December 3 to December 17 2020

Joe Moran's performance film Materiality Will Be Rethought, commissioned by Whitechapel Gallery and Dance Art Foundation, launches on Thursday 3 December at 7pm. A Q&A will follow the premier featuring Joe Moran and dancers Temi Ajose-Cutting, Sean Murray and Eve Stainton. The film will be available to view until Thursday 17 December on the Whitechapel Gallery website.

Conceived as a site-specific work, Materiality Will Be Rethought was developed as a live performance within the sculptural environment, now reimagined as a film. The work forms a dialogue with Carlos Bunga’s exhibition Something Necessary and Useful (on display 21 Jan – 6 Sep 2020).

The piece navigates dance’s potential to animate and disrupt architectural space, the physicality of the dancer’s voice and the moving body as a site of political unrest and complex subjectivities. Moran’s choreography offers new contextual frameworks within which Something Necessary and Useful can be experienced. Moran conducted research for this work at a residency at Wysing in 2018.

Materiality Will Be Rethought is supported by the Arts Council England Emergency Relief Fund and private patrons. The commission drew upon research undertaken during residencies at Wysing Arts Centre, LaunchPad LaB, The Lowry and with postgraduate students at London Contemporary Dance School.

10 September to 17 October 2020

I Decided I Want to Walk is Helen Cammock's first exhibition at Kate MacGarry Gallery, London. The exhibition features Cammock's new work They Call It Idlewild, which was first exhibited at Wysing, and a new project of screen prints.

For more information, visit the gallery website by clicking here.

Cammock explores social histories through film, photography, print, text, song and performance. She is motivated by her commitment to questioning mainstream historical narratives around blackness, womanhood, wealth, power, poverty and vulnerability. Mining her own biography in addition to the histories of oppression and resistance, multiple and layered narratives reveal the cyclical nature of histories.

The exhibition features Cammock’s new work They Call It Idlewild (2020). The film acts as a reflection on the politics of idleness and what it means creatively, emotionally and culturally to be idle at a time when the questions are being asked more widely about the physical and emotional costs of hyper-productivity, required by Neoliberalism. Cammock explores the processes of idleness through visual and poetic intertextuality drawing on writers such as Audre Lorde, Mary Oliver, James Joyce and Jonathan Crary. Part way through the film, Cammock begins to sing Johnny Mercer’s depression-era song ‘Lazy Bones’, drawing an explicit link between several historical periods, a reminder of the pervasiveness of racial stereotypes around

laziness and the toxic hypocrisies of the slave business and land-owning classes. They Call it Idlewild asks; who gets to be lazy?

They Call It Idlewild was first exhibited at Wysing, Cambridge in March 2020 following a residency responding to the forgotten histories, photographs and artworks uncovered in Wysing's archive. Cammock’s film has gained currency with the pandemic. Observation and patience are offered alongside urgent conversations of complacency and collusion. A new project of screen prints respond to a moment that is both past and current - political and social - individual and collective - asking how one exists without the other. Through the poetic quality and potential of language these propositions, and perhaps provocations, ask us to pay attention.

For more information about Cammock's They Call It Idlewild exhibition at Wysing, please click here.

5 June to 30 August 2020

Helen Cammock's film They Call It Idlewild, commissied by Wysing as part of our 30th Anniversary programme, is part of Unprecedented Times, a new group exhibition at Kunsthaus Breganz, Austria.

The exhibition includes works by Helen Cammock, William Kentridge's The Centre for the Less Good Idea, Annette Messager, Rabih Mroué, Markus Schinwald, Marianna Simnett and Ania Soliman.

Unprecedented Times assembles works that have either emerged during the crisis or can be read as a premonition of it. There is much at stake: life together, the political community, the economic situation, ethical imperatives, the ego and existence. In view of the radical experience of a world that is very different to what was previously imaginable, there are attempts to withdraw and search for meaning. Some of the works depict silence and intimacy. Others map social consequences, the danger of political alienation, and the loss of democratic rights.

For more information please visit the Kunsthaus Breganz website, here.

To find out more about Helen Cammock's exhibition They Call It Idlewild at Wysing, please click here.

January 17 to April 5 2020

Wysing Spring 2019 artist in-Residence Athanasios Argianas presents Hollowed Water, an exhibition at Camden Arts Centre including new film, sculpture and musical works that emerge from his interest in redundant technologies and the traces of modernism found in unthought of places, supported by the Freelands Foundation.

Drawing on the social and historical specificity of acoustic forms and visual aesthetics, Argianas developed several new works during his residency at Camden Arts Centre in 2018-19. These include modular ceramic sculptures that trace the nuanced shifts from the curves of art nouveau to 1930s modernism, as well as casts and replicas of acoustic technologies, including the Ondes Martenot Resonator – a prototypical instrument that tilts and bends sound, treating it as a tactile material.

As part of the The Freelands Lomax Ceramics Fellowship, Wysing hosted Argianas for a period of three weeks in March 2019 where he used the Wysing Polyphonic Recording Studio.

The Freelands Lomax Ceramics Fellowship was launched in 2017 and offers an annual residency at Camden Arts Centre, followed by an exhibition. Argianas is the second recipient of the Fellowship.

For more information, please visit the Camden Arts Centre website by clicking here.

Supported by Freelands Foundation.

24 October to 10 November

Wysing studio artist Soheila Sokhanvari presents work in a new group exhibition The World Without Us at APT Gallery, London. 

For more information, visit the APT Gallery website, here.

Few things are more commanding than our own image – after all, the wealthy and the influential have demonstrated the power of an iconic portrait century after century. But what of the digital era and its effect on the painter and, in particular, our image of self? In the past, the aristocrat or the ruler might assert their dominance through a commissioned portrait, surrounded by carefully staged possessions and symbols.

Today, the contemporary cultivation of glamour is instantaneously related through the filters of Instagram as electronic devices carve new divisions for potential class categories. The sublime now becomes the backdrop of the selfie, and easy access to quick image making means that essentially everyone can mimic what the traditional painter constructed slowly and deliberately through physical material.

How do painters respond to this? What is the role of the painter in this era? Do painters still maintain a separate and special perspective to examine culture in such circumstances? The infiltration of the digital is unavoidable and The World Without Us pays homage to this. 

Running from 25 October–10 November 2019 at APT Gallery, London, it examines these issues through the works of six contemporary painters: Phillip Allen, Maja Godlewska, Sally Kindberg, Andrew Leventis, Christiane Pooley and Soheila Sokhanvari.

This exhibition has been organised and curated by Andrew Leventis.

We are pleased to be leading on New Geographies, a three-year partnership between nine arts organisations in the East of England working within the ECVAN network, culminating in ten new artistic commissions.

The East Contemporary Visual Arts Network (ECVAN) launched an open call in Summer 2017, asking people living in the East of England to nominate overlooked or unexpected places in the region that they find meaningful and interesting. By asking ‘what is a forgotten place that you think is important to highlight?’ we wanted more people to share their stories, building upon an active discussion with the potential to connect us to each other and to reimagine our idea of ‘place’.

Through outreach projects and online, the public nominated over 265 overlooked or forgotten places which helped to create a new map of the East of England made by those who live here. 

In response to these nominations, ECVAN opened a call for artists to make new work inspired by the locations. With nearly 600 applicatons, we are pleased to announce that we have commissioned ten projects by artists from the UK and internationally to make new work in response to the stories that were shared. The artists are: Maria Anastassiou, David Blandy, Marcus Coates, Cooking Sections, Ian Giles, Krijn De Koning, susan pui san lok, Studio Morison, Stuart Whipps, and Laura Wilson.

The full press release can be found here and more details about the project, the commissions and biographies of the artists can be found on the dedicated website www.newgeographies.uk

21 October — 30 November 2019

Wysing studio artist Bettina Furnée presents the Even You Song Tour 2019, supported by Wysing Arts Centre, King’s Lynn Festival, Young Norfolk Arts and The National Centre for Writing.

Tour Schedule and Tickets

Upcoming

29 November 7pm
St James’ Piccadilly, London
(London Oriana Choir, Dir. Dominic Ellis-Peckham)
To purchase tickets, please click here.

Past

2 November 6.30pm
Trinity College Chapel, Cambridge
(Cambridge Chorale, Dir. Owain Park)

13 October 6.30pm
All Saints and St Andrew’s Church, Kingston, Cambridgeshire
(Cambridge Chorale, Dir. Owain Park)

15 July 6.30pm
King’s Lynn Minster
(Even You Song Choir, Dir. Jane Wells)

Even You Song is an interdisciplinary art project that presents an innovative interpretation of Choral Evensong asking couples whether they can travel into space together.

The work is co-created by Wysing studio artist Bettina Furnée and writer Lucy Sheerman, and set to music by celebrated composer Cheryl Frances-Hoad. The tour involves the participation of adult and school choirs in four new performances across East Anglia and London, with new writing and digital projections.

Online review of the 2017 premiere at Peterborough Cathedral: http://www.planethugill.com/2017/02/an-immersive-experience-even-you- song.html

Even You Song was created during an artist residency at Metal Peterborough by writer Lucy Sheerman and artist Bettina Furnée. The work reflects a long-standing engagement with the concept of travel, space and locality in their practice and is the result of a highly collaborative process bridging art forms and communities.

Even You Song follows the format of Choral Evensong, with a libretto based on interviews with twelve couples from Peterborough, contemplating a space journey to the moon of indefinite duration, echoing the popular call-out by the Mars Foundation for a ‘mature couple' to go to Mars. The work is accompanied by digital projections using footage taken from their homes. Even You Song explores the musical and spiritual traditions of Choral Evensong and is devised to engage with the community in which it takes place as the 50-minute piece for choir and organ will be performed by local adult and school choirs, and two of the spoken sections are rewritten for each performance. This element involves diverse writers and a focus on a range of topics.

Even You Song Tour 2019 is supported by King’s Lynn Festival, Young Norfolk Arts and Wysing Arts Centre, and is made possible with funding from All Saints and St Andrew, Arts Council England, Cambridgeshire Music, National Centre for Writing & Norfolk Music Hub

Bettina Furnée’s visual art practice ranges from small text and moving image pieces to complex and collaborative environmental projects, using language as source material. She has executed many public realm projects commissioned by art organisations, local government, architects, Arts Council and Ministry of Justice. She is studio artist at Wysing Arts Centre. She has most recently been working with MKGallery and Art+Christianity to create new site-specific works. bettinafurnee.co.uk.

Lucy Sheerman has poetry collections with Cam Rivers Press, Dancing Girl Press, Oystercatcher Press and was included in Infinite Difference, the Shearsman Anthology of Innovative UK Women Writers. She was commissioned to write a play with the Apollo astronaut Al Worden for HotBed 13 and a libretto for ‘Together to the Workhouse Door’ an opera produced by Viva Sinfonia for Gressenall Farm and Workhouse. She was artist in residence at Metal Peterborough and poet in residence at the Scott Polar Institute, Cambridge. She runs the University of Cambridge Centre for Creative Writing and is currently working on a series of essays and fan fictions which respond to Jane Eyre.

Admired for her originality, fluency and professionalism, Cheryl Frances-Hoad has been composing to commission since she was fifteen. Classical tradition (she trained as a cellist and pianist at the Menuhin School before going on to Cambridge and King’s College, London) along with diverse contemporary inspirations including literature, painting and dance, have contributed to a creative presence provocatively her own. Her output - widely premiered, broadcast and commercially recorded, reaching audiences from the Proms to outreach workshops - addresses all genres from opera, ballet and concerto to song, chamber and solo music.

10 October to 16 November

Soheila Sokhanvari, presents new works of egg tempera paintings, installations and the sculpture “The Private Dancer” in 'Addicted To Love' at Kristin Hjellegjerde gallery, London.

For more information, visit the Kristin Hjellegjerde gallery website here.

Subscribing to the school of magical realism that enhance reality in which the banal and everyday take on new life and meaning by being imbued with an elevated focus, the works also belies the complex political undertones of her work, allowing her to take a step back and examine events from her native country through the lens of distance and time. She investigates the concept of collective trauma as an experience that can be told through the narratives of individuals, focusing on reimagining of female Iranian celebrity photographs. These women were the popstars of Iran’s entertainment industry, who were forced to flee their country or abandon their art after the revolution of 1979 radically changed the country’s culture. Visually striking and woven with complex political and cultural narratives, the exhibition investigates our impulse and desire to be seduced by imagery, whilst reviving Iran’s repressed and forgotten female stars.

In the making of her paintings, Sokhanvari refuses manufactured products, instead mixing egg yolk with high grade pigments for paint. The use of calf vellum as a canvas possesses connotations of religious sacrifice, relating to the sacrifice of the individual as the artist's practise explores portraiture as a form of simultaneous oppression and empowerment for the subject. Notably, Sokhanvari has dedicated three portraits and a sculpture installation to the actor/singer Googoosh, who famously became a fashion icon by embracing dressing up as a means of liberation. In the installation Private Dancer, Gagoosh appears enlivened through a hologram dancing inside a sculpture to one of her greatest hits Khalvat. However, her endless dance symbolises her isolation and inaccessibility, whilst also highlighting the tension between public and private identities. 
 

Layering collective and personal experiences, Addicted to Love explores the lasting impact of trauma and the objectification of the individual through historical narratives that continue to reverberate in the present. Beyond her bright colours and dreamlike scenes, Sokhanvari’s work possesses a vivid and complex emotional range that invites a deep engagement with not only the image itself but also, wider political and cultural discussions. 

7 November to 2 February 2020

Florence Peake and Tai Shani's ambitious exhibition Andromedan Sad Girl, commissioned by Wysing in 2017 with funding from Arts Council England and additional support from the Henry Moore Foundation and The Elephant Trust, travels to CentroCentro, Madrid

The exhibition has been re-worked fro CentroCentro's 'Absolute Beginners' programme. 

Drawing on their research into structures of feminism, Andromedan sad Girl is an imagining of what a pre or post patriarchal site could be. Peake and Shani are interested in exploring the fluid mythologies and imagined futures of lost civilizations. The artists take an archaeological excavation as a point of departure to imagine and represent non-hierarchal, pre-historical or futuristic civilizations, imagined through ambitious new sculptural works and wall paintings.

Using multilayered elements, including sound, the whole installation takes the visitor to a highly theatrical space and invites them to rest inside this immersive environment. The sound, with vocals from Florence Peake and produced in collaboration with recent artist residency and composer Maxwell Sterling, suggests a pre-linguistic dimension where speech is not yet acquired, but open.

1 November to 31 February

Artist Anna Bunting-Branch will be presenting a new version of her virtual reality installation Meta as part of FACT's you feel me_ exhibition.

you feel me_ imagines an alternate world, imagined by artists, where we can feel and heal. The exhibition is curated by Helen Starr and features contribiutions from Brandon Covington Sam-Sumana, Phoebe Collings-James, Salma Noor, Anna Bunting-Branch, Megan Broadmeadow, Rebecca Allen and Aliyah Hussain.

Anna Bunting-Branch's Meta is a new work in VR, jointly commissioned by Wysing Arts Centre, The Mechatronic Library, FACT, Liverpool and QUAD. A protoype of the installation featured in our exhibition Warm Worlds and Otherwise in 2018.

For more details on you feel me_, please visit the FACT website here.

MOTHER...
Studio Morison at Wicken Fen

Covid-19 Update: Wicken Fen Nature Reserve and MOTHER... are open but please check the National Trust website before visiting, here.

MOTHER.. was commissioned by Wysing as part of the programme New Geographies, with funding from Arts Council England and the National Trust.

MOTHER… is an artwork by artists Heather and Ivan Morison of Studio Morison that engages with the connections between the natural world and our mental health. The work is inspired by writer Richard Mabey’s book ‘Nature Cure’, in which he recovers from severe depression through walking, watching and writing about the Eastern region’s beautiful and unexplored landscapes.

It has been commissioned by Wysing as part of the region-wide arts commissioning programme, New Geographies, which aims to bring contemporary art to unexpected places in the East of England. All locations for art works were nominated by members of the public – in this case Wicken Fen suggested for its “sublime peaty landscape”.

MOTHER… is a sculptural structure that has been created specifically for this important area of wild fenland.

Directions
To find MOTHER... please go to the main car park at Lode Lane, Wicken Fen. It is a 20 minute walk to the structure from there, and there are direction signs. Access to MOTHER... is free and does not require entry payment. The car park costs £3 per day.

MOTHER… references local building traditions, materials and architectural vernacular to root the structure in the landscape it is a part of. The form is an interpretation of the remarkable hayricks once found dotting this countryside. The timber used in the framing was felled from the artists own forest and milled by the artists at their workshops. The walls and roof are made from local straw, the thatching of which has been done in the traditional style by a master thatcher whose first job as an apprentice was to thatch a hayrick on this very site.

The work, with its deep entranceways, ceiling oculus and high double layered conical ceiling, is an architectural space to enter; re-framing visitors’ experience of the landscape of Wicken Fen, the sky, the light and the materials that surround them.

The vessel like form of the sculpture, alongside its title, connoting universal ideas of protection, nurturing, and birth.

The Artists
The Morisons, Heather Peak Morison (b. UK, 1973) and Ivan Morison (b. Turkey, 1974) have established an ambitious collaborative practice over the past fifteen years that transcends the divisions between art, architecture and theatre. They are co-directors of STUDIO MORISON, their artist led creative practice which supports and realizes their ideas and the people they work with. Central to their work is the involvement with spaces of human coexistence and with the communities that exist or may exist there. They have often engaged with public space, for example in 2010 with Plaza. Commissioned by Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite this artwork talks about the failure of modern cities to accommodate the needs of all people. Other works, like Sleepers Awake (2014, Museum of Modern Art, Sydney) are transitory works, whose alteration and ephemerality create starting points for open narratives.

