at Wysing Arts Centre (13 to 15 December) where they will work closely with Werkflow, a studio specialising in Game-Engine technology, alongside curators from Wysing, FACT and QUAD. Following the clinic, the artists will have the opportunity to revise their proposals for a second selection process.

From this a new co-commission will be produced with support from the Mechatronic Library and specialist technical studios. As part of this second stage, final works will be exhibited at Wysing, FACT and QUAD between 2018 and 2020 with an opportunity to create limited editions with digital manufacturing technology.

We invite proposals from artists interested in developing their practice through these new technologies and interested in reflecting on the philosophical and political implications of their increasing adoption by society. 

We invite proposals from artists new to these technologies as much as those who have experience working with them. We are especially keen to hear from artists who can bring a range of cultural, social, racial and gender perspectives to draw attention to other worlds existing among us. 

During 2017 Wysing has been exploring ‘many voices’ across all our programmes under the over-arching title Wysing Polyphonic. Through residencies, exhibitions, events, study weeks and study days, we have worked with a range of artists to explore a diversity of contexts and positions to help better understand the role of art, artists, and arts organisations such as Wysing, at this moment of global political change. 

For the retreat at Wysing, food and shared accommodation will be provided in our 17th century farmhouse.  

FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) is the UK's leading media arts centre, based in Liverpool. Offering a unique programme of exhibitions, film and participant-led art projects, FACT use the power of creative technology to inspire and enrich lives.  

QUAD is a Cinema, Gallery, Café Bar, Digital resource and Workshop that anyone can use. 

QUAD a creative hub based in Derby that connects people and businesses to art and film and create opportunities for entertainment, education and participation. QUAD transforms lives through active participation in art and film. 

The Mechatronic Library is a not- for -profit organisation dedicated to fostering shared projects between artists, technologists and retailers; producing saleable products and experiences. 

Werkflow is a digital arts studio based at Somerset House Studios, London. Formed in 2013 as a space for digital artists to experiment and collaborate they work across art, music, fashion and advertising to create unique projects that often utilise game engine technology. Werkflow has presented talks, participated in panel discussions and held workshops that are based around the emerging use of game-engine technology and the way they can be used as a tool to create work.

Werkflow is made up of Tom Wandrag, James Stringer and Jon Emmony and is currently in early stage production of its first full length computer game.

3 - 5 November
'Can I Be Me?' 

Please note that we have selected the artists for this year's Syllabus III programme.

The Syllabus III artists Frederica Agbah, Chris Alton, Conor Baird, Ilker Cinarel, Phoebe Davies, Freya Dooley, Rose Gibbs, Jill McKnight, Ben Sanderson and Karis Upton are coming back together for their second retreat devised together with New Contemporaries and Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, with a special evening event curated jointly with The Northern Charter.

Friday

10:30am - Closed reading session led by artist, curator and writer Paul Stewart, looking in detail at the 'Ignorant Schoolmaster’ and Paulo Friere's ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ pulling out techniques for learning. As a group, they will build a geodesic dome bamboo structure then look at different ways of reading and editing stories through voice/movement and the manipulation of space.

2pm - artist Luke McCreadie will lead a writing workshop based on two short texts: Georges Bataille's 'Formless' and Zbigniew Herbert's 'Pebble'.

6:30 - 7:30pm - Syllabus alumni artistThomas Whittle  will lead a slide night at Baltic 39 featuring fellow Syllabus alumni Susie Green, Syllabus III artists Fred Agbah, Ilker Cinarel, Chris Alton and Ben Sanderson, alongside Nadia Hebsen and Paul Becker. It's free and all are welcome to attend.

Saturday

10:30am - Artist Nadia Hebson will lead a workshop about activism and performance at Baltic 39.
2:30pm - In the afternoon, the artists will visit Foundation Press in Sunderland.
6:30pm - 9pm - Can I be Me? A night of live performance co-curated by Syllabus III, New Contemporaries and Northern Charter featuring Syllabus artists Conor Baird, Rose Gibbs, Ilker Cinarel and Freya Dooley alongside Holly Argent and Leah Millar.

Full details can be found here. 

Sunday

10:30am - The artist Richard Taylor will lead a writing workshop that explores observational techniques and grammatical as well as physical rules. It will also include voice orientated exercises to prepare for performance, an editing session, and a short run of performances from participants reading new texts produced during the workshop.

The exercises will draw on the careful handling of autobiography, how to deal ethically with sensitive subjects in content that is performed live, the use of description to create an open and inclusive experience for the listener/audience, writing from different points of view to create distance from fact to make fiction.

The Syllabus III artists have invited a vocal facilitator for the afternoon and will begin to plan their retreat at Spike Island in December.

To receive information on the next round of Open Calls for this and other programmes at Wysing, please subscribe to our e-bulletin, click here.

21–24 September

The first retreat in the third year of Syllabus with artists selected from an open call: Frederica Agbah, Chris Alton, Conor Baird, Ilker Cinarel, Phoebe Davies, Freya Dooley, Rose Gibbs, Jill McKnight, Ben Sanderson and Karis Upton. The retreat is devised and led by artists Harold Offeh and Jesse Darling, who are the programme leads for Syllabus III.

Thursday 21 September
Arrivals at Wysing for introductions and icebreaker activities devised by Harold Offeh and Jesse Darling.

Friday 22 September
"What is Your Problem?" Artists are invited to present an aspect of their practice to each other and the Syllabus partners.  Responding to the provocative question "What is Your Problem?", the aim is to identify and shape a current concern in their current practice. The group are encouraged to focus on a particular work or project that reflects these current or ongoing concerns. The presentations will be followed by a dinner with the Syllabus partners.

Saturday 23 September
Manifestos and creating a Syllabus. This day will focus on the practical aspects of building and sustaining the peer group. How do people want to maintain communication? What systems might we want to put in place. Are there any new collective goals that might have emerged from the weekend? The second part of the day will consist of a close reading group and a screening. For the screening, everybody in the group is asked to select a youtube clip (of no more than 10 minutes in length) that might reflect current interests or research. 

Sunday 24 September
A closing group activity revisits the key themes of the weekend and create a plan for future retreats.

Essential Reading:
Hannah Black, ‘The Identity Artist and The Identity Critic’, Artforum, 2016.

Suggested Reading:
Claire Bishop and Grant Kester, Discussions following her article the “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents”, Artforum, 2006
Anne Boyer, “Some Rules for Teachers”, New Inquiry, 2015
“Ivan Illich: deschooling, conviviality and lifelong learning”, Infed, 2016.

Please note that we have selected the artists for this year's Syllabus III programme.

To receive information on the next round of Open Calls for this and other programmes at Wysing, please subscribe to our e-bulletin, click here.

22- 25 June

“Are there emotions of the age? If so, do we as artists have a responsibility to approach and work through them?”

“What do you have to get over, to get over yourself and get on?”

Considering these two key questions from the first Syllabus retreat, the final retreat at Wysing will invite the partners, the lead artists and guest artists to reflect on the responsibility of artists to address the ‘age’, but also on how to sustain a practice over the long-term – to continue making work beyond the support structure of the Syllabus. It will feature guest artists Florian Roithmayr and Mark Leckey as well as a day each led by programme leads Milly Thompson and George Vasey. 

Some of the essential reading includes:

Reece Jones, Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move, Verso, 2016, Chapter 1.

Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, Zero Books, 2014, 'The Slow Cancellation of the Future', extract from The Quietus

Academie X: Lessons in Art and Life, Stephanie Syjuco 'A Redactive Pedagogy (Letter from the Field)', p288 -295

Surviving Art School: An Artist of Colour Toolkit: Online here.

Thursday

Artists arrive and install work around the Wysing site.

In the afternoon, there will be time for the artists to have an editorial meeting about George Vasey's proposed podcast for Saturday's session. 

Dependent on weather, we will go for a walk through Wysing's countryside, followed by dinner.

8pm-10pm    

Slide Night in Amphis led by artist Thomas Whittle with E. Jackson, Faye Claridge, Lucy Steggals, Phillip Cornett, Wilf Speller & Laura Hindmarsh and Robert Foster.

Free and open to all to attend.

Friday

We will spend all day Friday conducting crits and seeing new work by the Syllabus artists, or work in progress, across Wysing's site. We’ve invited artist Florian Roithmyr to join us and this will be followed by a catered group dinner. 

Saturday

Syllabus Radio Session led by George Vasey addressing the question: Are there emotions of the age? If so, do we as artists have a responsibility to approach and work through them?

The inital editorial meeting will have taken place on Thursday where the artists will have selected current topics which they think are worth exploring and responding to. They will then be split into groups of 3 and 4 with each group creating a short audio segment in response to their chosen brief. It’s up to them how this is structured during the editorial board.

The content can take any form. Abstract sound, poetry, field recording, music - it doesn’t have to be a narrative driven news piece. It could be that one person is put in charge of developing a playlist of timely songs based on the editorial thematics that could be interspersed throughout the programme. The finished piece will be shared with the group and then uploaded onto Wysing's website. 

After lunch, Mark Leckey will be joining the artists for an in conversation taking into account the two leading questions, sharing his own experiences alongside his and others' work.

The evening will see some one to ones with George and the partipcating Syllabus artists followed by dinner.

Sunday

The artists will continue with one to ones with George throughout the day.

In addition, they will attend a drop in and out surgery with Milly Thompson addressing the question 'What do you have to get over, to get over yourself and get on?'.

Milly will be looking at self-promotion, next steps, representation of your practice, how to keep making without formal support structures and sustaining you practice in the long-term. 

Please note that we have selected the artists for the Syllabus II programme. 

We will announce those selected for Syllabus III in mid June. 

To receive updates about Syllabus and other programmes at Wysing, please subscribe to our e-bulletin, click here.

8 - 11 June

Learning From Athens: The Syllabus at Documenta 14

Spike Island is taking the Syllabus II artists on a group visit to documenta 14 in Athens. 

This is an opportunity for the group to experience a wide range of contemporary practice together, while considering questions of democracy, the politics of the present moment and participation. Sessions with visiting artists will open up space for each individual to consider their own practice in relation to issues of display, with regard to power relationships, choreography, place and context.

As the meeting point of the economic and migrant crises that have consumed Europe, and as the foundation site of European democracy itself, Athens is a loaded site from which to explore current global complexities.

The reading list includes extracts from documenta 14's series of journals entitled South, all of which are available online and which expand upon various ways of thinking of and around the exhibition. Recommended reads:

• Keeping Score: Notation, Embodiment, and Liveness by Hendrik Folkerts - online.
• The Construction of Southern Ruins, or Instructions for Dealing with Debt by Aristide Antonas - online

Friday

The weekend kicks off in the afternoon of Friday at the Athens Conservatoire.

The artist artist Cally Spooner will discuss the exhibition display and its curation by Pierre Bal Blanc. Exploring ideas of improvisation, participation and repetition the work embodies notions key to the composer’s concept of the ‘continuum’, an idea the composer explained as: ‘the work might last for any stretch of time. Anyone wishing to participate in the continuum is welcome.’

Saturday

The group will visit the EMST-National Museum of Contemporary Art on Saturday morning.

After lunch, we will visit The Breeder gallery, co-founded by George Vamvakidis and Stathis Panagoulis and formed organically from The Breeder magazine in 2002. Following the Greek financial meltdown in 2009 and the subsequent economic and social crisis, one of their main goals was to promote a group of emerging Greek artists on the global arena.

The gallery and residency program serve as a link connecting cultures and supporting a deeper understanding and exchange of Greek culture, political ideas and ideals and contemporary production.

We will see the exhibition SI SEDES NON IS curated by Milovan Farronato and the gallery team will discuss the work of the gallery and the local art scene in Athens.

Saturday evening, a member of the documenta ‘chorus’ will lead us on a walk around the Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA). 

Sunday

On Sunday, we will visit the Benaki Museum, Pieros Street branch, which hosts a group exhibition as part of documenta 14 featuring artists who were invited to respond to the museological collection and histories housed there.

After lunch there is plenty of time to see others sites in the city for both documenta 14, as well as general sightseeing around Athens.

The Hills, The Paintings, The Dema (a fact free walk that considers duration as an antidote to instantaneity)

On our final afternoon, Danish artist Jesper List Thomsen, writer and part of the collective Am Nuden Da will take us on a walk, over the 3 hills next to the Acropolis: Filopappou aka Hill of Muses, Hill of the Nymphs and The Pnyx (hill). 

We will visit Vivian Suter’s paintings at the Church of Agios Dimitrios; considering their making, material, hanging, looseness and straightforward generosity. We will discuss agency, response, brevity, infinity and the relations between site and subject.

Continuing on to The Dema (stepping stone) a plateau carved out of the local rock, which served as the first site for public speech, as it was conceived as, in the early days of democracy c.500BC. The idea of a participatory system of governance in which all voices are encouraged to make themselves heard in public, seems appropriate in relation to how one might choose to engage Vivian Suter’s paintings. 

Please note that we have selected the artists for the Syllabus II programme. 

We will announce those selected for Syllabus III in mid June. 

To receive updates about Syllabus and other programmes at Wysing, please subscribe to our e-bulletin, click here.

7 - 9 April

Studio Voltaire in London is hosting the next retreat for the Syllabus II artists, broadly based on the theme of care.

The artists selected for Syllabus II are Mira Calix, Faye Claridge, Mike Harvey, E. Jackson, Tyler Mallison, Nika Neelova, Tom Smith, Dylan Spencer-Davidson, Thomas Whittle and Laura Wilson.

‘Wishes will not be granted’
‘We are never working’
'There will be care’

The Studio Voltaire Syllabus II Weekend is broadly based on the theme of ‘care’. Over the weekend we will explore different forms of care and support structures in relation to practice – from the informal and invisible forms of care that might contribute to an artists practice, through modes of production, dissemination, representation and beyond this, ways of working collaboratively, under direction or positions of refusal – and survival. The retreat will begin with a series of informal and candid in-conversations and Q&A’s between three types of ‘support structure’: a commercial gallery, an arts commissioner, and an institution, accompanied by artists with whom they are currently working. 

Friday, 7 April
The first day will consist of Q&As and conversations with Phoebe James, Curator at Artangel; Mary Cork, Director Pilar Corrias; Anthea Hamilton with Dr Zoe Whitley, Tate Modern. Syllabus II artist Dylan Spencer-Davidson will also lead a workshop on Survival Strategies for a hostile environment,

Saturday, 8 April 
Marvin Gaye Chetwynd will lead a full day performance workshop that explores the notion of invention and improvisation in performance. The day will start with simple movement exercises and builds to learning a full performance/narrative dance. There will be time for discussion and questions and a chance to share and discuss work.

Sunday, 9 April
An all-day workshop led by George Vasey and Milly Thompson in response to the previous day's session.

Non-essential reading:
Anthony Huberman, 'Take Care, Circular Facts', 9–17, Berlin, 2011*  
Jan Verwoert, 'Exhaustion and Exuberance, Ways to Defy the Pressure to Perform' originally published in Dot Dot Dot magazine 2008
Dora Garcia, 'The Artist Without Works', 2008
Audre Lorde, 'A Burst of Light', 1988
Michel Foucault, 'The Care of the Self', 1984 (part of the History of Sexuality)

Please note that we have selected the artists for the Syllabus II programme. 

The Syllabus III Open Call is now open for applications. For more information, click here. 

5–8 June 

Women’s Beat League is a Portland, Oregon collective dedicated to teaching and co-learning DJing and music production skills. Women’s Beat League hosts workshops, lectures and parties focused on representing female-identified and nonbinary views in electronic music. For this study week, Women's Beat League will share and discuss the skills, theory and politics of DJing through workshops, discussions and "open deck" sessions.  

Throughout the week four representatives of Women's Beat League (Alyssa Beers, Felisha Ledesma, Daniela Karina Serna and Kathleen Hong) will provide a supportive environment for participants to learn the basics of DJing on CDJs and will lead discussions, music-sharing sessions and workshops on resistance through sound, personal histories, DIY organising, and gender in electronic music.  

Participants selected for the retreat will also be invited to DJ with Women's Beat League at a special event at DIY Space for London, on Friday 9th June. 

The Study Week will take place between 5th and 8th June 2017 at Wysing Arts Centre. Participants who decide to take part in the event at DIY Space for London are responsible for their own travel and accommodation. 

Selected participants will be asked to bring a USB with songs for DJing (the more you can bring the better). These should be songs with a strong and identifiable beat, of varying tempos and styles which the participant is familiar with.

The deadline for applications has now closed. The successful applicants are: Phoebe Davies, Claire Hall, Madeline Hall, Johanna Hardt, Poppy Moroney, Annabel Other, and Sylvia Ugga.

BIOGRAPHIES  

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.  

3-5 February

Eastside Projects in Birmingham is hosting this weekend's retreat for the Syllabus II artists, jointly programmed by the artists and the Eastside team.

The artists selected for Syllabus II are Mira Calix, Faye Claridge, Mike Harvey, E. Jackson, Tyler Mallison, Nika Neelova, Tom Smith, Dylan Spencer-Davidson, Thomas Whittle and Laura Wilson.

With contributions from Teresa Cisneros, Celine Condorelli, Ruth Claxton, Lucy Lopez, Rosalie Schweiker, Milly Thompson, Gavin Wade and Syllabus artist Mike Harvey, the weekend will look at some of the following questions: How do we escape politeness? How can art assist in making a different/better future? Is it the responsibility of an artist to think of a positive future? Is it productive to be in a time when things are unknown/unclear? What role does the cultural reception of negative emotion play? How do you make politics present in the work without being didactic? 

Friday 3 February

The first afternoon will consist of crits and conversations around the participating artists' works with Milly, Gavin, Ruth and Lucy.

This evening, Digbeth First Fridays takes place, which sees exhibitions, late-night openings, special events, culture in unexpected spaces, live music, street food and more. 

Saturday 4 February

The rest of the artist's crits will take place this morning, with an afternoon session led by Gavin. Celine Condorelli also leads a workshop called 'Working Together'.

She explains "Friendship is a fundamental aspect of personal support, a condition for doing things together; I’d like to address it as a specific model of relationship in the large question of how to live and work together — and autonomously —  towards change, as a way to act in the world. Friendship, like support, is considered here as an essentially political relationship, one of allegiance and responsibility. Being a friend entails a commitment, a decision, and encompasses the implied positioning that any activity in culture entails. In relationship to my practice, friendship is, at its most relevant in relation to a labour process: as a way of working together."

A dinner hosted by Eastside including curators, artists and directors from Birmingham and the surrounding area will take place this evening. 

Sunday 6 February

Syllabus artist Mike Harvey leads a breakfast reading group, discussing extracts from Sarah Schulman's ‘The Gentrification of the Mind’ and Sara Ahmed's ‘The Promise of Happiness’.

 The group will address some of the following questions:

∗ what is it to be present to difficulty, but not get swallowed?
∗ what is it to generous or kind versus what is it to be nice?
∗ what does it mean to look backward pessimistically?
∗ what is it to look backward optimistically?
∗ what is it to look forward pessimistically?
∗ what is it to look forward optimistically?
∗ whose pessimism and when, whose optimism and when?

This is followed by a conversation between Teresa Cisneros and Rosalie Schweiker, incorporating a workshop.

Starting with six diagrams, their workshop includes thoughts on: the love for admin, using no filter, institutions coming to an end, 1:1, thinking by doing, not being able to talk the polite British way, putting on your oxygen mask first before helping others, not writing, saying yes to everything, saying no to everything, ethics, teaching outside the state system, working behind the bar, occupying yourself by introducing other people, email etiquette, withholding and granting access, public speaking, thinking beyond your own body, being honest, redistribution as a way of working and why thinking alone is criminal.

The afternoon includes a song, a debrief and some time to discuss future retreats before departing.

Please note that we have selected the artists for the Syllabus II programme. 

To receive information on the next round of Open Calls for this and other programmes at Wysing, please subscribe to our e-bulletin, click here.

7–10 March 2017

Ain Bailey is returning to Wysing to host a Study Week that will explore the role of sound in the formation of identity. Following an open call for applications, the following participants have been selected for the Study Week: Beverley Bennett, Tariq Emam, Deborah Findlater, Elizabeth Graham, Christopher Kirubi, Frances Morgan, Harriet Pittard, Adam Saad and Nathalie Wuerth.

The Study Week will explore the role that sound plays in our identity formation using the term ‘sonic autobiography’, which might best be explained when compared to the format of BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. Lauren Istvandity’s The Lifetime Soundtrack: Music as an archive for autobiographical memory (2014) provides invaluable insight into the ways in which sound and music are central to our identities, and is an exploration of the “interface” between memory and music, which permeates everyday life. The term “lifetime soundtrack” seeks to describe, “the metaphorical canon of music that accompanies personal life experience”. Songs can often be used as a communication tool when participants feel inarticulate and unable to express feelings. Lyrics can shape identity from a young age, and can help to provide an overview of episodes in one’s life through metaphor.

What are the six sounds that have a particular resonance for you? Perhaps it’s the sound of a creaking door in the house of a beloved family member; the call to prayer from a mosque in your neighbourhood; the song/piece of music that reminds you of your first love/crush/attraction or the soundtrack in a club or house party that feels like home.

The sonic collections of study week participants will be shared in listening sessions.

Each participant will be asked to consider and reflect upon their choices and then create a response in the medium of their choosing.

Istvandity notes that technology is often used to evoke memory. It is more difficult to reproduce the qualities of older listening formats. The reproduction of an older format to a new one can alter the memory of the original listening experience/memory. i.e. lack of clicks/scratches on digitised vinyl.

In offering a context for some sonic autobiographies, and in particular those of queer people of colour, Dr Gemma Romain will lead a session on an historical view of a collective sonic biography. This session will explore sources including archival government records which relate to queer and black clubs of the 1930s. Reading against and along the grain of the archive this session explores how information on lives of queer black and white interwar individuals, including individuals’ experiences of Soho music and nightlife, can be found in archival police surveillance and court records. Participants in the session will explore copies of archival documents, discuss the type of sources which can be found relating to queer black lives and how these sources highlight histories and experiences of aurality.

Study week residents will be invited and encouraged to share DJing responsibilities for a session which will seek to evoke blues parties as sites of intimacy through music. The embodiment of music, via dancing, is another key aspect of a person’s sonic autobiography. How often, where and why one danced to a particular song can create a memory soundtrack.

Each day yoga, meditation and walking will take place as a way to balance the interiority of ourselves and the possibility of deep emotional engagement during this sonic exploration.  

Reference: Istvandity, Lauren. "The lifetime soundtrack: Music as an archive for autobiographical memory." Popular Music History 9.2 (2014). 

The Study Week will take place from 7-10 March 2017 

The deadine for applying to participate in this Study Week has now passed. The successful applicants are: Beverley Bennett, Tariq Emam, Deborah Findlater, Elizabeth Graham, Christopher Kirubi, Frances Morgan, Harriet Pittard, Adam Saad and Nathalie Wuerth.