New Geographies
New Geographies is a three-year project, funded by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, to create a new map of the East of England based on personal thoughts, reflections and stories of unexplored or overlooked places, rather than on historic or economical centres. The first phase of the project invited members of the public to nominate locations for the map in Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Suffolk, over a three-month period in the Summer of 2017. This resulted in over 270 nominations. Via an international open call, artists were then invited to submit proposals for artworks inspired by the nominated locations. The artists selected are: Maria Anastassiou, David Blandy, Marcus Coates, Cooking Sections, Ian Giles, Krijn de Koning, susan pui san lok, Heather and Ivan Morison, Stuart Whipps and Laura Wilson. Each artist is working closely on the realisation of their work with one of the New Geographies partner institutions. The New Geographies partner institutions are Art Exchange, University of Essex Colchester; East GalleryNUA, Norwich University of the Arts; Firstsite, Colchester; Focal Point Gallery, Southend; Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge; Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery; originalprojects; Great Yarmouth; UH Arts, University of Hertfordshire; and Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire. 

22 February, Sonic Acts, Amsterdam

5 March, Cafe Oto, London

8 March, Borealis, Bergen

Building on a work commissioned for Wysing Polyphonic in 2018, Last Yearz Interesting Negro and Phoebe Collings-James present a mini-tour of Sound as Weapon, Sounds 4 Survival, an ensemble of solo and entwined bodies and cut up rnb and dub loops, combining dance, sound and sculpture. For each performance of this work, Phoebe Collings-James and Jamila Johnson-Small a.k.a. Last Yearz Interesting Negro are joined by a different cast of three other artists. The group forms a chorus centred around a conceptual deconstruction of ​‘percussion’ as it functions instrumentally and also as a radical proposition to the various ways you could think about the power of ​‘striking an object’ and the impact of the sonic as resonating frequencies and vibrations. Their bodies navigate the sensory labour of being ​‘played’.

Commissioned by Bergen Kunsthall and Sonic Acts as part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. Based on work developed in residency at Wysing Arts Centre.

11 May, Barbican Theatre, Plymouth (tickets here)
18 May, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (tickets here)
1 June, The Albany London (tickets here)

The View From Behind The Futuristic Rose Trellis is a bold and ambitious immersive live work by Ravioli Me Away (Sian Dorrer, Rosie Ridgway and Alice Theobald). The work launched our 2019 30th anniversary programme with two sold-out performances and an acclaimed iteration as an exhibition.

The surrealist, multi-media opera takes the audience on an audio enhanced journey as The Protagonist (the soul of humanity) searches for a body that can give it meaning. The Protagonist expresses the paradoxical sentiment that everyone is the main character in their own life. The View From Behind The Futuristic Rose Trellis is a colourful, comi-tragic take on individual and collective aspiration, explored and expressed through a genre-diverse score and the ever-present voice of The Narrator, a soprano singer situated amidst the audience.

For more information about the project, please click here.

Bluecoat, Liverpool, 
Fri 27 April to Sun 24 June 2018

Primary, Nottingham,
Fri 30 Nov 2018 to Sat 9 Feb 2019

HOME, Manchester,
Sat 6 Apr 2019 to Sun 19 May 2019

Wysing Arts Centre, off site live performance in Cambridge
Date to be announced

We are delighted to announce a partnership with Primary in Nottingham and HOME in Manchester to bring the work of Emma Smith to the three cities. The tour so far has included an exhibition of Smith’s work 5Hz at Primary, Nottingham, Fri 30 Nov 2018 – Sat 9 Feb 2019; and 5Hz and Euphonia will tour to HOME, Manchester, Sat 6 Apr 2019 – Sun 19 May 2019; and finally shown as a live performance with Wysing Arts Centre in Cambridge (date to be announced).

5Hz is a sound installation centred around the invention of a new singing language designed to strengthen social connections. Through a year long research process examining psychological and neurological responses to the human voice, Smith created the 5Hz language, comprising a set of sounds that transcend language barriers. Visitors to the exhibition can learn the language and begin using it within 15 minutes.

Leading on from 5Hz, April 2018 saw the premiere of Smith’s latest work Euphonia at Liverpool’s Bluecoat, an ambitious new sound installation based on the musicality of social interactions. Developed through public experiments and workshops with world experts in music, psychology and the brain, contributors to the work include Bluecoat regulars, Liverpool’s homelessness and marginalisation group Choir With No Name and youth theatre group 20 Stories High.

The partnership is the result of a successful bid to Arts Council England’s Strategic Touring Fund and will enable the venues to connect with community groups through workshops with the artist, both in venue and in the community.

Emma Smith has a social based practice and creates large scale installations and performances through research and collaboration. Smith is based in the UK and works internationally. Recent exhibitions / performances include: her major solo exhibition Euphonia at Bluecoat, Liverpool (2018); Hauser & Wirth Somerset (2018); Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (2018), touring exhibition material / rearranged / to / be with Siobhan Davies Dance that premiered at the Barbican before traveling to Tramway, Glasgow; Whitworth, Manchester; and Bluecoat, Liverpool (2017); Hunch – a major public performance work and installation in Cambridge city centre (2017); The Whistling Orchestra – that premiered at Primary, Nottingham before traveling to Nottingham Contemporary and Wysing Polyphonic Music Festival (2016); as well as projects for Art on the Underground, London (2017), Tate Exchange, London (2017), MAAS, Sydney Australia (2017), Delfina Foundation, London (2016), B-A-U, Italy (2016), Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland (2015), and Arnolfini, Bristol (2015), among many others.

'Without You I’m Nothing' is a trilogy of events including performances, lectures, workshops and discussion at Somerset House Studios by 2018 Wysing residency artist Nastja Säde Rönkkö.

For the project, Rönkkö, will live and work in London without the Internet for six months. The intention of Rönkkö’s slow offline existence and the accompanying events is to actively research, create and test out new ways of connecting, communicating and being in a city, community and the society at the time of major changes in the ways we live, feel and function in the world.

The series of events is born out of a sensibility that we are at the end of the world as we know it: current ecological, political and technological narratives and histories are volatile and unstable. Environmental disasters, future of net neutrality, vanished species and looming nuclear disasters are no longer a part of science fiction writing or a post apocalyptic movie but a part of our reality. The three events investigate the possible ends of an era, its entangled histories, open-ended narratives and flux identities. The series of events aims to carefully glimpse into the possible futures of humankind and otherkind: the vital necessity for co-dependence and urgency to remember, preserve and act now.

The first of the three events, 'Humble Beginnings/Alternative Presents', takes place at Somerset House on 28 November from 18.45-20.45pm and investigates feminist and queer alternatives for contemporary digital culture. Emerging from the rapid changes of technological landscape and its effects on a variety of issues such as identity, gender, power and activism, there is an urgency to create effective methods towards equitable and unbiased society. Hopeful and uncertain, dark yet optimistic, we will ask what are the spaces and places that we need and want right now, and how these spaces can be created and sustained?

Invited participants Katriona Beales, Anna Bunting-Branch and Rebecca James will join Rönkkö to examine discourses and ideas around cyber-feminism, race and feminism, gender, privacy, online/offline healing practices and queering the social media. Through radical re-thinking and critical assessment of the on-going narratives, identities and possibilities presented to us, we will share methods and ideas on how to shape the digital and IRL realities into safe and nurturing havens. 

Rönkkö will host Middle Age / We Should Know Better on 31 January, from 18.45-20.45pm, as part of her residency at Somerset House Studios, London . In this event Sade Ronkko explores a redefinition of the meaning and functioning of technology, moving from something that only considers Western rational logic and knowledge as valuable and scientific, to something that includes other modes of knowing and being. Contributors include artist, writer and curator Tamar Clarke-Brown, Somerset House Studios associate Feminist Internet, Shira Jeczmien, founding editor of Screen Shot and Melody Patry Advocacy Director at Access Now. For more info on her residency click here.

For further information on the 31 January 2019 event click here.

For futher information on the 28 November 2018 event, click here.

The events are organised as a part of a residency titled '6 Months Without' by Nastja Säde Rönkkö, supported by Somerset House Studios, Wysing Arts Centre, The Finnish Institute in London and Alfred Kordelin Foundation.

ICA, London
Saturday 1 September

This film screening and reading marks the starting point of a project by a new crip research group, comprising art practitioners who identify as crip, disabled or otherwise non-conforming to standard ideas of good health. 

Tickets and more information.

The group formed to develop artwork, a critical language and practical changes to working relationships within arts organisations from a ‘crip’ position.
 
The term ‘crip’ describes a necessarily political position on illness and disability. It subscribes to the social model of disability, which states that disability is caused by the way society is organised, rather than by a person's impairment or difference, and looks at ways of removing barriers that restrict life choices for disabled people. Crip theory owes much to queer theory, taking its basis of fluidity and applying it to identities forged in sickness and unhealth. This includes disability, chronic illness, mental illness and more.

Four members of the group – Leah Clements, Elena Colman, Alice Hattrick and Lizzy Rose – will present film and artworks created before this period of research and development. This presentation is a point from which to think through how their work currently deals with crip themes, and to develop this visual and critical language.

Using In formation III as a platform to explore how best the group can work together, this also marks the beginning of a supportive exchange with the institution. The crip research group will further advance their work while in residence at Wysing Arts Centre in October.

This is a relaxed event. This means that if you tic, shout or move about, you’re more than welcome.

The crip research group comprises art practitioners who identify as crip, disabled or otherwise non-conforming to standard ideas of good health. The group was formed by Leah Clements with members Uma Breakdown, Rebecca Bligh, Elena Colman, Alice Hattrick and Lizzy Rose.
 

Leah Clements is an artist based in London. Her practice is concerned with emotional experiences; the relationship between the psychological and the physical; and self-loss. Recent work includes a residency at Rupert, Vilnius; Sick Bed, SPACE Art + Technology residency; The Empath Project, Res (all 2018); we felt the presence of someone else, Jupiter Woods (2016); Beside, Chisenhale Gallery (2015–16); and You Promised Me Poems, Vitrine (2015).

Lizzy Rose lives and works in Margate, UK. Her work work spans video, photography, ceramics, drawing, writing, curating and online blogging. She broadly explores community, landscape, British identity and hidden culture. Lizzy Rose has a severe form of Crohns disease which impacts her daily life. She has spent the last 12 months in hospital, documented through Instagram. Lizzy Rose is an Associate Member of Open School East 2017. She graduated from BA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in 2010. Rose worked with Matthew de Pulford and Paul Hazelton at LIMBO, an artist-led project space, from 2013-2015 and recently she has contributed to the programming team at Crate in Margate.

 

Elena Colman is an artist based in London. Her practice explores the creation of temporary social spaces in order to explore concepts such as work-life balance, behavioral ethics in dating and what it means to break the binary of private and public life. She is the founder of Ladette Space, a DIY project space in her flat which ran from 2014–17 and continues as a publishing house.
 
Alice Hattrick writes essays and criticism about art, scent, family ties and health. She is currently working on her first non-fiction book on the subject of gendered illness and mother-daughter relationships, titled Ill Feelings.

Guest Projects, London

Preview with performances: Tuesday 28 August, 6-10pm
Exhibition open: Wednesday 29 August + Thursday 30 August, 12-6pm

Frederica Agbah, Chris Alton, Conor Baird, Ilker Cinarel, Phoebe Davies, Freya Dooley, Rose Gibbs, Jill McKnight, Ben Sanderson and Karis Upton.

Can We Still Be Friends responds to the polyphony, the push and pull, the joy and tension of solo and collaborative practices as they rub up against one another.

This exhibition is the culmination of the arranged marriage that was Syllabus III. It brings together ten artists from disparate parts of the UK who didn’t choose each other, but after 10 months of intense and immersive weekend retreats, they became close. They worked, talked and made things together, danced, wined, dined, cried a bit and then broke up after a year. Breaking up is hard to do.

Syllabus III is a collaboratively produced alternative learning programme jointly delivered by Wysing Arts Centre, Eastside Projects, Iniva, New Contemporaries, S1 Artspace, Spike Island and Studio Voltaire.

The Syllabus is supported by Arts Council England and the Fenton Arts Trust.
Address: Guest Projects, Sunbury House, 1 Andrews Road, London E8 4QL

Nearest station(s): Cambridge Heath, London Fields, Haggerston (optional)

More information.

Tai Shani: Semiramis
20 July - 14 October
The Tetley, Leeds

Tai Shani presents her first major solo exhibition in a public gallery at The Tetley in Leeds. It presents the culmination of her ongoing project Dark Continent, for which we undertook extensive research whilst in residence at Wysing in Summer 2017.  

The exhbition includes an immersive installation in The Tetley’s atrium, which features sculpture made for her Wysing two-person exhibition Andromedan Sad Girl with Florence Peake in Autumn 2017, as well as new film works, posters and a selection of artworks drawn together by Shani.

Over the last four years Tai Shani has been developing a body of work that takes Christine de Pizan’s 1405 proto-feminist text The Book of the City of Ladies as its starting point. Pizan created an allegorical city of notable women drawn from a medieval conception of history, where fact, fiction and myth are blurred. Characters from fiction live side by side with female historical figures, collectively making an early case for gender equality.

In Semiramis, Shani presents twelve films of twelve characters, including The Woman on the Edge of Time, The Vampyre, The Medieval Mystic, Siren and Phantasmagoregasm, presented through performed monologues with an original score by Let’s Eat Grandma.

The often violent, erotic and fantastical narratives, mix science-fiction, anthropology, feminist and queer theory, to re-imagine a world with interlinked cosmologies, myth and histories. Throughout, Semiramis privileges sensation, experience and interiority, undermining patriarchal conceptions of narrative history to propose a possible post-patriarchal future.

Co-commissioned by The Tetley and Glasgow International, in collaboration with Nottingham Contemporary and Wysing Arts Centre. Supported by Arts Council England and the Royal College of Art.

Full details on the exhibition can be found on The Tetley website here. 

AR-Resident Tito Valery in conversation with Harold Offeh
9 July, 7-9pm
Guest Projects, London

Wysing Art Centre’s first ARTIST at RISK (AR)-Residency artist, Tito Valery, will be in-conversation with artist and Wysing Trustee, Harold Offeh, at Guest Projects on Monday 9 July. They will discuss Valery's current political situation, his activism, and his new work and research.

Whilst in residence at Wysing, Valery has been bringing together voices from the African diaspora through spoken word, a podcast, photography and conversation to explore the realities of the post-colonial impact and political division currently affecting Cameroon. The evening will include a presentation of a  photographic series and sound piece made at Wysing and Valery will perform a newly commissioned sound work made in collaboration with Dzekashu Macviban and ANG.

Please join us for this special one-off event kindly hosted by Shonibare Studio’s Guest Projects space and supported using public funding from Arts Council England.

Admission is free and open to all. Details of how to get to Guest Projects can be found here.

Tito Valery (1982, Cameroon), activist, photographer, public figure and media personality, has written, hosted and directed the socio-political radio talk how W.A.K.A (where African Knowledge Applies) and the television shows Ya'Mo, (To enjoy Africa)), Goodmorning Cameroon, the Break and @W.a.k.a. In December 2017, Valery co-wrote and co-hosted an apolitical wake-up/consciousness awakening radio show with French speaking Rapper & political activist Valsero. Through his work and art, among a broad range of topics, Valery draws attention to social issues and the inequities and oppressive measures of the Cameroonian Government. In 2015, the exhibition The Northern Survivors drew attention to the situation of Cameroonian refugees in the northern part of the country who were fleeing the terrorist group Boko Haram. During the opening of Documenta 14 in Athens 2017, Valery was one of the programmers for Cameroon on the Documenta radio-programme curated by Bonaventure Ndikung of Savvy Contemporary in Berlin. Valery has shown his works and contributed to major festivals and institutions such as Athens 2017, Performa 17, OFF Dakart Biennale 2014, and is a co-writer and performer on the TRACEY ROSE SHOW. 

Harold Offeh was born in Accra, Ghana in 1977 and grew up in London, UK. He is interested in the space created by the inhabiting or embodying of history. His work encompasses performance, social practice, video and photography, often using humour as a means to confront the viewer with aspects of contemporary culture and history. He studied at the University of Brighton and the Royal College of Art, London. He lives in Cambridge and works in London and Leeds where he is a senior lecturer in Fine Art at Leeds Beckett University. Offeh is also a trustee of Wysing Arts Centre. Recently Offeh has approached the themes of service and Afro hair culture through collective live engagements with other artists, performers and community participation. He was in residence at Wysing Arts Centre in 2016 and has shown widely both in the UK and abroad. Venues include: Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, UK; New Art Exchange, Nottingham, UK; Tate Modern, London, UK; Tous, des sangs-mêlés at MAC VAL, Museum of Contemporary Art in Val de Marne, France; Kulturhuset, Stockholm Sweden; Abrons Arts Center, NY USA; The Studio Museum, Harlem, NYC, USA, and Miami Art Basel, Miami, USA.

ARTISTS at RISK (AR), led by Perpetuum Mobile (Helsinki-Berlin), is a human rights institution in the field of the arts. The first of its kind in the visual arts, launched in 2013, it has since included musicians, theatre and film-makers. Uniquely, it hosts artists at risk in close cooperation with artistsin-residencies and includes them directly in the curatorial process. Building so-called AR-Residencies across Europe, it is currently also working with new partners in Africa and the Middle-East. With close ties to organisations such as PEN (International, America, Finland, etc.), SafeMuse or FreeMuse, it stands at the intersection of the fields of the arts and human rights. As a network-institution dedicated to persecuted art practitioners, the work of AR encompasses mapping, hosting and advocacy of art professionals “at risk”, addressing their practical needs and advancing their artistic practice. To achieve this, selected key figures are granted short or long-term residencies at AR-Residencies - not as asylum seekers, but as invited and honoured visiting art professionals. These artists not only greatly enrich their host countries, but are at the heart of rebuilding their often war-torn countries of origin.

Wysing Head of Partnerships, Chelsea Pettitt, and Artists and Programmes Curator, Lotte Juul Petersen, will be presenting at the Istanbul Biennial as part of 'The Rural: Contemporary Art and Spaces of Connection'.