BIOGRAPHIES 

Ain Bailey is a sound artist, living and working in London, UK. Her current practice involves an exploration of architectural acoustics, live performance,  as well as collaborations with performance, visual and sonic artists. Among these is performance/visual artist Jimmy Robert, who commissioned Bailey to create a composition for his 2016 show 'Desendances du Nu' at the CAC-Synagogue de Delme, Delme, France. Bailey has exhibited and performed both nationally and internationally, and 'Oh Adelaide' her collaboration with the artist Sonia Boyce, has shown in London at Tate Britain and the Whitechapel Gallery, and The Kitchen, New York, to name but a few international art spaces. Most recently, Bailey was commissioned by Art Basel Miami Beach 2016 to compose for the Soundscape Park. Bailey is also a doctoral scholar at Birkbeck, University of London.

Dr Gemma Romain is a historian who specialises in Caribbean and Black British history, with a particular interest in Queer Black histories, Black histories and visual culture, Jewish histories in modern Britain, and modern Grenadian history. She is an Honorary Fellow of The Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton and has recently worked at The Equiano Centre, Department of Geography, UCL on various projects relating to Black British history. Her book Race, Sexuality and Identity in Britain and Jamaica: The biography of Patrick Nelson, 1916-1963 will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2017.  

9 - 11 December 2016

S1 Artspace in Sheffield is hosting the third retreat for Syllabus II focusing on 'Audience and Articulation'. In collaboration with the Syllabus II participating artists, partner venues, and curator George Vasey, guest artists have been invited to deliver workshops at venues across the city. 

The weekend in Sheffield will focus on questions raised during the first retreat by the artists on the programme, specifically looking at language and how to articluate your work for audiences. It takes the following questions as a starting point: 

How do you frame the work in order to affect readings for audiences? 

Who is the audience and how do we disrupt them?

How to express your position and open up a dialogue?

How do I define the people and who experience my work?

What is at stake in the language you use to describe work?

Guest speakers include Jeremy Akerman (of Akerman Daly), Ruth Beale, Katrina Palmer and Jonathan P. Watts alongside lead curator for the programme, George Vasey with a contribution from Syllabus artist Thomas Whittle who has organised a 'Slide Night'. 

Friday 9 December

The first day is focused on getting to know Sheffield's artspaces and local artists. This will be followed by a workshop led by artists Jeremy Akerman and Ruth Beale of which details will be added soon. 

The evening sees a Slide Night hosted at Abbeydale Picture House from 6pm - 8:30pm organised by Syllabus artist Thomas Whittle and featuring additional contributions from artists Mira Calix, Tom Smith, Peter Martin and more Sheffield artists to be announced soon.

Saturday 10 December

A workshop led by Jonathan P Watts called Registers n’ That at SHU Art School will begin the weekend. This workshop takes three forms of writing that artists have to do or be concerned with – the artists’ statement, the press release and the exhibition proposal – to examine how language and syntax is used according to context and communicative purpose. What registers of writing are appropriate to different contexts and audiences? 

After lunch, Katrina Palmer will host a session which will raise the spectre of disappearing objects, looking at how something can be produced and destroyed on the page. The focus will be on the volatility of the written object and the voice.

Sunday 11 December

The day will begin with a meeting at Park Hill where curator George Vasey will lead a workshop inspired by Lars Von Triers' film 5 Obstructions. Each artist has been asked to respond to a site on the Park Hill estate with a new work. It must be made on-site and in one day and can take any form they like.

However, the artists have been paired up to give the other person an obstruction, thinking about the other’s practice and how one can undermine it or challenge them. They will then present the finished work to the group with a brief introduction and this will be turned into a group crit around this new work.

A late lunch will take place with S1 Studios artists in Old Nursery at Park Hill and the rest of the day is dedicated to time for reflection on the day's activity and the weekend as a whole.

Please note that we have selected the artists for this year's Syllabus II programme. They are: Mira Calix, Faye Claridge, Mike Harvey, E. Jackson, Tyler Mallison, Nika Neelova, Tom Smith, Dylan Spencer-Davidson, Thomas Whittle and Laura Wilson.

To receive information on the next round of Open Calls for this and other programmes at Wysing, please subscribe to our e-bulletin, click here.

The theme and focus of our 2016 programme emerged from discussions initiated by David Toop in the summer of 2015. We are therefore thrilled that our final Study Week of 2016 will be led by David and it builds on some of the themes that have emerged across in the year, in particular the act of listening.

The following artists have been selected to participate in the Study Week: Anna Barham, Ann Brodie, Alison Carlier, Daniel Clark, Fionn Duffy, Rachel Haines, Katie Hare and James Lowne.

David Toop will lead a four-day study week called The little strange sound was the living voice of the brooding presence. 1

“In a society organised round objective psychological measurement, the power to listen is a potentially iconoclastic one,” writes William Davies in The Happiness Industry. “There is something radical about privileging the sensory power of the ear in a political system designed around that of the eye.” Listening to others, to the world, is a start but how to organise, be active, collaborate, from the point of listening? Is listening necessarily an act of hearing audio information or is it more productive to think of it as receptivity, attention, a channel through which to break down the rigid authoritarian formats through which events are structured?

“I’ve seen you ill with boredom,” wrote stream-of-consciousness pioneer Dorothy Richardson in Revolving Lights (1923). ‘You always think people’s minds are blank when they are silent. It’s just the other way around.” Richardson argued that everything in life, particularly relationships, was best judged by the quality of in-between silences. Silence inflates to contain even the smallest gesture; the supposedly passive and fixed ear moves outward, a gathering in; the projectile of sound is reversed, becoming receptive. 

All of these reversals are exercises in how to move across boundaries of practice, how to collaborate, to improvise, to perform without performing, to listen as a ritual without sound. Food and time will be important, along with foraging for sound, learning to work with materials and durations, inventing instruments that are not instruments, listening, reading/writing sessions and collaborative actions.  

1 Dorothy Richardson, Deadlock (from Pilgrimage) 1921.   

David Toop is a composer/musician, author and curator based in London who has worked in many fields of sound art and music, including improvisation, sound installations, field recordings, pop music production, music for television, theatre and dance. He has recorded Yanomami shamanism in Amazonas, appeared on Top of the Pops, exhibited sound installations in Tokyo, Beijing and London’s National Gallery, and performed with artists ranging from John Zorn, Evan Parker, Bob Cobbing and Ivor Cutler to Akio Suzuki, Elaine Mitchener, Lore Lixenberg and Max Eastley.

David has published five books, including Ocean of Sound, Haunted Weather,and Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener, released eight solo albums, including Screen Ceremonies, Black Chamber and Sound Body, and as a critic has written for publications including The Wire, The Face, Leonardo Music Journal and Bookforum. Exhibitions he has curated include Sonic Boom at the Hayward Gallery, London, Playing John Cage at Arnolfini, Bristol, and Blow Up at Flat-Time House, London. Currently writing Into the Maelstrom: Improvisation, Music and the Dream of Freedom. His opera – Star-shaped Biscuit – was performed as an Aldeburgh Faster Than Sound project in September 2012.

Please note that the participants for this Study Week have now been selected following an Open Call for applications. The selected artists are: Anna Barham, Ann Brodie, Alison Carlier, Daniel Clark, Fionn Duffy, Rachel Haines, Katie Hare and James Lowne.

13-16 October

New Contemporaries is working with the Bluecoat, Liverpool in the context of their 2016 exhibition and the Liverpool Biennial to host the Syllabus II artists for their next retreat. The Syllabus II artists are Mira Calix, Faye Claridge, Mike Harvey, E. Jackson, Tyler Mallison, Nika Neelova, Tom Smith, Dylan Spencer-Davidson, Thomas Whittle and Laura Wilson.

Using Chris Kraus’ novel 'I Love Dick' as a framing device, artist Milly Thompson will lead the Liverpool session to address some of the challenges around the question ‘How to sustain your practice’.

Through crit sessions and a Saturday workshop, Milly will encourage the artists to think about the expectations of producing work, self-promotion, public-ness and recognising failure as a useful basis for sustaining practice. 

The context of the Liverpool Biennial and New Contemporaries partnership with the Bluecoat will also provide an opportunity to address issues of collaboration with Bluecoat Curator Adam Smythe and New Contemporaries Director Kirsty Ogg. 

The session’s last day will look at the connection between making, thinking and writing.

Thursday 13 October

The first day is a chance to see the Liverpool Biennial with an introduction by Polly Brannan, Education Curator. Polly will focus on Marvin Gaye Chetwynds’s work and the collaborative curatorial structure of this years show.

Friday 14 October

The day will start with an introduction to Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2016 exhibition by Adam Smythe & Kirsty Ogg followed by a discussion about the collaborative process of Bloomberg New Contemporaries – selecting the show; curating the exhibition & public programme.

Marie-Anne McQuay, Head of Programme, Bluecoat will introduce their Expanded Programme, and their future ambitions, what it means to work with a public and questions of audience.

After lunch, Milly Thompson will lead crit sessions with Kirsty Ogg  & Adam Smythe. The artists are asked to focus on an element of their work that they feel tends to unravel, or fails to meet expectations and how can we learn from ‘failure/s’; what would you like to improve with your practice; what is the work not doing; work that is unresolved.

In the evening, the artists will present a short video, which is tangential to their practice, eg. a commercial, a short clip. This is a social exercise, which might reflect the subjects of the crits, or alternatively pick up on the themes of Collaboration or Modes of Presentation workshop.

Saturday 15 October 

This morning Milly Thompson will continue to lead the crits 

The afternoon will be focused on a workshop led by Milly and Kirsty, asking the question 'what does it mean to lead a sustained practice?'.

It will look at the expectations of producing work as an artist and what making art ‘public’ is about. The workshop will seek to understand failure in relation to work: when work or ideas don’t succeed and why recognising failure is useful and can be a basis for sustaining a practice.

Sunday 16 October 

The final day sees a visit to The Serving Library with introduction from Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey, lunch, and then a final writing workshop led by Stuart.

Please note that we have selected the artists for this year's Syllabus II programme.

To receive information on the next round of Open Calls for this and other programmes at Wysing, please subscribe to our e-bulletin, click here.

8-10 September 2016

The first retreat in the second year of the Syllabus with artists selected from an Open Call: Mira Calix, Faye Claridge, Mike Harvey, E. Jackson, Tyler Mallison, Nika Neelova, Tom Smith, Dylan Spencer-Davidson, Thomas Whittle and Laura Wilson. The retreat is devised and lead by curator George Vasey, who is one of the programme leads throughout the year alongside artist Milly Thompson.

Thursday 8 Sep
Welcome and introduction from each of the Syllabus partners; Eastside Projects, New Contemporaries, S1 Artspace, Spike Island, Studio Voltaire and Wysing Arts Centre followed by artists' presentations about their work and concerns around their practice, drawing out shared themes and overriding questions. During the evening we will be joined for dinner by past Syllabus artists. 

Friday 9 Sep 
“What is the Academy (Syllabus) for? Who does it belong to? How is it organised?”

The day will be focused on planning the curriculum for Syllabus II. The above series of questions are taken from Tom Vandeputte's interview with Sidsel Meineche Hansen in the recent educational reader published by Open Editions. Replacing Academy with Syllabus, we will think through what the programme means for the artists and partners this year. 

As a group, we will use the questions collated from the previous day and start to map thematics and overlapping interests with possible speakers to formulate a curriculum for the rest of the programme.

Saturday 10 Sep
The morning will consist of a workshop in our structure, Amphis, inspired by Oulipo writing techniques. 

Looking at texts by Thierry De Duve and Antony Huberman, the afternoon will focus on peer-led learning and working ‘outside’ institutional structures. How do we replace forms of competition with care? Is it possible to create entirely horizontal institutions? Who is responsible for what and when? How do we, to quote Chantel Mouffe, become “friendly enemies” to each other? What do we expect from our peers?

With a broad interest in alternate forms of pedagogy it would be good to think about ideas of unlearning as much as learning. How do we articulate knowledge in a world that seems governed by too much information? We will then extend the conversation out from peer-groups to thinking about larger networks and relationships by exploring “There is no alternative: THE FUTURE IS SELF-ORGANISED” by Stephan Dillemuth, Anthony Davies and Jakob Jakobsen. 

We aim to consider the assumed role of radical ‘outside,’ particularly in relation to neo-liberal agendas, zero-hour contracts etc.

The evening will be finished off with film screenings of Redmond Entwistle's Walk-Through (2012) which explores the pedagogy of Cal-Art’s famous post-studio crits led by Michael Asher and Harry Meadley’s Artist’s Talk (2016).

Please note that we have selected the artists for this year's Syllabus II programme.

To receive information on the next round of Open Calls for this and other programmes at Wysing, please subscribe to our e-bulletin, click here.

17-19 June
Wysing Arts Centre

Wysing Arts Centre, Eastside Projects, New Contemporaries, S1 Artspace, Spike Island and Studio Voltaire are pleased to have the Syllabus artists return to Wysing for a final few days. 

The artists that were selected for the first year are: Simon Bayliss, Noel Clueit, Susie Green, Mathew Parkin, Rory Pilgrim, Jessica Sarah Rinland, Tom Salt, Lucy Steggals, Tom Varley and Rafal Zajko. 

The final retreat for the artists over this year-long programme sees them returning to Wysing, where they initially met in June 2015. Led by Andy Holden, the retreat invites the artists to present some of their latest work to The Syllabus partners; Eastside Projects, New Contemporaries, S1 Artspace, Spike Island, Studio Voltaire. The artists have been invited to develop a Saturday session for eachother with Andy Holden's support.

Friday 17 June
The artists are invited to present new work to the Syllabus partners throughout the day. Featuring screenings, performance, video and sculpture, the works will be shown informally in the Wysing exhibition gallery and open studio. This is followed by dinner and an informal discussion about the overall programme and next steps.

Saturday 18 June
11am - 1pm. Shared readings and discussion around the texts: Jorge Luis Borges, 'On Exactitude in Science', Mike Watson's 'Towards a Conceputal Militancy', and Stephen Wright 'Towards a Lexicon of Usership' and Mark McGowan's films, Rolling on the floor for no reason, There is no meaning to life, The right to be lazy, Austerity is a Scam

2pm - 5pm. TUMBLR CLUB - discuss one image/clip/short text that relates to the concept of art as 'usership' and the 1:1 scale based on reading of the above essay, or something that as a gut reaction relates loosely to this theme, or interpretation of this notion...

5pm - 8pm. Afternoon free to discuss eachother's work, progress through the Syllabus and future plans

8pm. Dinner followed by a film screening selected by the Syllabus artists

Sunday 19 June

We say goodbye to the first year of The Syllabus artists. 

*Please note that the Syllabus II artists have now been selected and you can read about them on our current press release here. 

Keep up to date with their activity by signing up to our mailing list here.

20 - 23 June

We have invited recent residency artist Jesse Darling back to Wysing to devise a Study Week as part of our 2016 programme, Wysing Poly.

The participants selected from an Open Call are Daniel Baker, Noah Carvajal, Bettina Fung, Carl Gent, Alexandra Gribaudi, Christopher Kirubi, Veronique Maria, JeongEun Park, Adam Saad, Helen Savage, Sophie Serber, Rosalie Schweiker, Raju Singh and Andrea Willamson.

“To whom it may concern,

I am an artist (you too, maybe? But it doesn’t matter if you’re not). Before I was an artist I worked in many different kinds of jobs and in some ways they were harder and in other ways easier. One of the hard things about being an artist, as opposed to being a cook or a bricklayer, is that it is difficult to know if your work is “good.” This is difficult mainly because for many people – including me, if I’m honest - it can feel like the ways in which people work out whether the work is good or not only make it harder. The words used to praise things or criticise. The prices attached to things. The more I think about the field in which I work – contemporary art – and all the ways in which it is corrupt (including the history of colonial appropriation; the careless instrumentalisation of identities and ideas; the role art has played in neoliberal gentrification) the more I twist myself up in knots.

Lately I have been thinking about how my work as an artist could have value outside of the market and the discursive traveling circus in which information and opinion are reified as meaning. In a secular world it feels like art – both the objects (works) and the process (labour) would be massively useless, or worthless, if we stripped away all the commerce and concept. The extraordinary exchange in which ideas become money is quite magical really, like water into wine - and there are plenty of artists who devote their whole study to this alchemy. But me, I’m sceptical of enlightened attitudes to magic, since I feel like we’re a faithful species, always believing in something or other - and like Mulder & Scully, I want to believe.

At art school you’re supposed to develop a practice. I know this because I teach there sometimes. Everyone tries to understand what their practice could be, even though for many people the whole notion of an art-school-standard ‘art practice’ seems like something you have to invent out of thin air. But Wiktionary defines practice like this: “the actual application or use of an idea, belief, or method, as opposed to theories relating to it.” I tell my students: whatever you can’t stop doing? That’s your practice.

Wiktionary also suggests that practice could be “the customary, habitual, or expected procedure or way of doing of something.” In other words: a ritual. And then there is the religious associations of a practice, of course: and maybe it’s true to say that contemporary art is a kind of religion, with its own icons, scripture, and epistemology.

But since thinking about contemporary art only twists me up in knots, I’d rather focus on the practice, on the habits, on the actual applications: the rituals themselves. Ritual is also a word used to describe the mechanisms people use to calm down or feel more in control; tapping, counting, stimming, washing your hands. When people try to quit their addictions, often they say it’s the rituals around substance use that they find hardest to let go. Rituals are the application of a certain kind of desire: a way of praying through doing.

During this study week I want to see if it’s possible to locate this hard-wired mechanism in myself, and to find out together with others (maybe you?) whether ritual practice is a hard-wired mechanism in a group dynamic, or in a temporary community. In this way I hope to be able to think differently about the work we do as artists, organisers or relational beings.

If you have a response to all or any of this, I would love to hear from you. Looking forward,

JD”

15-17 April
Studio Voltaire, London

Studio Voltaire has invited artist Rehana Zaman to lead the sixth retreat in our Syllabus programme. 

The retreat, entitled 'On Group Work', is led by Zaman and will attend to how we work with others reflecting on questions of presence and notions of relation. Reference will be made to opacity, collaboration, participation, the roles we play and who or what is implied by the term ‘we’. Over the course of the weekend we will make use of immediate events, texts and films to examine the complexity of what it means to work with others. Some reading materials include extracts from Poetics of Relation by Édouard Glissant, Lies Volume II: A Journal of Materialist Feminism, and Experiences in Groups by W. R. Bion.

Rehana Zaman is an artist based in London working with moving image and performance. Her work considers the interplay of multiple social dynamics that constitute subjects along particular socio-political formations. These narrative based artworks, often deadpan and neurotic, are generated through conversation and collaboration with others.

Friday 15 April. IMT Gallery

5:00-8:30. The retreat begins with selected crits hosted by IMT gallery where Syllabus artist Mathew Parkin has a solo exhibition currently showing entitled I Believe in You. Led by Andy Holden, Rehana Zaman and Deputy Director of Studio Voltaire Mat Jenner will also be in attendance. This will be followed by dinner.

Saturday 16 April. Studio Voltaire with Mat Jenner, Rehana Zaman, Shama Khanna

9.00 – 9.30 Breakfast at Studio Voltaire
9.30 – 11.15 Session 1: I, I and I Practical workshop and discussion
11.15 – 11.30 Coffee break
11.30 – 13.30 Session 2: I, you, they Practical workshop and discussion
15.00 – 16.30 Sharon Hayes in conversation with Mason Leaver Yap
16.30 – 18.00 Social (all welcome)
18.00 - late The Peculiar People PV at Focal Point Gallery (optional)

Sunday 17 April. Lux with Mat Jenner, Rehana Zaman and Shama Khanna

10.15 – 10.45 Coffee at Café Oto
11.00 – 13.00 Session 1: Close reading Glissant *Please bring an image/object/ clip triggered by the reading*
13.00 – 14.00 Lunch from Evin café at LUX
14.00 – 16.30 Session 2: Film screening, discussion and Syllabus amnesty
16.30 – 18.00 Drink at The Railway with Gareth Bell Jones, curator Flat Time House, on Anti University and his work on the Escalator retreat programme whilst a previous curator at Wysing

Please note that we have selected the participants for this year's The Syllabus programme.

The Syllabus II artists have also been selected and the first retreat will be held in September 2016.

To receive information for this and other programmes at Wysing, please subscribe to our e-bulletin, click here.

STUDY WEEK LED BY CALLY SPOONER
14-17 MARCH 2016

As her contribution to the exhibition, The Practice of Theories, Cally Spooner will lead a four-day Study Week.

The participants selected from an Open Call to join Cally are Jamie Atherton, Gabriella Beckhurst, Antonia Blocker, Judith Browning, Rosa Farber and Isabella Martin.

'Please remember when you get inside the gates you are part of the show.'[1]

"In tough times we are often told, "keep your head". If you're a good Manager, you may find you have become all head, less body. You’d think making art would put the brain back in the body, and the brain-body firmly on earth but not necessarily. In private enterprise we control what comes in and out extremely carefully. I have only recently learned the intimate is very different to the private. We use the same tools to have a good conversation as we do to make money; the micro is hosted in the macro, the intimate in the corporate, the body in the institution.  This study week considers how a 'poetically processed subject' might never be produced from a mind-only rupture. Topics of study and activity include new management strategy, post-enlightenment doubt, embodied body-training, eating, institutional internalisation, complicity and walking. The four days will be structured with reading groups, film screenings and group practicalities, punctuated with invited speakers and walkers."

[1] An instruction from a 'Short Sermon to Sightseers' at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, NY

Cally Spooner has developed a distinctive body of work consisting of media installations, essays, novels and live performances such as radio broadcasts, plays and a musical.  Fluctuating between the intuitive and the bureaucratic, the unplanned and heavily managed, her work grapples with how indeterminacy, instincts, conviviality and less cogent time can be organised and arranged within the linguistic architectures of corporate, mediatised and institutional production.

Recent solo exhibitions include And You Were Wonderful, On Stage, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2015 & 2013); THE ANTI CLIMAX CLIMAX (2015), Bielefelder Kunstverein, Bielefeld), Post-production, Spike Island, Bristol (2015);  On False Tears and Outsourcing (2015, Vleeshal, Middelburg) and Regardless, it’s still her voice..., gb agency, Paris (2014); He's in a Great Place!, BMW Live Performance Room, Tate Modern, London (2014); Performa 13, The National Academy, New York (2013) and Seven Thirty Till Eight, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2013). In 2013 Spooner received the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award. Her novel Collapsing in Parts was published by Mousse in the same year. In April 2016, Spooner’s first large-scale US solo exhibition will take place at the New Museum, New York.

6 - 7 February
S1 Artspace, Sheffield

 Artist and Professor Keith Wilson leads S1 Artspace’s retreat. This is the fifth in the year long Syllabus programme for ten artists.

This weekend session focuses on the challenges, considerations and potential pitfalls of commissioning and presenting new work in a variety of contexts. With contributions from Brian Griffiths, Sally Shaw and Tom Morton, it will provide an opportunity for participants to consider who is involved in allowing their work to go public, and how context might alter the perception of it.