Wysing is pleased to be a partner on 'The Rural: Contemporary Art and Spaces of Connection', led by Whitechapel Gallery, London and with partners Istanbul Biennial, the University of Aberystwyth, Manchester Metropolitan University, and artist collective Myvillages. 

The Rural

Through a programme of public events and research, the project will explore contemporary art in the rural sphere. Many contemporary artists, architects and creative practitioners are challenging the assumptions made about rural life, providing a new vision of the countryside grounded in everyday experience. From re-imagined farming practices and food systems to architecture, community projects and transnational local networks, this programme brings these projects to the foreground, inviting a careful and critical look at our relationships with the rural today.

For more information about the panel in Istanbul, click here.

Wysing is pleased to be a partner on 'The Rural: Contemporary Art and Spaces of Connection', led by Whitechapel Gallery, London and with partners Istanbul Biennial, the University of Aberystwyth, Manchester Metropolitan University, and artist collective Myvillages. 

Through a programme of public events and research, the project will explore contemporary art in the rural sphere. Many contemporary artists, architects and creative practitioners are challenging the assumptions made about rural life, providing a new vision of the countryside grounded in everyday experience. From re-imagined farming practices and food systems to architecture, community projects and transnational local networks, this programme brings these projects to the foreground, inviting a careful and critical look at our relationships with the rural today.

The programme will offer space for knowledge sharing and collective thinking that focusses on cultural activity taking place outside urban centres globally. It will work towards a conference in 2019. Connecting the local to the global, the conference will invite an international and transdisciplinary conversation on art and the rural, with a focus on profiling lesser-known projects from across the world. Details to be announced Autumn 2018.

Partners

​Myvillages is an artist group founded in 2003 by Kathrin Böhm (UK / DE), Wapke Feenstra (NL) and Antje Schiffers (DE). The work addresses the evolving relationship between the rural and the urban, looking at different forms of production, pre-conceptions and power relationships. Myvillages initiates and organizes international artistic projects which range from small-scale informal presentations to long-term collaborative research projects, from work in private spaces to public conferences, from exhibitions to publications and from personal questions to public debate. Current and recent projects include Vorratskammer / Pantry at House of World Cultures in Berlin (2011), Good News from Nowhere at the Architecture Foundation London (2013), Lending Shape to Form (2015), A–Z Marzona Collection, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Farmers and Ranchers(2012–2015) with M12, Colorado, US and the Fries Museum, NL and the International Village Show for the Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig (2014–2016), Myvillages’ ongoing work in London includes monthly Haystacks events and Myvillages Company: Movements, Deals and Drinks project, winner of the 2014 Create Art Award.

Istanbul Biennial. The Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts has been organising the Istanbul Biennial since 1987. The biennial aims to create a meeting point in İstanbul in the field of visual arts between artists from diverse cultures and the audience. The fourteen biennials İKSV has organised up to now have enabled the formation of an international cultural network between local and international art circles, artists, curators and art critics by bringing together new trends in contemporary art every two years.

Considered as one of the most prestigious biennials alongside Venice, Sao Paolo and Sydney, the Istanbul Biennial prefers an exhibition model which enables a dialogue between artists and the audience through the work of the artists instead of a national representation model. It is of the utmost importance to promote local cultural sectors while generating collaboration possibilities internationally. Moreover, it is an emergency to contemplate on new forms of existence where both urban and rural are independently stable and are firm cultural/social and economic pillars. The programme’s main scope is to find ways to make the two systems beneficial for each other’s sustainability.

Whitechapel Gallery. The Whitechapel Gallery, based in East London, is a touchstone for contemporary art internationally, plays a central role in London’s cultural landscape and is pivotal to the continued growth of the world’s most vibrant contemporary art quarter. Their intereset in the rural stems from the fact that major cities such as London have become increasingly inhospitable due to higher rents, denser housing and rising pollution. Many look to the countryside as a place of utopian potential. However, while often defined in antithesis to the urban, the rural has its own unique politics. This series, which began in 2017, explores those politics and their impact and relevance to urban centres.

Department of Geography, The University of Aberystwyth. ‘The Global Countryside: Rural Change and Development in Globalization (GLOBAL-RURAL)’ is a major research project funded by the European Research Council. The study aims to advance our understanding of the workings and impact of globalization in rural regions through the development and application of new conceptual and methodological approaches. It is led by Professor Michael Woods.

Manchester School of Art, (Manchester Metropolitan University) is an innovator in art and design education and research in the UK. They celebrated their 180th birthday this year and drew on their experience and expertise to offer undergraduate and postgraduate courses that provide their students with the essential skills and knowledge for their chosen career. Contemporary Art in rural places and the representation of rural places in visual and popular culture are significant research specialisms for staff in the Department of Art. Research is led by Dr. Rosemary Shirley.

Research trips for this project have been generously funded by Art Fund's Jonathan Ruffer curatorial research grant and through a STEP travel grant, an initiative by the European Cultural Foundation with the support of Compagnia di San Paolo.

Public events that come from this research as part of the series can be found on Whitechapel Gallery's website here. 

Since late 2016, artist Lucy Steggals has been in residence at Royal Papworth Hospital as part of their Artist in Residence programme led by Wysing Arts Centre. She is working on a project called Florulary, a series of seasonal experiments working with staff, patients, visitors, artists and experts to find playful formulae to re insert the floral into the hospital environment. 

She re-imagines the future of flowers to create something that can replace organic flowers (which are no longer allowed on wards) but which still carry some of the feeling and sentiment of the gift of flowers.

In her initial research into the Papworth archives, she has uncovered a rich legacy of floral images and materials relating to Papworth’s floral past and the flower festival that took place until the 1970s.

Lucy undertook a series of floral interventions across the site, as well as with the Cystic Fibrosis ward. She has created a series of photographs for a publication disseminated to the Hospital staff at the new location in Sept 2018. 

To follow the project, visit her website, Twitter: @saturdaymuseum or Facebook: The Saturday Museum. 

Florulary was part of the Cambridge Biomedical Campus Expansion Land Public Art Programme, curated by Futurecity on behalf of Liberty Property Trust and Countryside. The Artist in Residence strand for Royal Papworth Hospital was delivered by Wysing Arts Centre as part of the Cambridge Biomedical Campus Public Art Strategy led by Futurecity on behalf of Cambridge Medipark Limited.

Florulary 
6 June - 4 July 2018
Imperial College, London

An exhibition of photographs from the Florulary project can be seen on display this summer at Imperial College, London. 

Full details of where to view them can be found here. 

March Town Hall 
Market Place, March
Cambridgeshire, PE15 9JF
Sunday 10 June, 11.30am–4.30pm  

Free - click to book here.

Creating Change: How communities and artists can work together will bring together artists alongside grassroots projects that make a meaningful impact on the infrastructure of towns and cities. In this special off-site event, artists and other contributors discuss creative ways they work with communities to make an impact on their local environment through architecture, networks and spatial practice.  

Hosted in March Town Hall by our partners 20Twenty Productions, the first half of the day sees presentations of case studies by leading artists who have worked both locally, nationally and internationally on public projects. After a buffet lunch, everyone is asked to contribute to an open and informal discussion about how we can join forces to support a creative ecosystem for public developments in our towns, villages and cities.

Creating Change forms of part of the series The Rural: Contemporary Art and Spaces of Connection which explores how artists engage with the contemporary rural sphere in partnership with Istanbul Biennial, University of Aberystwyth, Manchester Metropolitan University, Whitechapel Gallery and artist collective Myvillages. It also forms part of our project New Geographies which is supported by an Ambition for Excellence grant from Arts Council England.  

Due to illness, STUDIO MORISON will no longer be able to take part in this event. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.​

SCHEDULE 

11:00am – Arrivals and coffee/tea

11:30am – Welcome from Katherine Nightingale, Director of 20Twenty Productions.

11:35am – Introduction to the speakers and the day by Chelsea Pettitt, Head of Partnerships at Wysing Arts Centre.

11:40 – 12pm – Lorelai Lodestar presentation on the legacy and Impact of the Show Home for Real Living project in Trumpington, Cambridge.

12pm – 12:20pm – Fernando Garcia-Dory will present Inland as an open network for land-based collaborations, economies and communities-of-practice.

12:20 – 12:40pm – Heather Peak Morison (STUDIO MORISON) will discuss their project The Artists' House as part of the Park Life initiative led in Banbury by Eastside Projects, Birmingham. 

12:40 – 1:15pm – Q&A with case study speakers led by Lotte Juul Petersen and Jane Scarth 

LUNCH

2:00 – 2:10pm – Idit Nathan & Helen Stratford: Reimagining Place through Play 
2:10 – 2:20pm – Amahra Spence: Making your own creative ecosystem 
2:20 - 2:30pm – February Phillips: Practicalities for implementing your ideas 

2.30-3.30pm – Informal  sessions with artists moving from table to table with an opportunity to discuss ideas from presentations and questions from the previous day laid out on the tables. 

3.30-3.45pm Coffee/tea break 

3.45pm – 4.30pm – Review of the day and discussions with contributors and audiences, chaired and moderated by Veronica Sekules.

Full biographies and tickets to the event can be found on the Whitechapel website. 

Glasgow International Festival
Tramway, Glasgow
Friday 20 Apr to Sunday 15 July

Tai Shani creates a large-scale immersive installation that also functions as a site for performance. 

The work is an experimental adaptation of Christine de Pizan’s 1405 proto-feminist text The Book of the City of Ladies.

Twelve performers play characters, including The Neanderthal Hermaphrodite,The Medieval Mystic, The Vampyre, Phantasmagoregasm, and Paradise to create a 12 part performance and film series, depicting an allegorical city of women, a space to imagine an alternative history which privileges, sensation, experience and interiority, undermining patriarchal conceptions of narrative history to propose a possible post-patriarchal future.

The performances will take place on the opening three days of Glasgow International festival, with the sequences filmed and the documentation subsequently presented alongside the installation.

Each episode focuses on one of the characters and is delivered through prose monologues which are violent and erotic and filled with fantastical images, told in a dense, floral language which re-imagines a world complete with interlinked cosmologies, myth and histories that reject patriarchal positions.

Drawing on multiple reference points including feminist science fiction, post-modern architecture, and feminist and queer theory, this is Shani’s most ambitious and multi-layered work to date and includes an original score by "Let's Eat Grandma".

Shani was an artist-in-residence at Wysing dueing2017 and developed the exhbition Andromedan Sad Girl in collaboration with Florence Peake.
 

This project will premiere at Glasgow International and travel to The Tetley in Leeds as a solo show, with further partial presentations at Nottingham Contemporary as part of their Still I Rise with additional screenings at Wysing Arts Centre and the Whitechapel Gallery, London.

Supported by Arts Council England and the Henry Moore Foundation.
 

Syllabus I, II and III
Guest Projects, London
Sunday 27 May
6-10pm

Artists from Syllabus I, II and III have been invited to take part in Guest Projects' 10th Anniversary celebrations over the bank holiday weekend 25-27 May. 

On Sunday 27 May from 6-10pm, they will present the Syllabus Mix, an evening of screenings, performance and sounds. 

It will Include work by Frederica Agbah, Chris Alton, Mira Calix, Ilker Cinarel, Faye Claridge, Pheoebe Davis, Freya Dooley, Mike Harvey, E. Jackson, Tyler Mallison, Jill McKnight, Mathew Parkin, Tom Smith, Lucy Steggals, Thomas Whittle, Laura Wilson, Rafal Zajko.

The Syllabus is a national, collaboratively produced alternative learning programme involving ten selected artists annually and two external Artistic Advisors throughout the year. 

It is led by Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge and jointly delivered with Eastside Projects, Birmingham; Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts), London; S1 Artspace, Sheffield; Spike Island, Bristol and Studio Voltaire, London.

There is limited availability for the event.

To register for this free evening, please visit the eventbrite page here. 

Museum of Classical Archaeology Cambridge
19 May – 3 November 2018

Kettle’s Yard Cambridge
5 September – Sunday 14 October 2018
 

Florian Roithmayr’s Humility of Plaster is a two-year research and exhibition project exploring the materiality of collections housing plaster moulds and casts across Europe, enabled through a new partnership between the Museum of Classical Archaeology and Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, and Wysing Arts Centre where Roithmayr has a studio.

Moulding and casting are widely used techniques of modern and contemporary art making. But their use and application can be found in many other areas of production and material transformations not immediately associated with art practices, and in times before casting became an acceptable form of sculptural production in its own right. 

Roithmayr has developed a new body of sculptures in response to this research that will be presented amongst the collection of plaster casts of classical works at the Museum of Classical Archaeology, 19 May to 3 November. Later in the year his research will be presented in an exhibition at Kettle’s Yard.

Alongside the exhibitions, Roithmayr has developed an audio blog that presents interviews recorded in different plaster cast collections across Europe, drawing attention to the materials and techniques still used in the moulding workshops often operating parallel to the collections displaying the casts.

To accompany the exhibitions, an artist book is published by Tenderbooks, London, designed by Sara De Bondt Studio, with contributions by writers Agnieszka Gratza and Alex Massouras. The book will be launched on Tuesday 24 July 2018, 18:00 at Tenderbooks, London.

A conference and a book launch on Tuesday 4 September at Kettle’s Yard will include contributions from invited speakers from a range of moulding and casting workshops, exploring practical making, plaster casting techniques and collection strategies, as well as Dr Rebecca Wade, assistant curator Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, Alex Massouras, Ruskin School of Art, Oxford, and artist Karin Ruggaber.

For further information on events and workshops associated with the exhibitions please visit Museum of Classical Archaeology and Kettle’s Yard

Humility of Plaster is co-commissioned by Museum of Classical Archaeology, Kettle’s Yard and Wysing Arts Centre. It is supported using public funding by Arts Council England, Henry Moore Foundation, The Elephant Trust, The University of Cambridge Museums and the Paul Mellon Centre.

Wysing Arts Centre, The Mechatronic Library, FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) and QUAD are pleased to announce a new co-commissioned work by artist Anna Bunting-Branch.  

As part of the joint project Worlds Among Us, eight artists who were interested in working with new digital technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and Game-Engines were invited to take part in a three-day clinic at Wysing in December 2017. The artists were supported by experienced technologists Werkflow and curators from each of the co-commissioning partners, after which they were asked to work up a full proposal for a new commission.  

In February 2018, the partners were pleased to select Anna Bunting-Branch to realise her commission with the ongoing support of The Mechatronic Library. The work will be shown at Wysing, FACT and QUAD between Autumn 2018 and Spring 2020 alongside a new limited edition made with digital manufacturing technology. 

Worlds Among Us is a joint project launched in October 2017 which seeks to use 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?

Worlds Among Us is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

3 - 31 March

Pallavi Paul made a new installation, Terra Firma, for the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge inspired by the secrecy and histories of the top-secret code-breakers of Bletchley Park. During her residency at Wysing Arts Centre, she visited and accessed archival material from the Bletchley Park collection for the new commission.

Terra Firma was installed as a ‘carpet’ in Gallery 8 of the Fitzwilliam Museum, amongst the collections of 16th to 18th century Spanish and Flemish art. With the upholstery acting as a textual landscape on which museum visitors could walk, the text on the carpet appeared like concrete poems. Pallavi Paul's work Terra Firma is now also part of the AV festival in a film installation as a new reiteration.

Terra Firma was co-commissioned by University of Cambridge Museums and Wysing Arts Centre. It was supported using public funding by Arts Council England and with support from Diversity Art Forum and the Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation. With thanks to Bletchley Park.

More information here.

How to Create and Collaborate: Generating Exhibition Ideas Symposium
13 March 2018
Southbank Centre

Chelsea Pettitt, Wysing's Head of Partnerships will be a guest speaker at this symposium programmed by Hayward Gallery Touring, the Touring Exhibitions Group and Art Fund.

It is designed to inspire, create a platform for sharing experiences and provide practical tips and networking opportunities for emerging curators in regional museums and galleries.  

The event will discuss creative approaches to exhibition-making, particularly ways of working collaboratively with colleagues in other organisations to realise complex and challenging projects.

Through presentations and panel discussions it will consider idea germination and ways to animate collections with original temporary exhibitions.

Participating speakers include:

Steven Bode, Director, Film and Video Umbrella

Brian Cass, Head of Exhibitions, Towner Art Gallery

Grace Davies, Contemporary Arts Programme Manager, National Trust

Tessa Giblin, Director, Talbot Rice Gallery

Natasha Howes, Senior Curator, Manchester Art Gallery

Harriet Loeffler, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery

Helen Nisbet, Curatorial Fellow, Cubitt Gallery

Michael Petry, Director, MOCA London

Sam Thorne, Director, Nottingham Contemporary

The panel discussions will be chaired by Rachael Browning, Head of Programmes, Art Fund and Roger Malbert, Head of Hayward Gallery Touring.

Delegates will have the opportunity to ask questions, network and learn from the experiences of others, to encourage confidence in taking their ideas forward, and finding partners to collaborate with.

Travel bursaries are available to support the cost of attendance.

To book tickets or apply for a bursary, please click here.

20 April 2018
11am - 5pm
St. George's Theatre, ​Great Yarmouth

The East Contemporary Visual Arts Network (ECVAN), of which Wysing is chair and coordinator, is pleased to announce the Creative Workspace Summit: The Role of Creatives in Creating a Great Place.

ECVAN member originalprojects; is hosting the summit which will explore the role of creatives (individuals and organisations) in creating great places and how creative workspaces can make the most of a town's potential.

There will be a keynote lecture about 'Why' creative individuals and organisations are important to places by Charles Landry.

He is author of 'The Creative City: A toolkit for Urban Innovators' (2000); 'The Art of City Making' (2006); and 'The Intercultural City: Planning for Diversity Advantage' with Phil Wood. 