Artist Brian Griffiths will discuss his experience of creating major public commissions such as his Art on the Underground project in 2007, Brian has also taught in the sculpture department at the RCA and is now working mainly at the Royal Academy Schools. Sally Shaw is Head of Programme at Modern Art Oxford and previously managed the Fourth Plinth commissions. Before this Sally was Senior Curator for Art on the Underground.

Tom Morton comes from both a critic’s and commissioner’s perspective through his many years as contributing editor at Frieze and acting as independent curator at large. He is also a practitioner, writing his own literary fiction as well as reviews and catalogue essays. All will come together with Keith to discuss the successes and the failures that come with the commissioning of new work.

Saturday 6 February
10am - 6.30pm (followed by dinner at S1 Artspace)
S1 Artspace, Park Hill, S2 5QX

On day one, the artists will be at S1 Artspace’s new gallery at Park Hill, the iconic Brutalist estate and largest listed structure in Europe. There will be self-led crits and a tour of the site.

In summer 2015, Keith was commissioned to produce a permanent new work for the new imagined sculpture park. His plinths and the newly created terraced site will become the future site for the display of new commissioned public sculptures, and will provide the context for a new S1 Artspace on a much larger scale at Park Hill. This provides a unique set of conditions, partner organisations and audiences for us to consider during our sessions on commissioning work for the public realm.

Sunday 7 February
10am - 6.00pm
S1 Artspace, Trafalgar House, S1 4JT

On day two, the artists will be based at Keith’s studio amongst the wider S1 studio cohort at Trafalgar House, revealing the specific context of S1 – setup as affordable studios to encourage the production of new work, from which the gallery and project space evolved. Trafalgar House’s unique environment where the gallery is open to overlooking studios and vice versa provides a fitting context to consider the commissioning of new work and how this translates from the artists’ studio into the gallery space and beyond into the wider public realm.

Please note that we have selected the participants for this year's The Syllabus programme.

The start date for Syllabus II 2016/17 is September 2016 and the artists have already been selected.

To receive information on the next round of Open Calls for this and other programmes at Wysing, please subscribe to our e-bulletin, click here.

4 - 6 December
Eastside Projects, Birmingham

The fourth retreat in The Syllabus programme is developed by Eastside Projects and led by Celine Condorelli and James Langdon. 

The retreat uses the exhibition ‘Display Show’ as a context and testing ground. The weekend will focus on the problematics of forms of display and the manifestations of blindness towards them, re-imagining these through a variety of possible relations between context, exhibition, work, and the public; which will in turn allow the questioning of these categories and the notions they form. This investigation will be undertaken as an entanglement between two modes of articulation: historical and theoretical on the one hand, and grounded in practice on the other. In both, the notion of ‘support’ will be used as a critical lens through which to interrogate the development of forms of display, by examining that which sustains them.

Friday 4 December

The retreat will start with Crits in the early afternoon with Andy Holden and Gavin Wade, Director of Eastside Projects. That evening the artists are invited to attend the Digbeth First Friday, late-night openings and special events at venues around Digbeth. 

This first evening will see a dinner hosted by Condorelli and Langdon with food by Jo Capper in which the artists are asked to bring and share an object of their choice which relates to their practice in some way. The evening is rounded off with the Grand Union Christmas party at Minerva Works.

Saturday 5 December

Condorelli and Langdon will begin day two with a short introduction to concepts in display and a seminar called ‘I-show-this-to-you’ focusing on gesture as an aspect of display. After lunch, the Syllabus artists will participate in a workshop called ‘System, narrative’, developing strategies for decoding and recoding objects through display. Throughout day 2, there will be short introductions to characters and histories including Lina Bo Bardi, Carlo Scarpa & Franco Albini. The night will see dinner with members of Extra Special People, Eastside Projects’ members group.

Sunday 6 December

The final day of the retreat starts with a seminar, ‘Bodies in exhibitions’ which follows Herbert Bayer’s graphic paths in exhibition design. The artists will then participate in a workshop; ‘Storytelling in exhibitions’ which is about the exhibition tour as format. Similar to day two, there will be short introductions to characters and histories throughout, including Frederick Kiesler.

Please note that we have selected the participants for this year's The Syllabus programme.
To receive information on the next round of Open Calls for this and other programmes at Wysing, please subscribe to our e-bulletin, click here.

1-3 October 2015
New Contemporaries, Nottingham

New Contemporaries’ retreat is the third in the year-long programme The Syllabus, focussing on The Archive. 

Working in collaboration with artists-run space Primary, New Contemporaries will host a two-day session at Nottingham Contemporary around archives, specifically artists’ use of archive and memory as material or mode of production. The session will coincide with the presentation of Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2015 across Nottingham.

Thursday 1 October
Session for Syllabus Artists
From 3-5pm, the artists will be given a tour of Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2015 exhibition at Backlit, One Thoresby Steet and Primary. It will be led by Kirsty Ogg, Niki Russell and Andy Holden. This session will be an opportunity to reflect on the Syllabus artists’ practice in relationship to the work on display and will be followed by a dinner. 

Friday 2 October
​Session for Syllabus Artists
This day will comprise of two practical workshops foregrounded by presentations by the facilitators.

Morning session 10.00 – 13.00: Nayia Yiakoumaki, Archive Curator, Whitechapel Gallery, London
This session will: share Nayia’s curatorial practice around the Whitechapel Gallery’s and other archives and present a practical workshop session identifying the potential of archive material for artistic practice.

Afternoon session 14.00 – 17.00: Barby Asante, artist
This session will: share Barby’s artistic practice and experience of working with archives and present a practical workshop session based on Barby’s research methods and approach to practice.

Saturday 3 October
Archive: In the making
Public Event, Nottingham Contemporary

This day-long event at Nottighman Comtemporary, hosted by Primary Nottingham, is open to the public and will explore the use of the archive as a source of material in relation to artistic practice. The day includes presentations and activity by artists Barby Asante, Ruth Beale, Goshka Macuga and Emma Smith.

For further information about this past event please visit Primary's website, here.

New Contemporaries is the leading UK organisation supporting emergent art practice from British Art Schools. Since 1949 New Contemporaries has consistently provided a critical platform for new and recent fine art graduates primarily by means of an annual, nationally touring exhibition. Independent of place and democratic to the core, New Contemporaries is open to all.

Primary is an artist-led space that exists to support creative research and to develop new ways of engaging audiences. Offering dedicated artists studios alongside more flexible spaces, both within and outside the building, where artists from around the world can meet and work in the heart of Nottingham. Primary is a place where artists and the public can share, experiment and learn about contemporary visual art through an ambitious programme of events and activities.

Please note that we have selected the participants for this year's The Syllabus programme. To receive information on the next round of Open Calls for this and other programmes at Wysing, please subscribe to our e-bulletin, click here.

31 July - 2 August
Spike Island, Bristol

Spike Island has developed the second retreat in the year-long Syllabus programme.The artists who have been selected for The Syllabus 2015/16 are Simon Bayliss, Noel Clueit, Susie Green, Mathew Parkin, Rory Pilgrim, Jessica Sarah Rinland, Tom Salt, Lucy Steggals, Tom Varley and Rafal Zajko.

Public workshop
Friday 31 July, 6-8pm
Fluid Medium is a work by Susie Green, one of the Syllabus participants. An experimental life-drawing class with exercises in drawing and simple sculptural practices, it is led by Green, who takes on the role of model, performer and facilitator. Green will choreograph a collaborative, immersive environment through music and lighting, offering an alternative to the typically one-way experience of artists observing a silent model.
Fluid Medium is presented as part of Spike Island’s public programme and will be attended by members of the public as well as the Syllabus participants.

Saturday 1 August
This workshop is led by Pil and Galia Kollectiv, whose practice is collaborative and interdisciplinary, encompassing film, performance, sculpture, costumes, music and collage.

Their work addresses the legacy of modernism and the avant-garde and the relationship between art and politics. They are especially interested in the role of art and creativity in post-Fordist labour, and the day will focus on this area of concern with an introductory lecture on the idea followed by a discussion of Josephine the Songstress or The Mouse Folk by Franz Kafka.

The afternoon will feature a screening of the film The Man Who Sleeps, a 1974 film directed by Bernard Queysanne and Georges Perec, based on Perec's 1967 novel A Man Asleep. A 25-year-old male student in Paris becomes indifferent to the world around him, and subsequently feels a strong sense of alienation and hopelessness.

Following this, there will be a discussion about the film and Paolo Virno’s text, Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of Exodus in relation to the artists’ possibility of withdrawal from the production of the self.

Sunday 2 August
The second full day is led by Andy Holden. Participants are asked to present work in the light of conversations initiated at the first session at Wysing and to discuss the development of their ideas.

The day will begin with a studio visit at Spike Island with the artists Harrison and Wood. The artists will then be given a tour by Richard Long on the occasion of his solo exhibition at Arnolfini where they will discuss his work in the light of some of the conversations from the previous day with Pil and Galia around the notion of ‘labour’. Following this will be lunch and then a studio visit with artist Linda Brothwell back at Spike Island studios.

Please note that we have selected the participants for this year's The Syllabus programme.
To receive information on the next round of Open Calls for this and other programmes at Wysing, please subscribe to our e-bulletin, click here.

15-18 June, Wysing Retreat

Wysing Arts Centre, Eastside Projects, New Contemporaries, S1 Artspace, Spike Island and Studio Voltaire, have together developed The Syllabus; a new programme that will support ten artists across one year.

The artists who have been selected for The Syllabus 2015/16 are Simon Bayliss, Noel Clueit, Susie Green, Mathew Parkin, Rory Pilgrim, Jessica Sarah Rinland, Tom Salt, Lucy Steggals, Tom Varley and Rafal Zajko. Wysing's retreat is the first in this year-long programme and has been devised by Andy Holden. It will explore what it means to be an artist, taking in:

Day 1

Kant After the Internet - This session will take as its starting point De Duve’s essay, Kant after Duchamp, in which he discusses art after the proposition that ‘everyone is an artist’.

What is an Artist? - Artist Richard Wentworth will make a 45 minute presentation followed by questions, discussion and time to reflect.

Artists Teaching Artists - We will look at a collection of artists’ writing in which advice and guidance is given, with particular focus on writing by Paul Thek, John Cage, and Virginia Woolf.

Day 2

Reading Group and discussion of Ben Lerner’s novel, 10:04

Updates from some of the programme partners on future sessions.

Field Trip to Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge - A trip to a museum in Cambridge that contains one of the largest collection of Greek and Roman Sculpture in the world. We’ll undertake a variety of drawing exercises amongst the 600 plaster casts of great works that are disseminated all over the Europe but that are all gathered together here in replica.

Public Event - Andy Holden performance: Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape. Full details here.

Day 3

A full day of participant crit sessions.

Day 4

New Ideas About Objects - A short introduction to current developments in thinking about materialism and the nature of the object. This will provide an introduction to some of the ideas currently being explored in Speculative Realist Philosophy and Object Oriented Ontology, with particular focus on The Quadruple Object by Graham Harman and Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennett, new writing on materialist philosophy and politics, including Neo Materialism by Joshua Simon, and ideas around collaboration and ‘making’ as explored in The Craftsman by Richard Sennett.  A brief historical contextualisation will be provided through a reading of We Have Never Been Modern by Bruno Latour.

Updates from some of the programme partners on future sessions and planning sessions for individual mentoring.

Please not that we have selected the participants for this year's The Syllabus programme.

To receive information on the next round of Open Calls for this and other programmes at Wysing, please subscribe to our e-bulletin, click here.

12-15 May

This retreat is curated by Pil & Galia Kollectiv in collaboration with Tanya Pragnell Lopez, Laura Prime and Sanghee Kim of the RCA's MA in Curating Contemporary Art.

The deadline for applying to participate in this retreat has now passed.

19-23 May 2014

In light of increasing connectivity and the pressure of a transforming environment, this retreat, entitled Of Our Own Making, will address the question ‘how do we want to live together?’ The retreat curators are MA students Jennifer KY Lam, Marenka Krasomil, Olivia Leahy, and Sophie Oxenbridge-Hastie.

In light of increasing connectivity and the pressure of a transforming environment, the retreat will address the question ‘how do we want to live together?’. Taking its title from the manifesto for the MayDay Rooms – a meeting place and supportive infrastructure for radical histories and communities – participants will engage in collective thinking and activities to examine present models of living across different fields. In turn, the retreat will offer an opportunity to speculate on possible futures, whilst situating this discourse within artistic practice.

For selection to this retreat, participants are invited to propose an hour-long session that takes as its starting point the question of ‘how do we want to live together?’. Rather than providing an answer to this question, we welcome a range of responses and broad interpretations, from the personal to the speculative. These sessions can take one or a number of formats: talks, performances, participatory workshops, screenings, reading groups, making sessions etc.

Across five immersive days a programme of invited speakers and group activities will offer possible interpretations of this question, endeavouring to address its social, environmental and metaphysical implications.

Commencing the retreat, artist Cally Spooner will lead a workshop session and host presentations and discussions by participants on their work.

On the following days, Anthony Davies and Jaya Klara Brekke of the MayDay Rooms, a safe house for vulnerable archives and historical material linked to social movements, experimental culture, and marginalised figures, will initiate discussion on current social movements and alternative communities in regards to collaborative ways of living.

Writer, curator, editor and artist Alfredo Cramerotti, director of MOSTYN art gallery, Co-Director, AGM Culture and collective Chamber of Public Secrets, will address the relations between society and the environment, situated within a concept of ecology influenced by the separation of nature and culture.

Finally, the retreat will examine visionary ideas for the future, with the theoretical and scientific research of English author, theoretician in the field of gerontology and co-founder of the SENS Research Foundation, Aubrey de Grey, on proposed techniques to stop aging. Contributing to this conversation, Richard Noble, lecturer in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, philosopher and writer, primarily on the intersection of art and politics, will also lead a talk on the politics of utopia in artistic practice.

RETREAT COMPONENTS
• Short presentations and in-depth discussion on each participant’s work.
• Participant-led Sessions
• Talks by invited speakers, followed by discussion
• Field-trips

Selected participants for the retreat are: Love Enqvist, Rose Gibbs, Lina Hermsdorf, Gareth Lloyd, Vipash Purichanont, Amy Spencer and Anna Stephens.

3 - 6 March 2014

The Artist Masterclass Retreat Stranger Than Fiction: Journeys from Books to Art led by renowned Spanish artist Dora García. Please note that the deadline for applying for this retreat has now passed.

Spanish artist Dora García is known for her work with performance, film and video, often made in collaboration with others, or by inhabiting existing broadcast networks or structures. Her subject matter and materials, or techniques, defy categorization and range from philosophy and politics, to popular culture, stand-up comedy and television, often mixing reality and fiction.

This retreat Masterclass, entitled Stranger Than Fiction: Journeys from Books to Art, will introduce García’s working methods, via three complex projects that arose from her encounters with fiction: The Beggar's Opera for Münster Sculpture Projects (2007); Die Klau Mich Show, for documenta13 (2012); and The Joycean Society (2013).

García and the selected retreat participants will work together to develop ideas for a collaborative work using the novel Artificial Respiration (1994) by Ricardo Piglia as a departure point.

Selected participants for the retreat are: Ami Clarke, Valerio Del Baglivo, Patrick Goddard, Agnieszka Gratza, Richard John Jones, Jenny Moore, Lorena Muñoz-Alonso, Marie Toseland and Jess Wiesner.

9-13 September 2013

How We Make and How We Might Make explored underlying concepts around processes of making, materiality and craft.

For the retreat we invited participants to explore underlying concepts around processes of making, materiality and craft. The deadline for applications for this retreat has now passed. To hear about furture retreat opportunities, please subscribe to our e-bulletin.

The title of the retreat refered indirectly to the lecture How We Live and How We might Live (1884) given by the English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist William Morris.  Here Morris writes about an ideal utopian existence and a future society based on common ownership and sharing means of production. Whilst engaging with the world of materiality, through sharing different making skills and sensitivity to the physical/material world, this may enable us to produce and bring another world closer to us.

During five immersive and reflexive days selected participants led their own workshop, took part in the activities led by others and joined in talks by invited speakers as a means of exploring their practice, sharing ideas, and approaching their work from other perspectives.

The selected retreat participants were: Briony Clarke, Traven T. Croves (Andrew Lister & Matthew Stuart), Lawrence Epps, Amanda Loomes, Victoria Mitchell, Rupert Norfolk, Beatriz Olabarrieta, Natalie Pace and Ellen Mara De Wachter

The invited speakers were: Dr. Spike Bucklow, David Mabb, Amanda Game, Dr Catharine Rossi and Conor Wilson

How We Make and How We Might Make was funded by Arts Council England through an initiative to support the development of crafts in the East and South East of England.

Tracing the Tacit: Silence, Chance, Disorientation and Entropy
Escalator Retreat: 13-17 May 2013

Artists, art-writers and curators explored underlying ideas, influences and concept, which inform their practice but are not immediately apparent in their finished work.

The retreat was organised around four key themes: Silence, Chance, Disorientation and Entropy - subliminal systems that govern creative decision-making and create tacit forms of experience and knowledge. We invited proposals for a workshop centred around one of the four topics, at a duration of one hour. During five immersive and reflective days selected participants led their own workshop, took part in the activities led by others and joined in talks by invited speakers as a means of exploring their practice, sharing ideas, and approaching their work from other perspectives.

Tracing the Tacit was suited to artists, art-writers and curators interested in multidisciplinary exercises, both led and self-initiated, including contributions from experts in diverse fields. The organisers of this programme, four curating students from the Royal College of Art, Margrethe Troensegaard, Miloslav Vorlicek, Ritz Wu and Paula Lopez Zambrano, took part in the retreat with the invited practitioners.

A total of six participants were invited to attend the retreat following a selection process. Three places were reserved for those from the South East and East of England regions. There was no charge for participating in the retreat. The first day of the retreat was devoted to practice presentations. Following this each day was structured as an investigation into one of the four themes:

Chance Encounters, led by Margrethe Troensegaard. From the I Ching through mathematics, Surrealism, neo-avant-garde music to contemporary participatory practices, chance has been wielded as a source of inspiration, as artistic methodology, structure of composition, and as content. This day was devoted to multidisciplinary investigations of the phenomenon of ‘planned unpredictability’ – as an underlying and invisible tool, aim or by-product of artistic and curatorial making, and its potential within this framework.

Disorientation, led by Miloslav Vorlicek. First in time, then in place and finally in person: these are the typical symptoms of disorientation. It is implicit that humans go through disorientating experiences at various stages of their lives, be it through felicity or loss of memory, to name just a few. By the examination of diverse forms and mechanisms of disorientation, practitioners were invited to investigate how these conditions or states may exhort the processes in which artistic and curatorial practices are structured.

The Language of Silence, led by Paula Lopez Zambrano. "Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness" (Samuel Beckett). Sometimes language hides meaning that cannot be communicated through words or symbols.  This day explored the ways in which silence can provide access to a tacit experience when reflecting upon the explicit components of language —those which can be directly transmitted and understood by others— in opposition to what cannot be transferred by means of writing, drawing or speaking.

Entropy, led by Ritz Wu. The rhetorical definition of entropy is as a universal law, stating that all physical entities are in a state of perpetual loss of energy, or decline.  It therefore becomes a potent metaphor for the vengeance of time upon all systems, states, and forces. The gradual unraveling of order as an absolutism of our environment has been adapted to various usages in artistic and scientific practice, which was explored in this part of the retreat, as a meditation on how this idea may be subverted to different ends.

POST RETREAT FUNDING

All artists attending the retreat were invited to propose ideas to develop their findings from it further, either jointly or individually. A number of proposals (dependant on numbers submitted and amounts) from each retreat are selected and supported to submit applications to Grants for the Arts to realise their ideas.

FURTHER INFORMATION

Escalator is the pioneering talent plan from Arts Council England, East that finds, supports and invests in the best artistic talent across all artforms throughout the East of England. Escalator is establishing the East of England as the leading UK region for talent development. Since it launched in 2003, Escalator has helped over 250 artists to develop their work, forge new partnerships and reach new audiences.

Tracing the Tacit was curated by first year RCA Curating students: Margrethe Troensegaard, Miloslav Vorlicek, Ritz Wu and Paula Lopez Zambrano.

The participants were: Rebecca Bligh, Terry Bond, Edward Clive, Ruth Hoflich, Jack James and Emily Speed.

The invited speakers were: Mete Atature, Lizzie Fisher, Paul Goodwin, Marysia Lewandowska, Katie Paterson, and Kate Cooper and Marianne Forrest from Auto Italia.

Image: Photograph of magnified lens fungus from a camera lens © Richard J. Kinch

Saturday, 6 April, 4-6pm

Jazz Improvisation Masterclass with Marshall Allen, Daevid Allen, James Harrar and Rogier Smal.  Book the free Masterclass here.

Jazz is America’s quintessential musical expression.  This indigenous art form is an integral component of American culture and history. Jazz has its own unique language.  The aim of this Masterclass is to gain a deeper comprehension of the jazz idiom while further developing it’s expressive language. It is designed to build on participants' fundamental knowledge and appreciation of jazz improvisation on an instinctual and intellectual level.

For over 16s only.

Marshall Allen will begin the Masterclass by discussing his musical history, at the helm of the Sun Ra Arkestra, and his motivation to compose original music to create a spiritual connection. He will also touch upon:

• Examples of different styles of Jazz
• Ear training and listening skills
• The masters and solo analysis
• Keyboard and chord voicing
• V7 progression
• Altered chords

 

During the afternoon participants will explore improv through:

• Lecture and discussion
• Call and response
• Demonstration with group performance
• As much playing as possible

And topics covered will include:

• Articulations
• Patterns
• Rhythmic and harmonic improvisation

Please bring instruments if you can - if you are able to bring extra instruments, for a wider palate or to allow someone without to participate, that would be great.

Refreshments will be available following the Masterclass and before a live performance by Marshall Allen, Daevid Allen, James Harrar and Rogier Smal, beginning at 8pm.

The Masterclass is free but spaces are strictly limited and need to be reserved in advance. Email here. 

During the mid-1950's, Marshall Allen met Sun Ra and became a devoted student of his musical cosmology. After joining the Sun Ra Arkestra in 1958, Marshall Allen led Sun Ra's reed section for over 40 years. He is featured on over 200 Sun Ra releases, while appearing as special guest soloist in concert and on recordings with diverse groups such as NRBQ, Phish, Sonic Youth, and Medeski, Martin & Wood.  Allen assumed the helm of the Sun Ra Arkestra in 1995 after the ascension of Sun Ra in 1993 and John Gilmore in 1995.

Daevid Allen is avant-rock's guitar legend and one of the founders of the British progressive rock band, Soft Machine. After Soft Machine, he became the founder/leader of Gong. He continues to release numerous live sets and one-off collaborations in limited editions on various independent labels under his own and various group names. Said Daevid, "this is a time of great changes, and we will be offering some real outer-space surprises;  so happy and honored to be working with these guys-finally playing with Marshall after all these years, I mean who hasn't he and Sun Ra influenced!"