Following this, we will look at 'How’ creative individuals and organisations have found ways to exist within and contribute to the vitality of their locations. Case studies will be presented by:

East Street Arts (Leeds)
Creative Foundation (Folkestone)
Dove Street Studios (Norwich)
originalprojects; (Great Yarmouth)
Focal Point Gallery and Southend Borough Council (Southend)
Outset (London/ UK)
HAT projects (Essex)
OUTPOST (Norwich)
Wysing Arts Centre (Cambridge)
Smiths Row (Bury St. Edmunds)
Mazi Reverso (independent networking)

A discussion chaired by Sarah Barrow, Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Film and Media at University of East Anglia, will follow the presentations. 

The Aims of the summit are:

• To explore some of the issues facing creatives today and the ways that they are solving their workspace issues through innovative resourcing and place making initiatives
• To share practical case-study experiences that inspire artist, creatives, students, budding entrepreneurs and SMEs
• To inform decision makers (civic leaders and private business owners) of the beneficial role of creatives can play in creating great places and how creative workspaces can make the most of a town's potential, attract diverse visitors and serve the year-round economy.

This event will be of interest to:

Artists, creatives, students, budding entrepreneurs, SMEs, councillors, planners, policy decision-makers, economists

For tickets and more infrmation about the event, click here. 

12 February
6.30-8pm, Gorvy Lecture Theatre
​Royal College of Art, London

For the first of this year What’s Next? Lecture Series, Donna Lynas will lead the discussion around: "Value – how do artists value their work? How is artist’s labour valued as opposed to the value of the objects which artists produce?" with Sonya Dyer, Erica Scourti & Catherine Wood.

What’s Next?

Featuring a number of informed inside perspectives from artists, curators, critics and gallery and museum professionals, What’s Next will provide insight and reflection on ways in which artists might navigate the complex and often contradictory values and processes that surround the making, distribution and value formation of contemporary art.

What’s Next will be delivered through a series of themed public panel discussions, comprising a variety of expert perspectives, which will be followed by seminars, workshops or tutorials, as appropriate.

As well as providing practical support and advice for artists at various stages of their careers, the series will also offer critical and creative reflections on the forces that govern and dictate the way in which art circulates and the manner in which artists might in turn facilitate and sometimes block these processes.

While principally targeted at final year MA Fine Art students at the RCA, What’s Next will also generate a resource for artists and students from beyond the RCA.

What’s Next has been developed in collaboration between the RCA School of Fine Art and DACS. Each Panel will be assigned a lead who will develop the theme and programming around it in consultation with RCA and DACS.

About the guest speakers:

Sonya Dyer is an artist, writer and occasional curator from London. Her research-based, post-medium practice utilises dialogical platforms, reproductive technologies and moving image. Dyer is concerned with modes of social organisation, the inter disciplinary and the performative, exploring how subjectivities and alliances are formed, particularly across cultures and temporalities. Her practice currently manifests itself through the …And Beyond Institute for Future Research, a peripatetic think tank concerned with the creation of possible futures. Recent projects include The Claudia Jones Space Station (BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and The NewBridge Project, Newcastle), Into the Future (Primary, Nottingham), At the Intersections (Nottingham Contemporary), Platform: In the Making and The Paul Robeson Research Station, (both Site Gallery, Sheffield). Previously Curator, Public Programmes at Tate Modern and Tate Britain, Dyer has previously developed projects at galleries and museums including The Tetley (Leeds) and The Queens House (Royal Maritime London) and has contributed to numerous publications including Frieze, Contemporary &, a-n online and Petunia. Dyer is a previous artsadmin Artist Bursary Scheme recipient, and was a 2011-12 Whitney Museum of American Art: Independent Study Program Fellow. She is currently a PhD candidate at Middlesex University.

Erica Scourti was born in Athens, Greece and is now based in London and Athens. Her work in video, performance draws on personal experience to explore life, labour, gender and love in a fully mediated, algorithmic age. She has exhibited recently in More Than Just Words at Kunsthalle Wien, Bedlam: The Asylum and Beyond at the Wellcome Collection; as well as Niarchos Centre, Athens, CTRL+SHIFT, Oakland, Microscope Gallery, New York, The Photographers’ Gallery, Hayward Gallery, Munich Kunstverein, EMST Athens, Autoitalia and Banner Repeater. She has presented performances and talks at Tate Modern, ICA London, Whitechapel Gallery, South London Gallery, Transmediale, Southbank Centre, Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths College and Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam. In 2015 Erica was in residence at Wysing Arts Centre and the White Building, London, and she is currently a resident of Somerset House Studios. She has published essays in Documents of Contemporary Art: Information (2016, MIT Press) and Fiction as Method (Sternberg, November 2017).Selected Exhibitions:Group Therapy, UNSW Galleries, Sydney, Sept 20- Nov 11 / Escaping the Digital Unease, Kunsthaus Langenthal, Switzerland 31 August – 12 Nov 2017 / Re-learning to / Read, Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool, April 1- May 5 2017 / More Than Just Words [On the Poetic], Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, March- May 2017 / Feral Kin, Autoitalia, Feb 28th- April 7th 2017

Catherine Wood is Senior Curator, International Art, specialising in performance. She works on performance projects, exhibitions, collection acquisitions and displays at Tate Modern, as well as being actively engaged in research. Catherine was instrumental in founding the performance programme at Tate in 2002 and since then has programmed more than two hundred live works by artists including Mark Leckey, Tania Bruguera, Trisha Brown, Katerina Šedá, Boris Charmatz, Ei Arakawa and others, both at Tate and within the online space Performance Room that she initiated in 2011. In the exhibition A Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance that she curated in 2012, Catherine Wood traced a dynamic relationship between painting and performance emerging in the post-1945 period, working back from contemporary artists’ perspectives. As a contributor to the International Monitoring Group specialising in strategies for collecting performance art, Catherine Wood has worked on acquisitions of works by artists including by Joan Jonas, Tino Sehgal and Suzanne Lacy. She curated Yvonne Rainer: Dance Works at Raven Row in 2014, and with Andrea Lissoni, the first ‘live exhibtion’, BMW Tate Live 10 days 6 Nights in the Tate Modern Tanks in 2017, featuring the work of Fujiko Nakaya and Isabel Lewis, amongst others. Wood is currently working on the next edition that concentrates on Joan Jonas, as well as the Hyundai Turbine Hall Commission for 2018, and is due to publish her book Performance in Contemporary Art with Tate Publishing in 2018.

Donna Lynas has been Director of Wysing Arts Centre since 2005 and has developed Wysing's identity as a research centre for the visual arts; introducing experimental artists' residencies and retreats and commissioning and curating ambitious projects including the annual festival of art and music. Donna was instrumental in delivering Wysing’s RIBA award-winning capital development project which opened in 2008 and now offers a unique set of facilities including purpose-built artists' studios. Donna is Chair of the Contemporary Visual Arts Network in the East and plays an active role on the steering committee of the Plus Tate network of Directors. Previously, Donna was Curator at South London Gallery (1999-2005) where she established the gallery’s influential performance and off-site programmes and worked with artists including Christian Boltanski, On Kawara, Joelle Tuerlinckx and Keith Tyson on their solo exhibitions, alongside curating a number of group exhibitions. Prior to that, Donna was Curator (1997-99) and Touring Exhibitions Organiser (1995-1997) at Modern Art Oxford. She studied Design at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee.

Phuplec is a project from Wysing Studio Artist Emma Smith, which offers free activies for people to do at home during this time.

Visit the project website by clicking here. 

Emma has created Phuplec for Cromwell Road, Cambridge, UK, where she is the artist-in-residence. Cromwell Road is a plot of land with a history of growing and making. Originally fields, this area was sold off after enclosure and in 1927 was turned into allotments. These allotments were tended to an almost professional level by shift workers at the nearby concrete and iron factories. While many of these allotments were developed as housing as the local population grew, the Cromwell Road site became a wood workshop and yard in 1938. In 2021 this site will become new homes, green space, a community centre and nursery. This project takes this moment of development to embrace sustainable and bio-diverse know how and propose new futures.

Emma was commissioned as artist-in-residence for Cromwell Road by Cambridge Investment Partnership (CIP) as part of Resonance-Cambridge.

Resonance-Cambridge is the public art programme commissioned as part of the Cambridge Investment Partnerships (CIP) programme of new housing. The public art projects will see the delivery of events engaging with the existing and new communities, together with permanent artworks installed across the new housing programmes. For further information please visit: www.resonance-cambridge.co.uk.

17 November to 21 January

Cell Project Space

Wysing Arts Centre have been working with artists Julia Crabtree and William Evans to support a research and development project developed from their recent Banff Centre commission. As part of this long-term commissioning process the artists will be working with Cell Project Space to develop an expansive sculptural work from material produced over this period.

Gullet, 17th November 2017 – 21st January 2018

“As part of a long-term research and commissioning process, artists Julia Crabtree and William Evans present their solo exhibition, Gullet. For this exhibition the artists will produce an expansive sculptural work, combining bespoke craft alongside technological processes, that are both desire driven and dismal. 

The work is situated at the intersection between the representational strategies of sculpture, design and architecture, with all of these fields treated as a common site of production. Primarily working as makers, Crabtree and Evans de-skill craft-based fabrication processes, breaking down systems of established knowledge as a means to reject the precedent of monumental gestures. The artists are interested in entropy, where disorder is fertile throughout the characteristics of the materials they choose. 

In Gullet, architectural scale is undermined by purposeful homespun techniques while deploying digital image to form soft upholstered landscape and lumbering memory foam to cup eroticised forms. Materiality embodies connections with human hybrid origins and their messy entanglements, from the half-wild and half-manufactured ecosystems that produce our food to the gut biomes that digest it. Crabtree and Evans reflect upon the macro and the micro, from the seismic landscape to an amoebic microorganism at a time when nature and bodies are evolving, comingling and collapsing.

The exhibition ‘Gullet’ is an extension of ‘Gulch’, recently commissioned by The Banff Centre, Canada and exhibited in ‘No Visible Horizon’, Walter Phillips Gallery in 2016. Glass works were developed at the National Glass Centre, Sunderland as part of an on-going research project with Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge.

Julia Crabtree & William Evans were recipients of the ‘Nina Stewart Residency award’ at South London Gallery (2014), ‘Future Residency’, at Wysing Art Centre, Cambridge (2014) and the ‘Mary Hofsetter Legacy Scholarship’ for the ‘New Materiality’ residency at Banff Centre, Canada. Recent commissions in the UK include ‘Crutch’ exhibited as part of ‘Maximum Overdrive’ at Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea (2017), ‘Antonio Bay’, South London Gallery,(2014)  and ‘Hyper Bole’ Legion TV, London (2014). Their work has been included in group exhibitions ‘The Uncanny Valley’, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, (2015) and ‘Back to the Things Themselves’, Assembly Point, (2015).”

Text by Cell Project Space

With generous support from Cell Project Space, The Banff Centre, Canada, Wysing Arts Centre and Arts Council England.

We: You, Me 
Firstsite, Colchester

Launch Friday 13 Oct 6pm - 9pm
14 October - 19 November 2017 10am - 5pm

Naomi Harwin has been invited to exhibit in We:You, Me at Firstsite in Colchester. Her work 'Parts & Wholes (The Studio)' will be on display in 'Narrative Whispers' curated by JMC Anderson.

This autumn Firstsite has invited three emerging curators based in the east of England to explore contemporary identity through their own areas of research. In a unique group exhibition JMC Anderson, Charlie Bryan and Laurie Taylor Straiton bring together artists who question the complexities of gender, narrative and environment in relation to the individual self. We: You, Me investigates ideas about the construction of identity in today’s society.

23 June– 8 September, 2017

Florence Peake: WE perform I am in love with my body
PV 22 June 6-9pm

Bosse & Baum, London

Bosse & Baum is pleased to present Florence Peake’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, consisting of a series of drawings made by the artist in her studio, and which were commissioned by Wysing Arts Centre during her residency in 2016, with funding from Arts Council England.

Performed on a horizontal surface, Peake uses the floor as a medium of support and resistance for her body to act out an expression of falling into an immersive sensorial experience, backwards into the horizontal. The floor and the body become a site for falling in love with the sensation of movement through sensing skin, flesh, bone. Simultaneously drawing an outline of her body/movement. Peake wants to contemplate ones own body as a complete territory of pleasure to sink into. Through these movement drawings an ensemble of characters/bodies are collected and come to re-perform once hung on the wall, the vertical; falling backwards becomes falling into rising up the wall.

Florence Peake’s practice encompasses visual art, dance and performance. As a trained dancer her background in choreography and painting stimulates a studio practice that is both diverse and immersive; she is often working performatively to incorporate drawing, painting and sculptural materials. Through public performances and carefully choreographed works Peake challenges notions of physicality, loss and political concerns such as the commodification of art by the corporate world.

By encouraging chaotic relationships between the body and material, she creates radical and outlandish performances, which create temporary alliances and microcommunities within the audience. In believing that objects and materials have their own autonomy and subjectivity, the artist draws on the expansive vocabulary of materials to enhance and contextualise her work. The sculptural works operate as documentation of the performance, but never in a reductive way.

Her current painting work, with mixed media, attempts to capture the live experience of performing, performers inner states and memory of a given performance as she re-performs live works through large scale canvas and fresco works. These investigations have also been applied to her exploration of ceramics, taking performance as her subject, and making clay forms through live performances to extract new and autonomous sculptural works. Recent performance work has taken themes from popular spiritual practices and appropriated them to interact intimately with audiences, exploring a range of states of being to test what people assume as their own reality.

Commissioned by Wysing Arts Centre and supported through public funding from Arts Council England.

26 May to 3 September

Heart of Glass, Soheila Sokhanvari

The New Art Gallery, Walsall

Heart of Glass is the first solo Museum show for Sokhanvari in the U.K. The majority of the works in this exhibition were created especially for the show and are inspired by family photographs of the artist that date back to pre-revolutionary Iran. Heart of Glass includes 24 drawings using crude oil and gold, a video installation, sculptures, a series of egg tempera paintings and a 22ct gold installation that was recently exhibited at Jerwood Project Space.

The exhibition was supported using public funding from Arts Council England.

Artist talk: Thursday 13 July,  6.30pm (Doors open at 6pm)

Join the artist and Stephen Snoddy, Director, The New Art Gallery Walsall for an informal talk about the exhibition. £3.  Please book at the Gallery reception.

13 June to 20 August

The Royal Academy, London

Wysing Studio artist Soheila Sokhanvari  presents work in the annual Royal Academy Summer exhibition. Held at the Royal Academy since 1769, the Summer Exhibition displays works in a variety of mediums and genres by emerging and established contemporary artists. 

The exhibition coordinated by the Royal Academician Eileen Cooper, explores themes of discovery and new talent from her unique position as Keeper of the Royal Academy – the Academician who is responsible for supporting and guiding the students. Cooper takes on the mantle of coordinating the largest open submission exhibition in the world, hanging over 1,200 works by artists established and lesser-known. 

22 June, 6-8pm
Somerset House Studios

A screening programme at Somerset House Studios, London, accompanies the exhibition Mene Mene Tekel Parsin.

The exhibition Mene Mene Tekel Parsin brings together a number of works by international artists who employ words and language to illuminate and obfuscate, fully cogent of the propagandist deployment of slogans and the seductively tall tales of advertising copy, including work by Sarah Boulton, Stanley Brouwn, Jesse Darling, Gordon Hall, Evan Ifekoya, Sulaïman Majali, Imran Perretta, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Özgür Kar, Claire Potter, Rosa Johan Uddoh, Hannah Weiner and Constantina Zavitsanos.

A programme of live works by Gordon Hall, Elaine Mitchener and Claire Potter were presented at the launch of the exhibition.

This accompanying screeing programme includes works by Sonia Boyce, Hamishi Farah, Carolyn Lazard, Miloš Trakilović and Anna Zett.

Anna Zett, Text to Speech, 2015
Duration: 9:38 (excerpt)

Sonia Boyce, Exquisite Cacophony, 2015

Carolyn Lazard, Improved Techniques, 2013
Duration: 4 mins

Miloš Trakilović, XYZ, 2016
Duration: 6:46 mins

Hamishi Farah, Study, 2016
Duration: 10 minutes

Curated by Jesse Darling and supported through public funding from Arts Council England.

10 June to 2 July
Sat & Sun 12 - 6pm

 xero, kline and coma, 258 Hackney Rd, London, E2 7SJ

Closing Event with live performance:
Sunday 2 July - 2pm

"The Gothic Quarter I imagine is shadowy is hardly even there compared to the Barri Gotic that is paved with flags and cobbles and those narrow streets are slaked with water from morning, evaporating with the heat of the day. But the imagined Gothic Quarter is with me and follows me through other streets in other countries at times is preferable to the absent 
The absent memory is insufferable because it’s insufferable because there is enough of it to realise that its content is absent. Cobbled and called on occasion with whatever there is to hand: a whiff of aftershave, that one, the one worn by whoever it is that happens to walk by; the heat; cracked paint on a door, perhaps not that one, perhaps a door from the main entrance of some other
I have nursed the Gothic Quarter dressed it in different clothes handled it and studied it, emphasised the qualities that resonated most, strengthening the image, recognising less and less the difference between the Gothic Quarter I have forged and the material presence of the city’s district." 

Commissioned by Wysing Arts Centre with funding from Arts Council England

9 June, 8pm-3am
DIY Space for London,  London SE15 1TF
£5
Purchase advanced tickets here

Wysing Arts Centre present an all-inclusive night of DJing and dancing, with Women's Beat League, SIREN DJs and participants from the Study Week. 
 

Women’s Beat League is a Portland, Oregon collective dedicated to teaching and co-learning DJing and music production skills with a focus on representing female-identified and nonbinary views in electronic music. Following a week long retreat at Wysing Arts Centre, Felisha, Daniela, Alyssa and Kathleen will be joined by friends old and new, for a night at DIY Space for London.

This is a safe space prioritised for women and non-binary individuals, but all DIY Space members and their guests are welcome. Join DIY space for London here for £2 a year. Membership takes 48 hours to process.