James Harrar began as a filmmaker, crafting densely lyrical film-poems since the late 1980’s exhibiting at venues including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Andy Warhol Museum and Yamaguchi Center for Art & Media to name a few. In an intimate form, Harrar attempts to imprint thoughts, dreams and conceptual ideas onto the open-minded viewer while examining the possibilities of perception. Throughout his career, Harrar has tried to give the viewer new visual experiences while challenging fixed notions of filmic language and individual seeing.

Rogier Smal is a drummer who experiments with free percussion sounds. Besides playing in improv group Dagora he plays with different musicians including Anne la Berge, Peter Quistgard, Jaap Blonk, James Harrar, Yedo Gibson, Marshall Allen, Dagora, Ti Femme, Dylan Carlson, Eugene Chadbourne, Geoff Leigh, Peter Zincken, Frankie Vis, Peter van Bergen, Ludo Mich, City Hands, Raoul van der Weide, Sunburned hand of the man, Eric Thielemans, Mik Quantius, John Moloney, Cathy Heyden, Alfredo Genovesi, Arvind Ganga, and many more.

15 October — 18 October 2012

For the twelfth Escalator retreat at Wysing, Space of Attention, ten artists, art-writers and curators explored alternative educational models and strategies. During an intensive four days, each participant led one workshop for the group and participated in others. 

Each day, invited speakers helped contextualise the workshop environment adding historical context and their own contributions. Crits and practical talks asked participants to reflect on their practice, consider new or alternative ways of producing, share ideas and to approach their work from other and alternative perspectives. The final day concluded with a public outcome from the retreat group.

The retreat was formed as a progression from the previous Retreat 11: And if it Was it Can't Be Is which was developed in collaboration with artist Mark Titchner. Participants from the previous retreat contributing to Space of Attention include Annabelle Craven-Jones, Mat Do, Clare Gasson, Claire Hope, Glen Jamieson, Kit Poulson, Florian Roithmayr and Alan Stanners.

The participants were: Jenny Chamarette, Annie Davey, Jamie George, Natasha Hoare, Fiona James, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Stephanie Misa, David Morris, Rosalie Schweiker and Khadija von Zinnenburg.

The invited speakers were: Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau, Lucky PDF and the participants of Retreat 11, And If It Was It Can’t Be Is.

Space of Attention artists subsquently programmed the MK Scratch Night Collaborative Acts. More info here.

23 July — 28 July 2012

Artists from the Eastern region were invited to apply to take part in a research trip to Belgium and Germany for the opening of Manifesta 9, a visit to FLACC, and the opening of Documenta 13.

Manifesta, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, is a roving, contemporary art event, showcasing the most innovative work by artists and curators from Europe and beyond.  Manifesta 9 took place at the site of the former Waterschei coal mine in Genk, Limburg, Belgium. Taking into consideration the significance of the former Belgian coal mining region as a locus for discussing both the geographical and imaginary aspects of industrial capitalism as a global phenomenon, Manifesta 9 developed as a dialogue between art, history and social reflection.

FLACC is a workplace for visual artists, also in Genk, Belgium.  Each year, a maximum of eight international artists are invited to develop a new project using FLACC's extensive facilities and curatorial support.  FLACC collaborates extensively with other organisations in Belgium and abroad, including the Frans Masereel Centre (Kasterlee) and the Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht).  In June 2012, FLACC and the Wyspa Institute of Art in Gdansk worked together as partners for A Subjective Bus Line,, a project by visual artist Grzegorz Klaman, which ran during Manifesta 9

In 1955, Documenta was held in Kassel, Germany for the first time. Since then, it has come to define a key periodic moment when, at five-year intervals, contemporary art is generated, exhibited, and explored.  In contrast to other periodic international exhibitions that have emerged from the world fair models of the nineteenth century, a strong theoretical grounding and a sense of urgency in relation to the question of art’s place in society have characterised Documenta. Documenta 13 opened in June 2012, with more than 160 artists and participants showcasing new artworks in multiple venues across the city of Kassel, under the artistic direction of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev.

Artists who came on the seven day research trip were Liz Ballard, Simon Newby, Joseph Murray, Rob Smith alongside writer Jonathan Watts. The group joined a regional delegation of directors and curators from the Contemporary Visual Arts Network, also organised by Wysing.

An exhibition funded by Escalator Visual Arts at French Riviera gallery, London. Exhibition Tumblr page here.

Emanuel Almborg, Sidsel Christensen, Lucienne Cole, KIMI CONRAD, Joe Crowdy, Laura Garbštienė,  Jan Peter Hammer, Matthew Noel-Tod and Ordinary Culture (formerly YH485 Press).

In The Presence of Multiple Possibilities combines existing and newly commissioned works, which draw attention and explore different approaches to the possibility of a future event that cannot be predicted with certainty. Through philosophical and practical understandings of the term contingency, the exhibition attempts to manifest the discrepancy between predicted and actual outcomes. The works in the exhibition attempt to make explicit the inherently contingent nature of translation, interpretation, appropriation and instruction, either through creating a structure for continued development, or by deliberately existing as incomplete.

KIMI CONRAD’s new film,FROM BIRTH & HEALTH (2012), presents an abstracted narrative that anticipates a larger forthcoming project, whilst existing as an autonomous artwork. Laura Garbštienė’s Love is… (2008) reconfigures the sentiments of love letters through online language translation engines; the text is increasingly distorted with each crude translation, exemplifying the discrepancy between human cognition and systematic logic.

Utilising architectural furniture and strategies of exhibition design, Joe Crowdy’s subtle interventionin the gallery will animate the vacant spaces between the other works.

In his film Blind Carbon Copy (2008) Matthew Noel-Tod uses actors, dancers and visual motifs such as life drawing and disco culture to interpret a script taken from his own email correspondences.

Jan Peter Hammer’s video The Anarchist Banker emulates the style of a talk show, where the host interviews a banker in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. A book projectcommission produced by Ordinary Culture (formerly YH485 Press) will include contributions by artists, critics and writers. The book’s malleable and speculative structure will reflect the thesis of the exhibition, while its discursive content will ensure the continued exploration of this theme.

To further disrupt a singular reading of ‘what may or may not happen’, the events programme will approach contingency from different thematic entry points, allowing for the potential for multiple understandings to become manifest throughout the duration of the exhibition. 

Drawing on the quintessential quirks of British popular culture, Lucienne Cole’s new performance Tumbling Dice is a tongue-in-cheek pub quiz, testing our expectations of general (and not so general) knowledge, followed by a DJ set of questionable logic.

Sidsel Christensen’s evening performance will explore the public cult of Britney Spears through elaborate conspiracy theories giving an insight into the darker, more esoteric aspects of the pop princess’ life. Through a gallery reading of the book The Fieldnotes of Jacinta Emilia Cosas, Emanuel Almborg will present part of his project centred on social experiment and communication among communities.

28 May — 31 May 2012

And If It Was, It Can’t Be Is was a four day retreat in May 2012 programmed and conceptualised in collaboration with artist Mark Titchner.

We invited artists and curators to an exploration of 'the self' to examine its construction and deconstruction. During an intensive four days, participants were the subject and focus of the retreat and took part in workshops and exercises which challenged routines and preconceptions. Crits and practical talks ask participants to reflect on their practice, consider new or alternative ways of producing and to approach their work from other and alternative perspectives.

Artist Mark Titchner also led activities over the four days, which included contributions from experts from diverse fields.

The participants were: Annabelle Craven-Jones, Mat Do, Clare Gasson, Claire Hope, Glen Jamieson, Shama Khanna, Kit Poulson, Kari Rittenbach, Florian Roithmayr and Alan Stanners.

The invited speakers were:  Beth Elliott, Joy Magezis, Gordon Melvin,  Anthony Morgan, Simon O'Sullivan and Jill Shanks.

4 December — 8 December 2011

Free Association was a four day retreat in December 2011 which used different models of improvisation to reconsider how we work and think, both individually and collectively. Free Association provided space to reflect on and consider new or alternative ways of working.

The retreat invited artists and curators interested in multidisciplinary activities, both led and self-initiated, and included discussions on collaboration with invited experts from varying fields. In this retreat artists and curators were invited to depart from their usual modes of practice in order to experiment with alternative processes and media.

The project was curated by first year RCA Curating students: Stella Bottai, Hannah Conroy, Rachel Falconer, Cicely Farrer, Ellen Greig, Ruth Hogan, Daria Khan, Juste Kostikovaite, Galit Mana, Augustina Matuseviciute, Ned McConnell, Youna Shin, Jessica Vaughan, Nick Warner, Sophie Williamson.

The invited speakers were: Field Broadcast, Patrick Coyle, Robin MacKay, Nick Thurston, Suzana Vaz and Brian Catling.

The participants were: David Raymond Conroy, Nicole Bachmann, Una Hamilton Helle, Scott Massey, Melanie Carvalho, Marianne Holm Hansen, Kimi Conrad, Rosie Grieve, Isabella Martin, Henry Jackson Newcombe.

3 October — 6 October 2011

Print and Production was a four day residential retreat in October 2011 that was an experimental look at publishing as a space for making, presenting and documenting artists' research and working process. During the retreat, artists and curators contributed to the first Escalator publication under the theme of Production through workshops that discussed design, editing, printing and distribution.

 

Each retreat participant was asked to bring material for their own project for the book - and to contribute towards the editing, layout and final presentation of material from participants involved in previous Escalator retreats. Documentation from this group process was also included.

The project was led by Unrealised Projects and Publish and Be Damned, and included sessions with publishers, artists and curators to give feedback on individual's work and discuss approaches to print and online publishing. The retreat was curated by MA lecturer Kit Hammonds and Escalator Curator Gareth Bell-Jones and was attended by the first work-based Inspire programme RCA Curating students Sunny Cheung, Asana Greenstreet, Ruth Lie, Christina Millare, Lena Mohamed, Melanie Pocock, Paul Reynolds, Karen Roswell, Sacha Waldron, Mariam Zulfiqar.

The participants were: Katie Barrington, Owen Chapman and Christian Tilt, Jackie Chettur, Samantha Epps, Louisa Martin, Charlotte Morgan, Lucy Pawlak, Anna Pickering and Aymee Smith.

The invited speakers were: An Endless Supply (Harry Blackett and Robin Kirkham designers, artists), Arnaud Desjardin (artist, publisher), John Phillips (director London Print Studio), Simon Grant (writer and art historian, editor of Tate Etc magazine and PICPUS), Publish and be Damned (Kit Hammonds, curator), Unrealised Projects (Sam Ely & Lynn Harris, artists), Eleanor Vonne Brown (director X Marks the Bökship)

1 June — 3 June 2011

Homework was a four day retreat where artists and curators were invited to reflect on their practice, the means and methods of their production and consider new or alternative ways of working. Participants first attended the retreat at Wysing for three days (1-3 June), then returned to present ideas for a new project for group discussion, again at Wysing, three weeks later.

The first three days consisted of an assortment of talks, presentations, discussions and workshops from specially invited contributors as well as an afternoon of presentations from participants on their artistic practices. Participants were then asked to return on the 24 June to present a new work or project made since the first three days (either in production, newly produced or as a proposal) for group discussion and critique.

The participants were: Chris Rawcliffe, Phil Root, E Park, Steven Paige, Lizzie Hughes, Richard Parry, James Epps, Lawrence Upton, Katherine Hymers and Giles Round

The retreat was curated by Escalator Curator Gareth Bell-Jones. The invited speakers were: David Raymond Conroy (artist), Am Nuden Da (artist/curatorial collaboration between Adam Gibbons, Jesper List Thomsen and Lewis Ronald), Lizzie Fisher (curator, Kettle’s Yard), Andy Holden (artist), Philomene Pirecki (artist, curator of Occasionals).