Alyssa Beers DJs as Nishkosheh, the yiddish word for so-so. Her sets are inspired by up-all-nighters and brass monkeys, overflowing with rippin’ guitars, cheery acid chuggers, and unexpected turns. Her penchant for smooth is matched by her need for the bizarre, drawing influences from a wide array of leftfields from island funk to moody techno. In addition to her work as a founder of Women’s Beat League, she also toils as a community facilitator with her efforts in Pushboard – a weekly events newsletter, and S1 – a local art & music space in Portland, Oregon.  

Kathleen Hong is a DJ interested in the intersections of sound and resistance within a decolonial context. She is a part of the music programming team at S1, Portland.  

Daniela Karina is a DJ and community organiser focused on highlighting marginalized voices. She finds inspiration in emerging transcultural sounds and reinvented ancestral rhythms, bringing the fringes of diasporic club music to the upper left United States. She is cofounder of Women’s Beat League and staff at S1.  

Felisha Ledesma is an artist and organiser based in Portland, OR. Felisha is the Executive Director of S1, an artist-run center that strives to provide engaging, relevant, and critical visual art, performance and education programming. In 2015 Felisha co-founded Women's Beat League with the goal of representing femme and nonbinary electronic musicians. And in 2016 Felisha co-founded the S1 Synth Library which is dedicated to providing education and access around modular synthesis to local, national, and international artists by hosting regular workshops, open library hours, and an artist-in-residence program. Felisha's focus has been providing low or no cost access to art and education in a supportive, nontraditional learning environment.  

SIREN is a collective that started a year ago in London, with the purpose of creating a space for those under-represented in dance music on lineups and in crowds. Their parties, zines and radio shows aim to be musical and political platforms for women and non-binary people, as well as a space to critique current trends within electronic music and create alternatives. SIREN are not a DJ collective but many do DJ and focus on the exploring the broadest sense of techno - from electro to minimal, acid to breakbeat.

Find out more about the Study Week here and Women's Beat League here.

Saturday 4th November
6.30 - 9.00pm
The Northern Charter, Newcastle

Doors 6.30pm, Performances begin 7.00pm

Performances by: Conor Baird, Freya Dooley, Rose Gibbs, Rene McBrearty, Holly Argent, Leah Millar

The Northern Charter has curated an evening of performance with Syllabus III and in conjunction with New Contemporaries

From this year's cohort of artists taking part in Syllabus III, Conor Baird, Freya Dooley and Rose Gibbs will each present a new performance work, accompanied by artists selected by The Northern Charter - Rene McBrearty, Holly Argent, Leah Millar.

Full details can be found on The Northern Charter website.

The Syllabus is a national, alternative peer-led learning programme, jointly delivered by Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge; Eastside Projects, Birmingham; New Contemporaries with BALTIC / BALTIC39 Newcastle, Gateshead; S1 Artspace, Sheffield; Spike Island, Bristol; Studio Voltaire, London and our new 2017 partner Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts), London.

More details about the selected Syllabus III artists and the full retreat can be found here.

22 - 28 May
The Opposite of Now

Syllabus II in residence at Guest Projects, London.

Artists who have been working together for the past ten months as part of Syllabus II, a peer-led education programme convened by Wysing and other national partners, are in-residence at Guest Projects, London. 

The artists -  Mira Calix, Faye Claridge, Mike Harvey, E. Jackson, Tyler Mallison, Nika Neelova, Tom Smith, Dylan Spencer-Davidson, Thomas Whittle and Laura Wilson - have invited Emily LaBarge to produce a text under the title 'The Opposite of Now' for their residency.

A week of production in response to the text will culminate in a public presentation of new works, talks and music. Ready Emily LaBarge's full text here.

The residency is part of a wider programme on 'Alternaticve Art Schools' being explored by Guest Projects and also includes contributions from the AltMFA Artist Group, and Open School East.

Syllabus II Schedule

27 May, 12-6pm: Exhibition open to the public

28 May, 12-6pm: Exhibition open to the public

28 May, 8-10pm: Slide Night #8, 

See the full programme of events on the Guest Projects website here.

Tate Modern
19.00, 24 May

2016 artists-in-residence Larry Achiampong and David Blandy present their Finding Fanon trilogy at Tate Modern.

A moving and multi-layered exploration of race, identity and globalisation inspired by the radical thinker Franz Fanon.

The Finding Fanon trilogy (2015–17) by Larry Achiampong and David Blandy blends personal histories, pop culture and post-colonial theory to examine how we navigate the digital and physical worlds of the twenty-first century. Join us for this exclusive screening – the first time the trilogy has been screened together – followed by a conversation between the artists and theorist Rizvana Bradley.

Programme

Finding Fanon Part One 2015
Ultra HD colour video, Stereo Sound, 16:9, 15 min
Directors, writers and composers: Larry Achiampong & David Blandy
Supported by Arts Council England

Finding Fanon Part Two 2015
Ultra HD colour video, Stereo Sound, 16:9, 9 min
Directors, writers and composers: Larry Achiampong & David Blandy
Produced by Artsadmin
Commissioned by Brighton Digital Festival
Supported by Arts Council England

Finding Fanon Part Three 2017
Ultra HD colour video, Stereo Sound, 16:9, 14 min
Directors, writers and composers: Larry Achiampong & David Blandy
Supported by Arts Council England and Wysing Arts Centre

More information.

About the Artists

In Larry Achiampong and David Blandy’s collaborative practice, they share an interest in popular culture and the decolonial position. They examine communal and personal heritage, using performance to investigate the self as a fiction, devising alter-egos to point at their divided selves.

Larry Achiampong (b. 1984) is a British-Ghanaian artist who has exhibited, performed and presented projects in various institutions within the UK and abroad including the Logan Center for the Arts, Chicago; Tate Britain and Tate Modern, London; Hauptbahnhof (Documenta13), Kassel; Iniva, London; and the ICA, London.

David Blandy (b. 1976) has exhibited at venues nationally and worldwide such as Bloomberg Space, London; The Exchange, Newlyn Art Gallery; Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum, Helsinki; MoMA PS1, New York; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai. He is represented by Seventeen Gallery and his films are distributed by LUX.

Rizvana Bradley is currently a Research Fellow in the History of Art Department at University College London, U.K., and joins Yale University this coming autumn as Assistant Professor in Film and Media Studies and African-American Studies Department. Bradley holds a B.A. from Williams College, and a Ph.D. from Duke University. Her research interests include feminist Theory, Black Critical Theory, Aesthetic Theory, Queer Theory and Performance Studies.

29 October, 2pm
Former Newington Library

Wysing's Head of Partnerships, Chelsea Pettitt, will be giving a tour of Andy Holden's and Peter Holden's Artangel installation Natural Selection. 

Working with his father Peter Holden, a renowned ornithologist, Andy Holden's Artangel installation is situated in the former Cuming Museum – a museum founded by a father and son – which was originally home to a collection of natural history and archaeological curiosities.

Natural Selection showcases several multi-screen films, a selection of archival material, and Andy Holden’s own collection of found nests. The exhibition spans two floors and captures the multi-sensory oeuvre of birds. ‘A Natural History of Nest Building’, situated on the ground floor, exposes the unscrupulous cuckoo; the artistry of the bowerbird; and the nest as an object in its own right. While, in the basement, ‘A Social History of Egg Collecting’ sheds light on this practice in a changing legal landscape, and the resultant criminal operations after 1954, through a video work 'The Opposite of Time' and an installation titled ‘How the Artist Was Led to the Study of Nature’.

Taking some of the exhibition themes as a starting point, including anthropology, childhood memories and collecting, Wysing's Head of Partnerships, Chelsea Pettitt, will provide an introduction to the installation and discuss it in the context of Andy Holden's overall practice. 

Free, but booking required here. 

Andy Holden (b.1982) artist and musician was born and now lives and works in Bedford, UK. He regularly performs and releases records with his band The Grubby Mitts who have contributed Wysing Arts Centre's music festival on a number of occasions. 

Holden has been working with Wysing since 2008. In 2010 he curated our first music festival 'Be Glad For The Song Has No End' as part of a period as an artist in residence. He has since participated in many exhibitions and events at Wysing and was the first lead artist for the collaborative 'Syllabus' programme, now in its third year.

His most recent solo exhibitions include ‘Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape (II)’, Glasgow International (2016); ‘Towards a Unified Theory of MI!MS’, Zabludowicz Collection, London (2013), Spike Island (2014); ‘Chewy Cosmos Thingly Time’, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (2011); and ‘Art Now: Andy Holden’, Tate Britain (2010). 

Peter Holden has been passionate about birds and wildlife for as long as he can remember. He was a senior manager for the RSPB for over 40 years, and while running the RSPB’s junior membership he devised the ever popular Big Garden Birdwatch which has grown into the largest wildlife survey in the world!

Peter’s activities are dedicated to taking the magic of wildlife to new audiences. For many years he advised BBCs Blue Peter and often appeared in their garden! In 1994-5 he joined Bill Oddie in a BBC 1 series called Bird in the Nest and more recently has contributed to Springwatch.

He has written many books, including the RSPB Handbook to British Birds, RSPB Handbook of Garden Wildlife and Birds: a Hidden World.

He was awarded an MBE in 2009 for services to Nature Conservation and elected a Fellow of the RSA.

24 October 2017 - 4 February 2018
Terra Firma, Pallavi Paul
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Spring 2017 Residency artist Pallavi Paul has made a new installation, Terra Firma, for the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge inspired by the secrecy and histories of the top-secret code-breakers of Bletchley Park. During her residency at Wysing Arts Centre, she visited and accessed archival material from the Bletchley Park collection for the new commission.

Terra Firma is installed as a ‘carpet’ in Gallery 8 of the Fitzwilliam Museum, amongst the collections of 16th to 18th century Spanish and Flemish art. With the upholstery acting as a textual landscape on which museum visitors can walk, the text on the carpet appears like concrete poems. Inspired by the secrecy surrounding the work that was being undertaken at Bletchley Park during WWII, the central motif is the word ‘secret’, with changing permutations of words around it. These concrete poems are composed to visually look like code and contributes a distinct, stylistic accent to the gallery.

The commission ties in with a new exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum "Codebreakers and Groundbreakers", exploring the groups involved in breaking WWII codes and those who deciphered the ancient script of Linear B – Europe’s earliest comprehensible writing system. Terra Firma has been installed just before the entrance to the exhibition, responding artistically and philosophically to the exhibition.

Pallavi Paul's new work is part of the University of Cambridge’s 'India Unboxed' series celebrating 70 years of Indian Independence and the Cambridge Festival of Ideas 2017. She was in conversation about her work on 27 October, 1.15 - 2pm in the Fitzwillliam Museum’s Seminar Room as part of the Festival.

Terra Firma is co-commissioned by University of Cambridge Museums and Wysing Arts Centre. It was supported using public funding by Arts Council England and with support from Diversity Art Forum and the Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation. With thanks to Bletchley Park.

Join Syllabus partners and alumni for informal information sharing and Q & A sessions about The Syllabus – find out how it works, how it is co-developed with participants, who is involved and what we are looking for in applications for this year’s programme.

Free and open to all.

Karst Studios, Plymouth

Sat 1 April, 3:30pm – 5pm

Join Chelsea Pettitt from Wysing Arts Centre and Syllabus alumni artist Simon Bayliss for this session. Bring along your questions and also see the exhibition Meta Matter. For directions, visit the Karst website.

Eastside Projects, Birmingham

Tues 4 April 6:30 - 8pm

Join Eastside Projects Director Ruth Claxton and Syllabus II participant Faye Claridge for this session. More information from Eastside Projects. 

Iniva, London

Wed 5 April 6:30 - 8pm

Join Iniva Director Melanie Keen and New Contemporaries Director Kirsty Ogg, with Syllabus alumni artist Rafal Zajko for one of two sessions in London. Directions and details to Iniva here.

Studio Voltaire, London

Sun 9 April 4:30 - 6pm

Join Studio Voltaire's Laura Harford and Nicola Wright, Wysing's Chelsea Pettitt, Syllabus alumni Lucy Steggals and some of this year's participating artists following their Studio Voltaire year 2 weekend session.

More details here.  

S1 Artspace, Sheffield

Mon 10 April 2 - 4pm

Join S1 Artspace Director Louise Hutchinson, who has been part of the Syllabus since its inception in 2015, for this session in Sheffield. More details here. 

Outpost Studios, Gildengate House, Norwich

Wed 12 April 12 - 2pm

Join Wysing Arts Centre's Chelsea Pettitt and John Bloomfield, alongside Syllabus II artists MIke Harvey and E. Jackson for this drop in session and communal lunch with studio and residency artists. 

Bring questions and food for an informal Q&A. The studio gallery is based at Gildengate House, Upper Green Ln, Norwich NR3 1AX. 

Our young people's group Circuit Conductors and artist Kate Munro will lead a series of drop in workshops for our New Geographies project.

New Geographies is three year project led by Wysing on behalf of the East Contemporary Visual Arts Network (ECVAN). It started with an open call, asking people living in the East of England to nominate overlooked or unexpected places in the region that they find meaningful and interesting. This will continue until 22 October.

In response to the nominations of places, ECVAN will commission artists – from the UK and internationally – to respond to some of those places with new site-specific work. This combination of local knowledge and world-class art seeks to create a new vision of the East of England as a place to encounter excellent art in unexpected places.

Full details of the project can be found here.

See the map so far at www.newgeographies.uk  

The drop in dates for the workshops are:

9 September,  10am-2pm - Heritage Open Weekend at Chatteris Museum. Led by artist Kate Munro

9 September, 11am- 4pm - Heritage Open Weekend at Peckover House, National Trust, Wisbech. Led by our Circuit Conductors. 

23 September, afternoon/evening - Fire & Flint Festival in Brandon. Led by artist Kate Munro.

These workshops are delivered with outreach partners Market Place, 20Twenty Productions and Peckover House in order to encourage nominations from the Fenlands and Forest Heath to the new map of the East. 

More details about each workshop will be announced soon.

Arti et Amicitiae, Sonic Acts Festival
1 February to 26 February 

Joey Holder presents a new iteration of Ophiux at Amsterdam's Sonic Acts Festival. The work was developed at Wysing as part of the Multiverse residency programme and was developed into an exhibition in autumn 2016.

Running from 1 to 26 February at Arti et Amicitiae, the exhibition features artworks and installations by emerging artists such as Joey Holder, Justin Bennett, Pinar Yoldas and Zach Blas. The artworks and installations reflect on how climate change, the Anthropocene, rapid technological advances and post-contemporary anxiety affect society, politics and the human body; they speculate on the future of humanity with science fiction scenarios, amorphous blobs, biological evolution, biometric governmentality, queerness, Artificial Intelligences and synthetic biology. The exhibition will be officially opened on 1 February.

More information here.

Jerwood Project Space
9 January 2017 to 13 May 2017

Jerwood Project Space present an installation of drawings by Soheila Sokhanvari using crude oil and with gold on paper, with the images derived from family photographs and media from pre-revolutionary Iran. 

The materiality of these drawings carries the narrative as a medium that is primarily not an art material but has political, social, economical and environmental values that implicates us all. Project Space is part of the Jerwood Visual Arts programme and provides exhibition and development opportunities to emerging artists; offering a small grant to develop new experimental work, which is then exhibited within the unique environment of Café 171 at Jerwood Space, adjacent to the main gallery spaces. 

Since 2004 it has presented new work from artists including Jasmine Johnson, Keira Greene, Susannah Worth, Luke McCreadie, Alice May Williams, Paul Schneider, Rhys Coren, Anna Bunting-Branch, Emma Charles, Alec Kronacker, Meg Mosley, Sara Nunes Fernandes, Johann Arens, Matthew Johnstone, Katie Schwab and Jamie George, Ben Senior, Ralph Dorey, Mindy Lee, Patrick Coyle, Gemma Anderson, Annabel Tilley, Alice Browne, and Holly Antrum. For more information please visit www.jerwoodvisualarts.org

Bloomberg Space
20 January to 18 March

For this new commission, Florian Roithmayr has transformed the architecture of Bloomberg SPACE to present an aggregate of his research into material actions at an unprecedented scale. Roithmayr’s gestural sculptures curl and bend over themselves as if they might envelop the viewer’s body. Poised between raw material and expressive form, these works articulate the tensions between their interior and exterior surfaces to produce modulations and inflections that are as open and ambiguous as the wordless prefixes that make the exhibition’s title - ir re par sur.

APT Gallery, London
10 March to 2 April (Preview: 9 March)

Syllabus II artist Tyler Mallison presents a new exhibition, New Material: Living in a Material World, featuring Robert Cervera, Russell Chater, Marieke Gelissen, Paul Kindersley, Edith Kollath, Tyler Mallison, Nika Neelova and Michaela Zimmer.

​New Material: living in a new material world is a group exhibition of new work by 8 international artists, which seeks to address the shift in the ‘material world’ from the Gen-X perspective of the mid 1980s; a time of pensive self-awareness and anxiety, to our current new material world; one of 21st century post-truth Trumpist politics and Brexit Britain. Work spans sculpture, installation, performance, photography, video and the expanded field of painting.

The title of the exhibition references the 1984 song Material Girl by Madonna. The hit was written at a time when living in a ‘material world’ meant aligning with the collective shift towards aspirational image, status brands and global corporations. Fast-forward 30+ years and now, what defines the ‘new material world’? The Internet is a given, the virtual seems real, and geographic borders have eroded in the exchange of artistic capital. Tensions suspended by millennial optimism are beginning to resurface in the face of post-truth Trumpist politics, Brexit Britain and recognition of the Anthropocene and its environmental impact. Moreover, around the artist has emerged a sophisticated international art market with an estimated worth of 50 billion Euros.

New Material presents a platform for investigating the conditions of this unstable, shifting and often contradictory ‘space’ through pluralist concerns (body/mind, public/private, virtual/real, authentic/fake) that give form and insight into materiality today. The work of the 8 artists brings to the surface strategies used to navigate their experience against the backdrop of an increasingly challenging climate for expression and artistic production. They themselves are the product of the new normal in contemporary art: relationships organically forged via precarious channels of alternative education, artist-led initiatives, open formats, studio disruption and social media.

During the exhibition, a dialogue will unfold amongst the artists and expand through community engagement and planned public talks involving guest artists. The aim of the events is to spark discussion with other artists and the public about what characterises life and art in this new material world. 

Curated by Tyler Mallison.

More information.

Z20 Gallery, Rome
10 March, 6.30pm

As part of the exhibition WALLED GARDENS IN AN INSANE EDEN, and exploring the theme of art as therapy, Florence Peake will reprise her performance of Voicings for the first time in Rome.

“Is it only the external landscape which is altering? How often recently most of us have had the feeling of déjà vu, of having seen all this before, in fact of remembering these swamps and lagoons all too well. However selective the conscious mind may be, most biological memories are unpleasant ones, echoes of danger and terror. Nothing endures for so long as fear.”
            - J.G. Ballard from The Drowned World (1962)

In line with the prevailing mood across Europe after an overthrow of political certainties in 2016, this exhibition curated by Marcelle Joseph features the artwork of seven London-based artists brought to Rome, many for the first time. Hijacking a phrase from The Drowned World, J.G. Ballard’s first science fiction novel and one of his London-based dystopic tales, Walled Gardens in an Insane Eden portrays the world we live in today - on the precipice but hopeful for a less fragile future.

As part of this exhibition and exploring the theme of art as therapy, Florence Peake will reprise her performance of Voicings for the first time in Rome. Previous iterations of this performance have taken place at Serpentine Gallery, London (2016); Modern Art Oxford (2015); Somerset House in London for Block Universe 2015; and at a group show in Athens in 2015. For this performance, Peake will actively channel both physically and orally the personal losses and political concerns of various audience members, acting as a conduit between imagined and material place as she embodies the collective spirit of the audience. In Voicings, the idea of the collective is held as a resource - You, Me and Us are used as a way to access and articulate questions of personal, group and global concern. Voicings responds with optimistic candour to questions of authenticity, the bogus and the real, truth and trickery.

The exhibition features work from: 

Rebecca Ackroyd, Gabriella Boyd, Rhys Coren, Kira Freije, Marie Jacotey, Florence Peake, Zadie Xa

River Rooms, Somerset House Studios
20 April

Beyond Telepathy presents an evening of new performances and discussions investigating the potential of communication without a shared language with previous Wysing residency artists Florence Peake, Essi Kausalainen, Erica Scourti and Gary Zhexi Zhang.

To book a place, click here.

How can we leap beyond telepathy - to respond to affinities beyond kinship, connections woven without words? What may telepathy imply in the age of omnipresent 'action at a distance' that challenges the distinctions between spiritual mediations, technological networks and material affects? The performances draw together emergent thought and embodied practices, driven by the ecological urgency to experiment with modes and meanings of co-existence for the future. The discussions will shed light into the research that has informed the performances, encouraging engagement with concepts and phenomena such as fungal symbiosis, natural computing, and energetic transference.

Beyond Telepathy includes contributions from Somerset House Studios resident artists Florence Peake and Erica Scourti, alongside artists Essi Kausalainen, Jenna Sutela, Gary Zhexi Zhang, Anne de Boer and Eloïse Bonneviot. They will be in conversation with Luciana Parisi, Jamie Sutcliffe, Ros Gray and Lotte Juul Petersen.

The event is curated by Taru Elfving in partnership with Wysing Arts Centre and in collaboration with Somerset House Studios and SPACE Art + Technology. Supported by The Finnish Institute in London.    

PROGRAMME

5pm The Mycological Twist
Eloise Bonneviot & Anne de Boer
Educational quantum VJ/DJ set 

5.20pm Introduction: Beyond Telepathy
Taru Elfving

5.30pm Nam-Gut (the microbial breakdown of language)
Jenna Sutela
Audiovisual installation

6.00pm once the workers have been enslaved, a state of erotic communism will be declared, globally
Gary Zhexi Zhang
Reading

6.20pm Discussion: Jenna Sutela, Gary Zhexi Zhang, Luciana Parisi and Jamie Sutcliffe

7.00pm ​Routine Disconnections
Erica Scourti
Remote reading and walk into disconnection

7.20pm The voracious Cunt aka Inter-penetrating waves of energy constellating in time and space
Florence Peake
Performance

7.50pm Lovers
Essi Kausalainen
Performance

8.20pm Discussion: Florence Peake, Essi Kausalainen, Ros Gray, Lotte Juul Petersen and Taru Elfving

PARTICIPANTS

Anne de Boer & Eloïse Bonneviot
The Mycological Twist as an intervention invites you to educate your way into fungi wisdom, multilayering tutorial videos, 'how-to' tricks, creatures dancing to trance music. Absorb as much as you can dance.
 
Since 2012 Anne de Boer and Eloïse Bonneviot examine the life form of fungi as an example for sustainable network structures and as an ecological model for human action. They studied at Goldsmiths College, live in London, and teach at Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam (as HARD-CORE).  Currently their movie 'Respawn' is on show in the Temporary Gallery, Cologne, and a collaborative film with Christopher Kulendran Thomas is exhibited at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. Bonneviot is in residence at SPACE Art + Technology, London, in 2017.

Jenna Sutela
Jenna Sutela’s installations, text and sound performances seek to identify and react to precarious social and material moments, often in relation to technology. Most recently, she has been exploring exceedingly complex biological and computational systems, ultimately unknowable and in a constant state of becoming. At Beyond Telepathy, she will present a homebrew computer, operated by a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast, producing a new kind of language.

Sutela (based in Helsinki and Berlin) has exhibited her work at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, The Institute of Contemporary Arts London, and Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art Helsinki, amongst others. Her writing has been published by, for example, Fiktion, Harvard Design Magazine and Sternberg Press. Sutela is currently an artist-in-residence at SPACE Art + Technology.

Gary Zhexi Zhang
Emerging out of research into biological networks, Gary Zhexi Zhang's current project is entitled once the workers have been enslaved, a state of erotic communism will be declared, globally. The work is a speculative fiction concerned with distributed touch, featuring a 'loving symbiosis' between humans and amoebae.

Gary Zhexi Zhang is an artist and researcher interested in various systems, based in Cambridge. Recent exhibitions include All Channels Open at Wysing Arts Centre. In 2017, he will be in residence at SPACE Art + Technology, London and CCA Creative Lab, Glasgow.

Erica Scourti
Erica Scourti's work across different media draws on personal experience to explore labour, gender and love in a fully mediated world. Her recent research has focused on questions concerning empathy and emotional contagion, as well as channeling and citation of speech through automation.

Scourti has exhibited at the Kunsthalle Wien, Wellcome Collection, CTRL+SHIFT, Oakland, Microscope Gallery, New York, FACT, The Photographers’ Gallery, Hayward Gallery, Munich Kunstverein, EMST Athens, and Banner Repeater, amongst others. Based in London, she was in residence in 2015 at Wysing Arts Centre and SPACE Art + Technology, London, and is currently a resident of Somerset House Studios. 

Florence Peake
Florence Peake is looking at penetration from a vibrational and energetic perspective in her new work The voracious Cunt aka Inter-penetrating waves of energy constellating in time and space. She has been investigating with dancers the merging of spaces, flesh, substance and how we become porous with our environments. The idea of transference of energy is explored through vocal sounding and touch movement in the performance, which also invites participatory exchanges with the audience.
 
Peake is a London-based visual artist, dancer, choreographer, and teacher. Her work has recently been shown at SPACE, Serpentine Gallery, Modern Art Oxford, and Hayward Gallery, amongst others. She was in residence at Wysing Arts Centre in 2016 and is currently a resident at Somerset House Studios.

Essi Kausalainen

Essi Kausalainen explores interspecies communication in her new series of performances, Symbiogenesis. Approaching objects and spaces as co-performers, she builds companionships and complex interactions between humans, plants, animals and minerals. Focusing on the intimacy of the organic and inorganic bodies - the leaking, the digesting, the resonant - the work grows into systems that take the likeness of a mycorrhiza, the symbiotic body of plant and fungi.

Kausalainen (based in Helsinki, Finland) has presented her work recently in Moderna Museet Malmö, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Matadero Madrid, Nikolaj Kunsthal Copenhagen, and SAVVY Contemporary Berlin. In 2015 she was in residency at Wysing Arts Centre, which gave rise to her new work developed in collaboration with Dr Uta Paszkowski, Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge.

Luciana Parisi
Dr. Luciana Parisi is Reader in Cultural Theory at the Centre for Cultural Studies and co-director of the Digital Culture Unit, Goldsmiths. Specifically engaging with cybernetics, information theories, and evolutionary theories, her work analyses the radical transformations of the body, nature, matter and thought led by the technocapitalist development of biotechnologies and computation.

Her publications include Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (Continuum 2004) and Contagious Architecture. Computation, Aesthetics and the Control of Space (MIT Press 2013). She is currently researching the history of automation and the philosophical consequences of logical thinking in machines.

Jamie Sutcliffe
Jamie Sutcliffe is a writer and publisher at Strange Attractor Press. His writing appears regularly in Art Monthly, Frieze, Rhizome, The White Review and EROS Journal. He is currently a contributing editor of A-or-ist, an independent journal of new art writing, and Berserker, a forthcoming periodical concerned with the exploration of high genre tropes in art and underground comics, published by Breakdown Press.

Ros Gray
Dr. Ros Gray is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art, Critical Studies in the Art Department at Goldsmiths. Her research explores the trajectories of militant filmmaking, and more recently with the intersections between artistic practices and decolonial environmentalism. She is currently preparing a monograph entitled The Cinemas of the Mozambican Revolution (Boyer & Brewer, 2017) and a special issues of Third Text on the topic of Botanical Conflicts: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Soil and Planting. 

Lotte Juul Petersen
Lotte Juul Petersen has been a Curator at Wysing Arts Centre since 2008 and has delivered numerous exhibitions, events and supported artists to take artistic risks and produce new work, including Jonathan Baldock, Emma Hart, Joey Holder, Evan Ifekoya, Essi Kausalainen, Florence Peake, Laure Prouvost, Giles Round, Cally Spooner and many more. She has a BA and MA in Art History and Cultural Studies from University of Copenhagen and University of Leeds. 

Taru Elfving
Taru Elfving is a curator and writer focused on nurturing transdisciplinary and site-sensitive artistic investigations with a commitment to the critical discourses on ecology and feminism. Her recent curatorial work includes Hours, Years, Aeons (Finnish Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2015), Frontiers in Retreat (HIAP Helsinki, 2013-2018), Contemporary Art Archipelago (Turku 2011, European Capital of Culture), and publications such as the anthology Altern Ecologies (Frame 2016). Based in London and Helsinki, Elfving holds a PhD from Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, and is currently on research leave from her position as Head of Programme at Frame Contemporary Art Finland.

ICA, London
23 March, 8pm to midnight

Join us to launch our new record label, Wysing Polyphonic. Buy tickets from the ICA's website here.

We are collaborating with the ICA, London to launch our new record label, Wysing Polyphonic, with a live performance by the first band to release on the label, Ectopia, alongside special guests N-Prolenta, xname and SIREN. 

Wysing Polyphonic will commission new compositions in sonic experimentation and for the first release three-piece, Ectopia, have created a suite of seven new works that take the listener on a journey into sad acid house, scratched DVDs, lipstick clogged with rolling tobacco and hangovers with absent lovers.

Ectopia, who have been together since 2011, use words, cello and synthesisers and are Adam Christensen, Jack Brennan and Viki Steiri. Previous works have included sound-tracking Jack Smith’s experimental film Normal Love, 1963 and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928.

The vinyl album life/section by Ectopia will be on sale on the night.

A dedicated recording studio is being built at Wysing over the summer of 2017 which, alongside being a resource for the artists and musicians associated with Wysing, will be available for hire.

Ectopia have been together since 2011, and use words, cello and synthesisers in their music to take the listener on a journey into sad acid house, scratched DVDs, lipstick clogged with rolling tobacco and hangovers with absent lovers. They are Adam Christensen, Jack Brennan and Viki Steiri. Previous works have included sound-tracking Jack Smith’s experimental film Normal Love (1963) and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). They played Wysing's music festival in 2015 are the first music project to appear on new the Wysing Polyphonic label.

N-Prolenta has been described as being on the cutting vanguard of experimental electronic music and they have worked with the likes of serpentwithfeet, PTP, NON Worldwide, and Halcyon Veil and been featured in publications including The Wire, Art in America, and The Fader.Coming through a wide-ranging palate of sonic influences-- spanning trap music and new age soundscapes, to the mutated club sounds of late, to trance, soul, darkwave, and lyric poem, Brandon Covington Sam-Sumana's work through the N-Prolenta project ever-erects tapestries of sound that are as dissonantly idiosyncratic and abrasive as they are rapturously gentle and apparative. 

xname is Eleonora Oreggia, a London based conceptual electronic artist from Milan who makes performances and interactive installations. Her live compositions transform light and other electromagnetic frequencies in sound waves through self-built synthesizers and complex semi-chaotic machines.

SIREN is a collective that started a year ago in London, with the purpose of creating a space for those under-represented in dance music on lineups and in crowds. Their parties, zines and radio shows aim to be musical and political platforms for women and non-binary people, as well as a space to critique current trends within electronic music and create alternatives. SIREN are not a DJ collective but many do DJ and focus on the exploring the broadest sense of techno - from electro to minimal, acid to breakbeat.

The Curve, Barbican
20-28 January

London-based investigative arts organisation Siobhan Davies Dance premiere an ambitious new installation comprised of multiple pieces by choreographers, visual artists, scientists and designers, including Wysing studio artist Emma Smith. Exploring how the body feels when in the act of doing, the installation includes live performance, film projection and objects that are presented as an ever-changing arrangement. 

Each of the works draws upon the library and practices of the art historian Aby Warburg, who collected diverse images of gestures from different times and places and positioned them side-by-side to reveal previously-hidden relationships. As they interrogate the fascinating relationship between mind and body the artists create new works including choreography exploring lost movements from the past, interactive structures examining the postures of an argument and a series of hanging mobiles inspired by Albrecht Dürer’s Melancholia. The works appear within a large-scale architecture, which is built-up, dismantled and rearranged, creating new pathways and drawing visitors into a journey of discovery. 

This exciting work features choreographers Andrea Buckley, Siobhan Davies, Helka Kaski, Charlie Morrissey, Efrosini Protopapa, and Matthias Sperling; visual artists Jeremy Millar, Emma Smith, and design duo Glithero (Tim Simpson and Sarah van Gameren). 

Supported using public funding by Arts Council England and support from Cockayne – Grants for the Arts and The London Community Foundation

Presented in collaboration with Tramway.

In association with The Warburg Institute, School of Advanced Study, University of London.

Peterborough Cathedral
16 February, 18.30

Why do you want to go to the moon?

As part of their residency at Metal Peterborough artist Bettina Furnée and writer Lucy Sheerman have created a choral work based on candid responses from a series of interviews with twelve Peterborough couples about a potential extended trip to the moon. Excised, edited and rearranged, these transcripts form the basis of a new libretto, which reflects the format of Evensong, and explores issues of faith and changed perspectives.

Could you take a journey into space with your long-term partner?

Celebrated composer Cheryl Frances-Hoad set the new libretto to music. This contemporary fifty-minute work for cathedral choir, children's choir and organ is modelled on the structure of Evensong, and sets both traditional texts (including the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis) and the new libretto. Cheryl Frances-Hoad is described as ‘an extraordinary talent’ (The Times) whose work is ‘mercurial, always compelling’ (The Spectator).

What would you disagree about?

Even You Song invites the city into the cathedral with the participation of 120 schoolchildren and the twelve Peterborough couples who volunteered to do the interviews.

Even You Song is an artwork inspired by the structure and themes of Evensong, a service that goes back to the earliest days of the Church. The piece celebrates that tradition and the return of the organ to Peterborough Cathedral in 2017, re-pitched from ‘Old Philarmonic’ to ‘Standard’ concert pitch. The project was influenced by the cathedral’s invocation of a heavenly sphere through its soaring pillars, its beautiful otherworldly evensong service and the sheer force and power of the organ, which figures as a kind of ‘lift off’.

What would you miss most?

The first performance of Even You Song will take place at Peterborough Cathedral on 16 February 2017. The music is directed by Cathedral Director of Music Steven Grahl, and performed by Cathedral and Community Choirs, with assistant Director David Humphreys as organist. The Community Choir brings together choirs from St. Augustine’s CE (VA)

Junior School, Bishop Creighton Academy, West Town Primary Academy & William Law CE Primary School.

The production incorporates digital projections of domestic interiors captured during the interviews and a printed libretto.

Bettina and Lucy developed Even You Song as artists in residence at METAL, Peterborough with support from Arts Council England and Peterborough Cathedral.

Also generously supported by:

Ambache Charitable Trust, Arts Council England, Metal, Peterborough, Peterborough Cathedral, Peterborough Presents, RVW Trust

Read this review from Planet Hugill. 

12-6pm, 1 October
SET Space, SE1 3AW, London

Syllabus is looking forward to participating in this day of workshops around alternative arts education, organised by School of the Damned.

Wysing Arts Centre's Assistant Curator John Bloomfield will be joined by Tom Smith and Frederica Agbah from Syllabus II and III to discuss the manifestos that each year's group have drawn up. Composed during the first retreat of each year, these manifestos are used to shape the ideals of the group and to lay down ground rules for the year ahead. 

THE FIRST 100% OFFICIAL UNOFFICIAL ART EDUCATION OPEN-DAY
An informal open day exploring the plural experiences of alternative art schools and wider conversations of alternative education all together. An opportunity to get to know existing alternative art schools but also teach you how to DIY or DIT (Do It Together).
SOTD will use this day as the launch for inviting applications for 2018/19. Alongside this, these alt- courses or schools will showcase how they are unique through workshops presenting their individual identity ; AltMFA, Art and Critique, Pacto, School of the Damned, Syllabus, TOMA, Turps Banana.
The venue is fully wheelchair accessible.
This event is part of the ART LICKS Weekend

For more information and tickets, click here.