1 February — 4 February 2011

Unrealised-Unrealisable was a four day retreat where artists and curators were invited to discuss and propose projects which have not been made, can not be made, have failed or are otherwise unrealisable. The event explored artworks and projects which exist as ideas, lie on the threshold between made and unmade or exist as a partial expression or incomplete idea.

The participants were: Rachel Barker, Kayle Brandon and Joanne Bristol, Veronique Chance, Elena Cologni, Aaron Head, Barbara Howey, Chris Jackson.

The invited speakers were: Matt Stokes (artist), Teresa Gleadowe (independent curator), Unrealised Projects (Sam Ely and Lynn Harris, artists), Paul Richards (artist) and included a visit to Norwich and Colchester to meet Harriet Godwin (Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art, Norwich Castle), Benjamin Brett (Steering Committee Member, Outpost), Katherine Wood (Director, Firstsite).

The retreat was curated by MA lecturer Kit Hammonds and Escalator Curator Gareth Bell-Jones. The event was attended by students from the Royal College of Art Curating Contemporary Art MA Laura Smith, Egle Kulbokaite, Laura Clarke, Mette Kjaergaard Praest, Elizabeth Stanton, Katie Guggenheim, Daniela Berger, Lily Hall, Sabel Gavaldon, Sunny Cheung, Asana Greenstreet, Ruth Lie, Christina Millare, Lena Mohamed, Melanie Pocock, Paul Reynolds, Karen Roswell, Sacha Waldron, Mariam Zulfiqar.

6 December — 10 December 2010

For the four day retreat Ways and Means, artists were invited to be both teachers and students, sharing knowledge and exploring skills with peers and guest speakers through practice and collective thinking.

Time, materials and processes were stripped back to consider approaches to art practice using the immediate environment, shared knowledge and a light touch.

The participants were: Benjamin Brett, Savinder Bual Statement, Lucia Farinati, Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau, Toby Huddlestone, Bob Levene, Jonathan O’Dwyer, Colin Perry, Josephine Reichert, Claire Louise Staunton

The retreat was curated by first year college based RCA Curating students Laura Smith, Egle Kulbokaite, Laura Clarke, Mette Kjaergaard Praest, Elizabeth Stanton, Katie Guggenheim, Daniela Berger, Lily Hall and Sabel Gavaldon. The invited speakers were: Bryony Gillard (artist), Neal White (artist), Ruth Beale (artist), Sepake Angiama (curator) and Andreas Lang (artist).

25 October — 28 October 2010

The retreat Art and Writing explored the relationship between writing and contemporary art practice.

Workshops led by international artists, leading writers and critics addressed both creative and critical writing practices and their role in making, discussing and presenting artists' work.

The participants were: Amy Budd, Adam Burton, Tom Durley, Rob Filby, Lawrence Leaman, Rashmi Munikempanna, Anna Reckin, Patrick Staff, Judith Stewart, Judith Waring

The retreat was curated by first year work placement based RCA Inspire students. The invited speakers were: Laura Oldfield Ford (artist), Gareth Long (artist), Adrian Searle (critic), Alexandre Singh (artist), Maria Fusco (critic, writer) and Sally O'Reilly (critic, event organiser and Wysing Ambassador).

8 October — 17 October 2010

Artists and curators from the East Region were invited to take part in a research trip to the Region of Murcia, Spain, for the opening of Manifesta 8.

Manifesta, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, is a roving, contemporary art event, showcasing the most innovative work by artists and curators from Europe and beyond. For Manifesta 8, rather than focusing on the European East-West divide, Murcia and Cartagena were selected as hosts for its dialogue with northern Africa. The south of Spain includes a blend of Islamic, Judaic and Christian cultural influences and both cities display intertwining cultures and a diverse cultural heritage.

Successful applicants attended the preview and opening of the Biennial over three days. Accommodation, flights and a modest daily per diem was provided. The eight artists/curators selected from applications to attend the opening were: Saim Demircan, Robert Filby, Mat Do, Julia Devonshire, Jacques Rogers, Simon Liddiment, Judith Waring and Elizabeth Fisher.

Artists and curators who provided talks/met for discussion: Teresa Gleadowe (independent curator, Organiser Falmouth Convention), Alexandre Singh (artist), Nav Haq (curator), WooLoo - Sixten Kai Nielsen and Martin Rosengaard (artists’ network), Celine Condorelli (artist), Chamber of Public Secrets (curatorial organisation), Kajsa Dahlberg (artist), Karl Holmqvist (artist), Melanie Gilligan (artist), David Rych (artist), Stefanos Tsivopoulos (artist) and many more.

Itinerary
Murcia 8-11 October
Cartagena 8-14 October

Day 1, 8 Oct
Arrive in Murcia
Walk around Murcia for context, Old Town - Platería and Trapería Streets, Gothic Cathedral, Baroque Town Hall

Day 2, 9 Oct
Visit to Projecto de Arte Contemporaneo – Domino Canibal
Manifesta Opening Event

Day 3, 10 Oct
Manifesta
Los Molinos del Rio Segura Hydraulic Museum and Sala Caballerizas
Pavilions 1 & 2, Artillery Barracks
Mubam - Fine Arts Museum Of Murcia
Espacio Av

Day 4,11 Oct
Manifesta
Centro Párraga
Antigua Oficina De Correos Y Telégrafos
Cendeac (parallel events)
Train to Cartagena

Day 5, 12 Oct
Manifesta
Auditorium, Parque Torres
El Parque Cafe-Restaurant
Muram - Regional Museum of Modern Art
Meet Manifesta organiser Yesomi Umolu

Day 6, 13 Oct
Manifesta
Arqua - National Museum Of Underwater Archaeology
Former Autopsy Pavilion
San Antón Prison

Day 7, 14 Oct
Split into groups for various sights in Cartagena: submarine, Roman Theatre, archaeological sights etc
Return to London
 

1 October — 30 April 2011

Six artists/curators were selected on the basis of their relevant knowledge and experience as mentors in a six month mentoring programme: Michelle Cotton (then independent curator and writer and holder of Cubitt Gallery curator's bursary, now Curator at Firstsite), Harriet Godwin (curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery), Andrew Hunt (director, Focal Point Gallery), Simon Liddiment (artist), Sally O’Reilly (writer and event organiser and now Wysing Ambassador), Jamie Shovlin (artist).

Face-to-face meetings with mentors allows for an informal transmission of knowledge and support for artistic and professional development, with both the mentor and the artist choosing whom they worked with and being paid equally for their time.

Mentees met with their mentors for a two-hour long session, three times over the duration of the programme. The basis for these meetings and the logic of their progression was decided jointly by the selected artists and their mentors. A one-off fee was provided for each of the successful artists and travel expenses were also covered.

The mentees selected were Julie Brenot, Will Clifford, Aaron Head, Katherine Hymers, Lyndall Phelps and Cally Spooner.

3 May — 6 May 2010

For the four day retreat In Flux, the Fluxus movement was a starting point.  The retreat looked at the international scope of Fluxus, chance and improbability, random actions and multidisciplinary forms of art-making including artists’ books, live events and video art.

For the first time, artists based outside of the eastern region, anywhere in England, were invited to participate. They were: Alexandra Zierle & Paul Carter, Simon Davenport, Katrina Schwartz (Hayward Gallery), Idit Nathan, Anne-Mie Melis, Olga Jurgenson, Christina Green, Lexa Drysdale, Cedric Christie

The retreat was curated by MA lecturer Kit Hammonds, Escalator Fellow Gareth Bell-Jones and students Antonia Blocker and Barbara Rodriguez-Munoz. The programme included Les Bicknel (artist), Sound Threshold (curatorial partnership), Laure Prouvost (artist), Lewis Ronald (artist).

1 February — 4 February 2010

The retreat pointed to the models that have revolutionised distribution – from the printing press to the internet and digitisation – and the evolutionary forms of social change that open up or are constrained by these changes in communication and explore how artistic practices, literature and film have addressed these issues.

11 artists and curators based in the eastern region were invited to come on the retreat following a selection process. They were: Julie Allen, Julie Brenot, Ric Carvalho, Andy Holden, Gary O’Conner, CJ Mahony, Lotte Juul Petersen (Wysing Arts Centre), Holly Rumble, Emma Smith, Helen Stratford and Simon Woolham.

Invited contributors were: Mindaugas Gapsevicius (o-o – the first Lithuanian new media art platform) Mark Essen (artist), Emma Hedditch (artist), Francesco Pedraglio (curator, writer and co-director of FormContent), Daniella Saul (curator), Mike Sperlinger (Head of Distribution, LUX), Karen Alexander (senior lecturer, Royal College of Art) and Maria Fusco (Director of art writing, Goldsmiths and the Editor of The Happy Hypocrite).

The retreat was curated by students Fatima Hellberg, Antonia Blocker, Robert Leckie, Helena Vilalta, Guillaume Breton and Tyler Woolcott.

5 October — 8 October 2009

The retreat Economics of the Art System took an in depth look at the art market, exploring the financial and cultural economies that drive the industry. From commercial galleries, collectors and art fairs, to the influence of auction houses the retreat questioned the value of art as commodity and the commercial influences on artists' practices, as well as considering survival tactics for artists, curators and gallerists.

Ten artists and curators based in the eastern region were invited to come on the retreat following a selection process. They were: Liz Ballard, Annabel Dover, Laura Earley (Firstsite Gallery), Julie Freeman, Alistair Gentry, Helen Judge, David Kefford, Annabelle Shelton, Elaine Tribley and Martha Winter.

The retreat was curated by MA lecturer Kit Hammonds and the programme included: Olof Olsson (Danish artist); Sarah Thornton (art correspondent and author of Seven Days in the Art World); Francis Outred (Director of Post War and Contemporary Art, Christies); Neil Cummings (artist and lecturer at Chelsea College of Art); Renaud Proch (Director The Project, New York) and Pablo Leon de la Barra (artist curator).

The retreat was documented by artists Daniel Wilkinson and Ludovica Gioscia. The new college-based Year 1 students on the MA programme attended one day of the retreat as an introduction to Escalator and then went on to curate the next retreat.

6 July — 9 July 2009

The first four day retreat, Neither Here Nor There, explored local narratives, histories and myths in the arts and examined successful approaches to working, exhibiting and selling art beyond the borders of major urban centres.

Ten artists and curators based in the eastern region were invited to come on the retreat following a selection process. They were: William Clifford, Lucy Conochie, Sarah Evans, Bettina Furnee, Catherine Hemelryk (Bury St Edmunds Art Gallery), Hayley Lock, Jo Mardell, Rachel Oxley, Mark Ross and Caroline Wright.

Contributors were: Stefan Rusu (Moldovian artist), Margarita Gluzberg (drawing lecturer at the Royal College of Art), Charles Avery (artist) and Heimo Lattner (Director of Dutch collective e-xplo).

The Year 1 students from the RCA who curated the retreat were: Emma Astner, Gareth Bell-Jones, Carmen Billows, Romain Chenais, Martyn Coppell, Thomas Cuckle, Saim Demircan, John Decemvirale, Karina Joseph, Gemma Lloyd, Antonia Lotz, Louise O'Hare, Eve Smith, Yesomi Umolu. The retreat was documented by artists Helen Sykes and Vicky Falconer.

Escalator Visual Arts was launched by the artist Phyllida Barlow in March 2009 with the event What do Artists do?  with contributions from artists Simon Liddiment, The Hut Project, Maria Zhale and Charlotte Thrane.

The launch was used as a way to communicate the aims of Escalator Visual Arts - to strengthen the networks of artists and curators working in the east of England and to support artists and curators based in the region to create opportunities for themselves and their work. The launch event was attended by ninety regional artists and curators and RCA staff and students.