Tate Modern Switch House
6 December 2016, 19.30–20.30

Recent Wysing artists-in-residence David Blandy and Larry Achiampong present a performance of their Finding Fanon project at Tate Modern.

More information here.

Examine communal and personal heritage through film and performance.

Inspired by the lost plays of radical humanist Frantz Fanon, the Finding Fanon project examines how society, race and racism affect our relationships with each other in an age of new technology, pop culture and globalisation.

Artists Larry Achiampong and David Blandy work collaboratively and share an interest in popular culture and the postcolonial position. They examine communal and personal heritage, using performance to investigate ‘the self’ as a fiction, devising alter-egos to point at their divided selves. Over two years, their research has evolved into a body of work including digital imagery, exhibitions, performance and video.

Become part of the story in a new live work by Larry Achiampong and David Blandy

Explore reconstruction, rejuvenation and the possibility or impossibility of reconciliation in the latest installment of Finding Fanon.

Incorporating music, text and large-scale video projection, the performance takes place around a closed shelter, acting as both a mysterious presence and sculptural centrepiece within the installation. Immerse yourself in the space as lines are blurred between performers and the audience.

Thursday 16 May to Sunday 19 May
Guest Projects, London, E8 4QL

This year’s Syllabus IV artists present OUTWITH in London’s Guest Projects. Presenting diverse works in sculpture, film, photography and live performance, the cohort artists include; Scott Caruth, Libita Clayton, Jessica Coleman, Bettina Fung, Laura Hindmarsh, Beth Kettel, David Lisser, Alicja Rogalska, Kirsty Russell and Abigail Sidebotham. 

For more information, please visit the Guest Projects website here. 

HIAP Helsinki
​16-18 November

Wysing's Director Donna Lynas is one of the speakers at Residencies Reflected, a symposium focusing on residencies and their critical role in the field of contemporary art today.

The symposium sets out to reflect on residencies as spaces for artistic development on cultural thresholds that have been opened up by accelerated globalization. It addresses the enduring significance and radical re-signification of mobility in relation to artistic practices by mapping historical trajectories, current economic and political pressures, as well as the impact of ecological and humanitarian urgencies, which position residenciestoday at the intersection of unsettled dichotomies of private and public, home and elsewhere, temporary and permanent. The symposium thus aims at articulating the position of residencies within the ecosystem of contemporary art while recognizing the ongoing processes of wider societal changes and their effects on the arts, professional practices and movement.

The symposium programme is built around two interlinked enquiries that map the shifting landscape whereresidencies are located: the notions and realities of artistic work on the one hand, and of mobility on the other. The opening day of the symposium will discuss European artists’ colonies in the 19th century, offering a resonant historical backdrop for the reconsideration of residencies. The second day looks at changes in artistic work within today’s context of the neoliberal work ethic and the potentiality of residencies for nurturing artistic development in more sustainable working conditions. The final day sets out to rethink in depth the significance of mobility in relation to artistic practices at present within the frame of acute questions about sustainability and access. What kind of futures can artist residencies envisage? Can they work towards new cosmopolitics today?

The keynote speakers of the symposium, art historian Dr. Nina Lübbren (Anglia Ruskin University) and Professor Dr. Pascal Gielen (Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts) are joined by a number of other speakers - directors of leading international residency programmes, researchers and artists - including art historian, Professor Hanna Johansson, Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki; Donna Lynas, Wysing Arts Centre; Adam Sutherland, Grizedale Arts; Laurel Ptak, Triangle Arts Association; Lex ter Braak, Jan van Eyck Academy; Barbara Hernandez, SOMA; Alma Heikkilä and Antti Majava, Mustarinda; Marie-Nour Héchaimé, Ashkal Alwan; Marita Muukkonen, Perpetuum Mobile; and Ika Sienkiewics-Nowacka, Centre for Contemporary Art Ujasdowksi Castle. A full programme will be announced on the first week of October.

Residencies Reflected opens with a welcoming event at the Academy of Fine Arts exhibition space in Helsinki and continues over two days as an intensive retreat at HIAP on the island of Suomenlinna. The symposium is co-organized by the Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki, Uniarts Helsinki, the HIAP – Helsinki International Artist Programme and Frame Contemporary Art Finland. It will be followed by a publication based on the symposium and drawing together the emerging critical discourse on residencies. The symposium programme is conceived and hosted by Irmeli Kokko (Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki), Taru Elfving (Frame) and Juha Huuskonen (HIAP).

Faculty of English, Judith E Wilson Drama Studio, Cambridge
Friday 28 October, 7–9 pm

Artist-in-residence Gary Zhexi Zhang presents a pecha kucha on the posthuman. Pecha Kucha is a fast-paced series of short-form presentations (20 slides x 20 seconds each = 6min40s). 

POSTHUMAN PECHAKUCHA is a collaboration between ten contemporary artists and researchers working at the intersection of cultural, scientific and political developments of the posthuman — broadly understood as the extension, reconceptualisation, or supersession of human being and its environment. Nebulous in scope, topics in discussion range include synthetic biology, queer archives, and teledildonics. Participants include artists, poets and sciences and humanities researchers and will comprise an energetic array of posthuman performances and provocations. After the individual presentations (and a break for drinks) there will be a discussion/debate/argument between the participants, loosely chaired by Gary Zhexi Zhang.

Kris Beaghton is a writer, artist and filmmaker currently undertaking a PhD in Screen Media and Cultures at University of Cambridge. Her research is focused on queer theory, and she has a background in Virtual Reality storytelling.

Agnes Fury Cameron is completing an MEng in electronic and information engineering at the University of Cambridge. Her research is in holographic interaction.

Dr Roberto Zanchi is a scientific consultant and a postdoctoral researcher in molecular biology. He will be speaking on the life-cycle of the social amoeba, dictyostelium discoideum.

Henry Driver is a digital artist whose work spans photography, film, sculpture and CGI, exploring perceptions of real and virtual worlds. Exhibitions include Aesthetica Art Prize 2016 and Late at Tate, Tate Britain.

Klara Kofen is an opera director, stage designer, and librettist. She is the Associate Artistic Director of Waste Paper Opera Company, and has worked with companies including Birmingham Opera Company, Theatron Novum, and Raucous Rossini. Klara holds an MSt. In the European Enlightenment from the University of Oxford, and is presenting on ‘Automatons, Animism and Angst’.

Dr Thomas Meany is an Interdisciplinary Research Fellow at the Department of Plant Sciences. His current research brings new optical and microfabrication techniques to the study of synthetic biology. He will be speaking on photonics and quantum computing.

Oscar Farley is a writer, musician and academic working on comics formalism and Charles M Schulz's Peanuts. His writing has been published in The Mays. He has also worked in bookshops, on West Gallery transcriptions, and archaeological digs.

Mathilde Sergent is an artist and writer who holds a Masters in American Literature from the University of Cambridge. Current interests involve the queer archive and the role of grief and anger in the formation of political subjectivity for marginalised communities.

The artists David Blandy and Larry Achiampong will be screening part of their project ‘Finding Fanon’, an investigation into how identities are continually shaped by colonial histories and mass- media art forms, such as television, video-games, music and the internet. Their works have been shown in the UK and internationally, including Tate Britain and Logan Center, Chicago.

Gary Zhexi Zhang is an artist and a staff contributor for Frieze magazine. His work concerns personal and political narratives of the digital; current research includes slime moulds and the Chinese internet. Recent exhibitions/screenings include Tenderflix 2016 at ICA, London, and ‘Would You Like Help’ at EMBASSY gallery, Edinburgh.

Big Screen Southend
15 October to 8 January

Joey Holder and William Evans & Julia Crabtree present work developed while on residencies at Wysing at Big Screen Southend (Focal Point Gallery). Big Screen Southend runs an ongoing programme of artist films to coincide with a quarterly artist commission led by Focal Point Gallery.

To coincide with 'Exhibition for Go-Getters', the first major solo exhibition in the UK for Austrian artist Torsten Slama, a series of 6 moving image works are presented on Big Screen Southend at the centre of Elmer Square. 

'A Retreat in Time' 
15 October 2016 to 8 January 2017 

Alison Ballance 
Julia Crabtree and William Evans 
Joey Holder 
Sean Lavelle 
Peter Simpson 
Rafal Zajko 

In Critters, 2015, a work developed by Julia Crabtree and William Evans during their residency at Wysing late last year, an object struggles to animate itself within a landscape that couldn’t be further from the green pastures of rural Cambridgeshire. Taking its form from historic radio telescopes located at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Astronomy, the object has been relocated onto the surface of an unknown planet, one that the object’s antecedents may have at one time tried to contact.

Joey Holder's PROTEUS, 2015–ongoing, uses footage recorded from an ROV (remotely operated vehicle) deep at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean (provided by Katrin Linse, British Antarctic Survey) where a strange landscape of 'Black Smokers' (underwater volcanoes) and completely unique ecosystems are found. Flashing across the screen like a heads up display are genetic charts, which map the data of the creatures.

Abadan Contemporary Art Museum, Abadan, Iran
26 September to 21 November 

Soheila Sokhanvari presents her work at the second edition of the Iran Contemporary Art Biennale, which brings together paintings, photographs, installations and video art highlighting peace, not war. 

The Iran Contemporary Art Biennale (ICA Biennale) successfully concluded its second edition “Peace on Paper” on 31 July at the Niavaran Cultural Center (NCC) in Tehran, with the second leg of the Biennale opening on 26 September 2016 at the Abadan Museum of Contemporary art. The Iran Contemporary Art Biennale is an independent and non-profit organization and has been dedicated to the advancement of discourse on peace in the field of contemporary art in Iran. It provides a context for the production and exhibition of Iranian as well as international contemporary art and related cultural practices.

The “ICA Biennale” began as a venture to showcase Iranian contemporary art by providing an international platform for innovative contemporary Iranian artists; alongside established international artists so as to create a space for cultural and social appreciation and exchange. “Peace on Paper” continues where the first edition “The Culture of Peace” left off, with some 90 Iranian visual artists participating and 35 international artists hailing from around the world and 15 galleries present, including three from Germany, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. This programme has been curated by Majid Abbasi-Farhani with Shadi Noyan as the curatorial advisor for the second edition.

Text from an article from Art Radar by Lisa Pollman.

More information here.

Crossroads Art Fair, London 
6 October to 9 October

Soheila Sokhanvari presents her work at Crossroads, a new international art show, from the organisers of the highly regarded Pinta Art Fair. Crossroads encompasses special curatorial projects and forty-six galleries from around the world handpicked by a team of renowned curators. This niche fair is fresh, multicultural and accessible. Crossroads presents the most current artistic trends in a relaxed and convivial setting. An opportunity to experience the highest quality contemporary art by established and emerging artists, from a multitude of backgrounds and spanning different generations, who share a desire for breaking with the status quo and exploring new realms, new forms, and new ideas. 

ASC Gallery, London
1 October, 3–6pm

Kit Craig presents Thought Forms Thought, 2015, a film developed while at Wysing on the Multiverse residency with Joey Holder and Takeshi Shiomitsu. 

"The film is a kind of dumb philosophical conversation played out on table top with objects, things and sculptural forms both describing and leading the narrative. It is divided into four parts, in each part the table top itself shifts from on the floor, to an elevated table, to an upright wall position and finally to a collapsing, folded, more sculptural space." Kit Craig.

More information here.
 

SIC, Helsinki
10 September to 9 October

Essi Kausalainen presents a new work developed while on residency at Wysing in 2015, when the artists-in-residence resonded to the theme of the multiverse.

Mycorrhiza is a symbiosis formed by a plant and a fungus. In this symbiosis both species feed and benefit one another. The exhibition Newcomers investigates themes inspired by the idea of symbiosis: being inside another, opening up and surrender, trust and love. The exhibition consists of a video, love song, text piece and performance.

Essi Kausalainen (b 1979) has studied performance art and – theory in Turku Arts Academy and the Theatre Academy of Finland. Inspired by plant thinking, feminist science studies, new materialisms and quantum physics, in her art Kausalainen creates ceremony like situations and events to explore and to celebrate the complex coexistence of different species of beings and things. Her work has been exhibited and performed in venues such as la Galerie (Noisy-le-Sec), kim? (Riga), Malmö Moderna Museet, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Museum for Contemporary Art Roskilde, Nikolaj Kunsthalle (Copenhagen) and Kunstraum Bethanien (Berlin).

The Architecture Gallery, RIBA  
22 September 2016 to 5 February 2017

Wysing has had a long relationship with artist Giles Round and we are excited to be working with him on a major new commission for the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in London

Through extensive research of RIBA's archive, Round has created an exhibition for the Architecture Gallery that focuses attention on one of the most familiar and unavoidable architectural features of the city: the façade. 

Inspired by the work of a wide-range of architects represented in the RIBA’s world-class architectural collections, in the exhibition Round investigates the increasing tension between the static exterior and changing interior of the architecture around  us, highlighting the aesthetic qualities of façades in their original conception, and the subsequent contemporary use and reuse of these buildings.

Original works of iconic façades by Berthold Lubetkin, Venturi Scott Brown and Jane Drew feature in the exhibition alongside representation and re-appropriation of façades from other architectural periods with unique graphic qualities from Greek Revival and Art Nouveau, to modern and postmodern architecture.

A key component of the exhibition is the transformation of the gallery into a production studio. Here, façades from a ‘stylebook’ compiled from RIBA’s collections, are applied to architectural sculptures that mimic the structure of buildings. Over the course of the exhibition period these will form an installation recognisable to visitors as an assembly of façades – a new city scape. The sculptures will be for sale in the gallery during the exhibition period.

Lotte Juul Petersen, Artists & Programmes Curator at Wysing, has worked with Giles, and Corinne Mynatt and Colin Sterling at RIBA, on the exhibition.

For further information visit RIBA's website, here.

Watou Art Festival
Poperigne, Belgium
2 July to 4 September

Soheila Sokhanvari will be presenting work at the Watou Art Festival along side readings, performances and art installations.

‘If the world was an understandable place, art would not exist.’ Albert Camus wrote.

Art Festival Watou is an exceptional meeting place for poets, writers, artists and other creative minds brought together in a unique space for a creative dialogue . Art Festival Watou is more than just an exhibition between language and image. Under the title SUMMER SENSES plans have been made around various events during the ten consecutive weekends this year for mini-happenings and meetings with other art and culture disciplines all focusing on the theme “The Strength of Empathy”. The festival will include readings, performances, art installations as well as the popular “Wall”, “Poetic Cinema” and “Hall of Fame” for the visitors to explore.
The festival is a space for the entire family to investigate and enjoy.

Some of the artists participating this summer are:
Wim Helsen, Athos Burez, Benjamin Vandewalle, Barbara Rottiers, Katharina Smets, Inne Eysermans, Joke Devynck, Delphine Lecompte, Sabien Clement, Soheila Sokhanvari, Michaël Vandebril, Max Temmerman and Tom Liekens

The entire calendar of all these events can be found here and on facebook from the end of June onwards.

The Syllabus Artists Residency
Guest Projects, London
3-9 June 2016

The Syllabus artists from 2015/16 have been invited to take up residence at Guest Projects, London from 3 - 9 June. Featuring Simon Bayliss, Noel Clueit, Susie Green, Mathew Parkin, Rory Pilgrim, Jessica Sarah Rinland, Tom Salt, Lucy Steggals, Tom Varley and Rafal Zajko. 

The artists are nearing the end of their particpation in the first year of The Syllabus and have developed new collaborations and opportunities across the past year. They will use the gallery space at Guest Projects to work, research, explore, present, screen, invite, perform new work and test out new ideas. 

For further details on opening times and events, please see updates on the Guest Projects website here. 

The artists will be returning to Wysing Arts Centre on 17 June for their final retreat as part of The Syllabus 2015/16.

Syllabus II has now been anounced and you can see the selected artists in our press release here.

The Shift Screening at South London Gallery
Saturday 21 May 2016 2-6pm

Mark Aerial Waller will be a presenting a performative work at an event to coincide with the current exhibition at Flat Time House and to mark its imiment closure.

The screening programme includes work by Holly Antrum and Jennifer Pike Cobbing, Giles Bailey, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, the Flat Time House MFI group, Melanie Jackson, Bea McMahon, Rory Pilgrim, Laure Prouvost, Kari Robertson, Anne Tallentire and a performative work by Mark Aerial Waller. This event, held at South London Gallery, presents an extensive selection of moving image that has been inspired by and conceived in this unique space over the last eight years.

Mark's contribution is Milles feuilles (2011/2016) A confluence of taste, memory, touch and video is put into action in this new arrangement between Latham's rarely seen Fragments and NOIT Intercouses and Waller's interdisciplinary practice of fractured time. Drawing from a performance made at The Cambridge Conflab, Wysing Arts Centre in 2011.

26 - 28 May, Huntly, Scotland
White Wood Forum
Art and Sustainability: Joseph Beuys and Beyond

Wysing studio artist, Caroline Wendling, and Artists and Programmes, Curator Lotte Juul Petersen, are both contributing to symposium The White Wood Forum organised by Deveron Arts and Caroline Wendling.

The White Wood Forum is a continuation of thinking about art and ecology, began by Joseph Beuys whose practice both literally - using acorns from his 7000 Oaks - and conceptually sowed the seeds for The White Wood. As a living monument to peace, created by the people of Huntly, the wood will grow and change as the oaks mature over the next 300 years. Working as an artist, pacifist and environmentalist, Beuys' work acts as a confluence between social and cultural perspectives of sustainability: local and global understandings and lived practices around the world.

Focusing on the nexus between art, peace and ecology the White Wood Forum will ask how art can be in harmony with the key principles of sustainability, including next to ecology - social justice, grass roots democracy and non-violence. By bringing together people from arts, anthropology, ecology, politics, peacemaking and locality, The White Wood Forum will ask how we can foster a culture of complexity, an art and a community that impacts the future, to the benefit of generations to come.

A wide range of contributors will be taking part in the forum. For more information, click here.

Champagne Life
Saatchi Gallery, London
13 January - 9 March

Champagne Life is a group exhibition of works by 14 female artists at Saatchi gallery, including Wysing studio artist Soheila Sokhanvari.

The exhibition also includes works by Mequitta Ahuja, Alice Anderson, Marie Angeletti, Jelena Bulajic, Julia Dault, Mia Feuer, Sigrid Holmwood, Virgile Ittah, Seung Ah Paik, Maha Malluh,Suzanne McClelland, Stephanie Quayle, Julia Wachtel.

For further information about Sokhanvari's work please click here.

Working Together: The Impact of Artists on Institutions
2 April 2016
Focal Point Gallery in Southend

We are pleased to announce that, as Chair of the East Contemporary Visual Arts Network (ECVAN), Wysing is on tour with a symposium at Focal Point Gallery in Southend. 

Book your place HERE

Working with colleagues in The Netherlands, this symposium will explore the dynamic relationship between artist, curator and organisation; looking at how collaborations on new projects and commissions allows for institutional methodologies and processes to be challenged and changed.

The symposium will profile innovative case studies from arts organisations in the Netherlands, presented in partnership with the artists they work with, to interrogate how artists have impacted on working with communities and on the development of collecting and curating contemporary art.

Programme: 

10am Registration with coffee and tea

11am  Welcome by Joe Hill, Director, Focal Point Gallery and introduction to the day by Chelsea Pettitt, Head of Partnerships, and Donna Lynas, Director, Wysing Arts Centre

11.15am Keynote address –  Beatrix Ruf, Director of the Stedlijk Museum, and artist Ed Atkins. Followed by Q&A 

12.30pm  Lunch including an opportunity to look around the exhibition Duh? Art & Stupidity

1:00pm   Introduction to Duh? Art & Stupidity by Curator Paul Clinton 

1:45pm Case studies followed by Q&As
- Artists working with communities, CASCO, Office for Art, Design and Theory, Publishing & Education coordinator Yolande van der Heide with Werker Magazine
- Artists in residence, De Ateliers Director Dominic van den Boogerd with artist David Jablonowski
- Artists working with collecting institutions, Stedelijk Museum Head of Collections Bart Rutten with artist Cally Spooner

3:45pm  Refreshment break

4:15pm Breakout groups.
- Group 1 Working with communities (led by CASCO and moderator Deborah Smith, Curator and member of ECVAN) 
- Group 2 Artists in residence (led by De Ateliers and moderator Lynda Morris, Curator and member of ECVAN) 
- Group 3 Working with collections (led by Stedelijk and moderator Dr. Jenny Powell, Senior Curator, Kettle's Yard and member of ECVAN)

5:15pm Conclusion of the day 
5:30pm Screening programme curated by Outpost, Norwich
6pm Ends with a drinks reception in the gallery for closing of the exhibition

Cost: £10 admission (including lunch and refreshments)
Concessions available for students, practising artists, unwaged and registered disabled attendees.
Book your place on Eventbrite HERE.

This event is being BSL interpreted

Supported by The Art Fund with additional support from the Contemporary Art Society and with thanks to the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands

ECVAN is part of the national Contemporary Visual Arts Network (CVAN) and delivers collaborative projects that explore new ways of working together to support artists, develop arts infrastructure and reach new audiences for art in new ways. ECVAN includes Aid & Abet, Cambridge; Art Exchange at The University of Essex; Bedford Creative Arts; Black Barn Project Space, Norfolk; Colchester & Ipswich Museums; Deborah Smith Projects; Departure Lounge, Luton; firstsite, Colchester; Focal Point Gallery, Southend; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; Norwich Castle Museum; Outpost, Norwich; Smiths Row, Bury St Edmunds; The Minories Galleries, Colchester; UH Galleries, University of Hertfordshire; Professor Lynda Morris; and Katherine Wood. ECVAN is chaired and coordinated by Wysing Arts Centre.

Ed Atkins is a British artist currently living and working in Berlin. He has exhibited internationally, including recent exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and New Museum Triennial, New York (all 2015), Serpentine Gallery, London (2014), Kunsthalle Zurich (2014); MoMA PS1, New York (2013), Chisenhale Gallery, London (2012) as well as the Lyon and Venice Biennales (2013). Atkins' video, sound, drawing and writing explores the limits of representation through CGI, performance and rhythm. His practice particularly explores the ambivalent distinctions between so-called material and immaterial worlds, the digital and the analogue, the figurative and the literal.

Dominic van den Boogerd is director and tutor at the international artists’ institute De Ateliers in Amsterdam. His reviews and articles on contemporary art have been published in numerous art magazines, including Parkett, Frieze, ArtReview, Metropolis M and De Witte Raaf. He wrote essays for books and exhibition catalogues on a.o. Marlene Dumas, René Daniëls, Luc Tuymans, Mary Heilmann, Fiona Tan, Thomas Houseago and Michael Raedecker. He was guest tutor at the Fachhochschule für Kunst und Gestaltung in Bern, Switzerland, the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford and the Dublin Institute of Technology and Fine Arts, Ireland.

Yolande van der Heide is publishing and education coordinator at CASCO – Office for Art, Design and Theory, where she started as an intern in 2008. She is managing editor for Grand Domestic Revolution (GDR) Handbook (2014) and Practice International (forthcoming), and the How to Live Together (2012–2013) and Community in Print (2013–2014) editions of Publishing Class, a course designed by Casco within the MFA program at the Dutch Art Institute in collaboration with the Werkplaats Typografie. She has been working with art collective Werker since 2012, specifically in the context of Ask!, an alliance of domestic and cultural workers making actions to support workers while confronting theoretical and material representations of invisible labor.

David Jablonowski is a German artist currently living and working in Amsterdam. He has had solo exhibitions around the world, including Kunsthalle Lingen, Germany (2015), Gallery Luettgenmeijer (2014), Baltic, Gateshead (2013), Bloombergspace, London (2011) and Dallas Contemporary, USA (2011). His work has been featured in recent group exhibitions at the Witte de With, Rotterdam, Gallerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck, Austria and Les Territoires, Montreal, Canada (all 2015).

Jablonowski was previously in residence at De Atelier from 2007-2009 and is now a tutor and on the Advisory board for the institution. His work explores the history of sculpture and how it can aid communication between analogue and digital contemporary culture.

Beatrix Ruf is the Director of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. After completing her studies, she was Curator at Kunstmuseum Thurgau, Warth from 1994-1998 and Director of Kunsthaus Glarus, Glarus from 1998-2001. In 2001, Ruf was appointed Director of Kunsthalle Zürich, overseeing a substantial expansion project launched in 2003 and concluded in 2012. In 2006, she curated the third edition of the Tate Triennial in London and in 2008 she was Co-Curator of the Yokohama Triennial. She has been a member of the think tank core group of the LUMA foundation since 2010.In 2013 Ruf co-founded POOL, a postgraduate curatorial program in Zürich. She is also a Member of several Advisory and Programme Committees amongst others: the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, Garage Moskow, MAXXI, Rome, the Samdani Foundation, Bangladesh and serves frequently as a jury member in award committees, among them the Guggenheim Museum’s Hugo Boss Prize and the Absolut Award and currently the Han Nefkens/MACBA Award, the Turner Prize, Erasmus Prize and the Prix de Rome.

Bart Rutten has been Head of Collections at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam since 2014 and was previously the Curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the Stedelijk from 2008. His recent exhibitions include The Oasis of Matisse (2015) and Kazimir Malevich and the Russian Avant-Garde (2013) as well as a major rehang of the Stedelijk's contemporary art collection in 2012 alongside numerous other exhibitions. He has worked closely with artists such as Rineke Dijkstra, Stanley Brouwn, Joan Jonas, John Knight and Guido van de Werve. He also sits on advisory boards for more alternative artspaces like the NDSM art foundation, the Kunstvlaai and the Service Garage (all in Amsterdam), and has been a guest speaker focusing on the history of video art for various art courses and universities in the Netherlands and abroad.

Cally Spooner is a writer and an artist based in London. She has had solo presentations around the world including at New Museum and Performa 13, New York; Bielefelder Kunstverein; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; gb agency, Paris; Spike Island, Bristol; Tate Modern, Frieze Projects 2014 and Kunsthal Charlottenburg, Copenhagen. Her novel Collapsing In Parts was published by Mousse in 2013 and she is a recipient of the 2013 Paul Hamlyn Foundation Awards for Artists. 

Using assemblages of theory, philosophers, pop music, media, current affairs and corporate rhetoric, Spooner has developed a distinctive body of work consisting of installations, essays, novels and live performances such as radio broadcasts, plays and musicals.

Werker Magazine is a publication about photography and labour initiated by the visual artist Marc Roig Blesa and the graphic designer Rogier Delfos. Its starting point is the Worker Photography Movement, a group of associations of amateur photographers that appeared in Germany in the 1920s, following in the steps of the first socialist photography experiments in the USSR which extended to Europe, the United States, and Japan. It takes an interest in working methodologies, based on self-representation, self-publishing, image analysis, and collective learning processes. Each issue of the publication is produced and distributed in a different context (a fine arts academy, a museum, a neighbourhood, the Internet…), thus exploring strategies of interaction with specific audiences. They have worked with partners from around the world, including in Cuba, Spain, The Netherlands, Italy, China, the UK, Bolivia, Russia and Switzerland.

Saturday 23 January, 3.00 – 5.00pm
Kenneth Armitage Foundation, London W14 8RR

Dominic van den Boogerd, Director of De Ateliers, Amsterdam, Lotte Juul Petersen, Artists and Programmes Curator at Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, and artist Francis Upritchard discuss the significance of residencies at public institutions. This talk will think about the role residencies now need to play, to support artists to develop new works and provide safe spaces to experiment, at a time when costs of living and education are becoming increasingly unaffordable.

In 2015/16 Camden Arts Centre celebrates its 50th anniversary and, to mark the occasion, is presenting five lectures looking at the important role public institutions such as Camden Arts Centre have played in making art accessible for everyone. Read more here.

with, and, or, without
12 December 2015 - 6 March 2016

Wysing studio artist Florian Roithmayr presents a new body of sculptural works which observe material transformations in the processes of making. Capturing the unexpected gestures that occur in the interstice between mould and cast, the sculptures embody the consequences of one surface, material or body yielding another. The configuration of the exhibition will change daily at the inclination of the front of house team as Roithmayr sets up parameters before relinquishing control of the works.

Interested in labour that renders itself invisible upon completion, Roithmayr has undertaken intensive internships, shadowing engineering specialists such as a car surface decorator and a concrete beautician, who manipulate materials to perform beyond their physical expectations. The sculptures act not as discrete objects but as representations of an accumulation of research, process and production.

Re-thinking Practice: Discussions on Contemporary Art Practice in the SW & Beyond
Visual Arts South West, Ocean Studios, Plymouth
3 December, 1.30–6pm

Wysing's Director, Donna Lynas, will be speaking on art and education at an event organised by Visual Arts South West.

The annual event will bring together artists, independent curators and producers, artist-led projects and representatives from the region’s arts organisations for a lively afternoon re-thinking art practice, exchanging knowledge and networking.

This year the event will focus attention on practice itself. The key factors shaping practice will be considered alongside those influencing the shape of the art world. South West initiatives and those from further afield will be drawn upon in relation to how they fit into these wider contexts.

Discussion and debate

Setting the scene for the day, artist, writer and lecturer Dave Beech will lead a provocation; ‘Entering the World From Here’.

An Art and Education session will discuss approaches to creative education, including the country's first school of creative arts, partnerships with cultural institutions and alternative forms of learning and education. The speakers are Andrew Brewerton, Principle and Chief Executive,Plymouth College of Art, Lisa Harrison, Associate Dean, Faculty of Arts, Creative Industries & Education at UWE and Donna Lynas, Director,Wysing Arts Centre.

Writing, Curating and Making will see art writer Lizzie Lloyd, curator ofPlymouth Arts Centre Ben Borthwick and artist Carl Slater discuss the influencing factors in how and who with they choose to work, and how this contributes to the ‘validation’ of certain kinds of art practice.

If a Tree falls in a Forest: Art Outside Urban Centres will highlight artists, curators, collaborations and organisations that are developing new platforms and new approaches to collaboration and audience engagement outside of urban centres and consider how these projects contribute to the wider critical dialogue. Speakers include artist & organiser of copse barn camps Anna Best, artist & curator Jennie Savage and architect at Neat Design and founding member of MUF, Juliet Bidgood. The session will be chaired by Tim Martin, curator, Hestercombe Gallery, Somerset.

Full details about the event can be found on Visual Arts South West's website here.

Jerwood Space, London
16 September 2015 - 17 June 2016

Wysing Studio Artist Soheila Sokhanvari has been nominated for the Jerwood Drawing prize. Her work will be on show in a group exhibition at Jerwood Space, London, which will go on to tour the UK.

The Jerwood Drawing Prize is the largest and longest running annual open exhibition for drawing in the UK. Selected from original drawings, the Jerwood Drawing Prize has established a reputation for its commitment to championing excellence, and to promoting and celebrating the breadth of contemporary drawing practice within the UK. The exhibition provides a platform to showcase the work of drawing practitioners, from student to established, and as a project helps to define a wider understanding of the role and value of drawing in creative practice. The longevity of the Prize, which has been running since 1994, is a testament to the appetite of the artists who make drawings, and the continued interest of audiences visiting the exhibition, making it one of the most popular shows in the Jerwood Visual Arts programme.

The other artists selected for exhibition, and now also in the running for the prestigious Prize, are:

Elisa Alaluusua, Ian Andrews, Robert Battams, Frances Blane, Hannah Blight-Anderson, Pia Bramley, Pete Burke, John Close, Julie Cockburn, Daniel Crawshaw, Gerry Davies, Cinzia Delnevo, Sammy Dent, Emma Douglas, Bryan Eccleshall, Pennie Elfick, Susan England, Exchange + Draw, Mark Farhall, Craig Fisher, Nina Fowler, Thomas Gosebruch, Thomas Harrison, Roland Hicks, William Hughes, Julia Hutton, Mehr Javed, Ben Johnson, Ali Kayley, Nigel Kingsbury, Lois Langmead, Gary Lawrence, Juliette Losq, William Mackrell, Sean Maltby, Grace McMurray, Anouk Mercier, Mary Millner, Joonhong Min, Paul Peden, Lee John Phillips, Ruth Philo, Giulia Ricci, Annette Robinson, Jenny Ross, Gabriela Schutz, Sarah Seymour, Caroline Shadbolt, Charlotte Steel, Hanna ten Doornkaat, John Thole, Caroline Truss, Alan Turnbull, Ronis Varlaam, Rosie Vohra, Roy Willingham and Martha Zmpounou.

A total of 60 works by 58 artists, including one collaboration, have been carefully selected for exhibition by the panel; Dexter Dalwood, artist; Salima Hashmi, artist, curator and writer; and John-Paul Stonard, art historian.

The First Prize of £8,000, Second Prize of £5,000 and two Student Awards of £2,000 each, will be announced and awarded to the winning artists at the preview on 15 September 2015. After Jerwood Space the exhibition will tour to venues across the UK, including Cheltenham Art Gallery, Sidney Cooper Gallery, Canterbury and Falmouth Art Gallery.

For further information about Soheila's work click here.

Lawrence Epps, AGAIN, the very last time
The Original Spode Factory Site, Stoke-on-Trent
British Ceramics Biennial 2015
26 September - 8 November

Drawing on a body of research into the psychological predicament of risk, Wysing Studio Artist Lawrence Epps’ latest work reflects on the seductive power of chance.

Over the course of the Biennial thousands of ceramic coins made by the artist will be distributed to visitors to play his customised arcade coin pusher stocked with terracotta, porcelain and gold ceramic wealth. Visitors are left with a choice as they enter into a wager with the artwork: keep their winnings, or risk them again in the machine.

In the development of AGAIN Epps collaborated with the poet Holly Corfield Carr to produce the very last time. This limited edition publication expands on themes raised by the artwork and contains a series of essays and poems responding to the nature of chance, value and loss. The book publishes a new translation of a letter from Fyodor Dostoevsky to his wife pleading for forgiveness, and includes contributions from academics, writers and poets including Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck University of London, Esther Leslie; Russian psychoanalyst and founder of the Sigmund Freud Dream Museum St Petersburg, Viktor Mazin; Antiques Roadshow expert, Geoffrey Munn, OBE; and Dr Richard Kelleher, Assistant Keeper Coins at the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge. Epps has in turn responded to each contribution to the book, by creating a coin design inspired by each piece of writing.

For further information about the work please visit the British Ceramics Biennial website here.

For further information about Lawrence's work visit his studio artist page here.

Ways of Looking 26 November - 17 December

Simon Bayliss, Noel Clueit, Susie Green, Mathew Parkin, Rory Pilgrim, Jessica Sarah Rinland, Tom Salt, Lucy Steggals, Tom Varley and Rafal Zajko. Zoe Anspach, Robert Carter, Melanie Coles, Michael Crowe, Penelope Diaz, Jack Fisher, Victoria Fornieles, Robert Fung, Kyle Galloway, Jake Kent, Kate Mahony, Katy Mottison, Phillip Reeves, Anastasia Shin, Rebecca Townrow, Matt Welch, Mitt Wheeldon and Elise Wortley.

Hanover Project 26 November – 17 December 2015

Ways of Looking is a group show which brings together work currently being made by artists studying on two alternative postgraduate programmes, The Syllabus and The School of the Damned.

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 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 ten months.

It has been developed for artists with the input of established artists who have a connection to each of the partners and who will continue to contribute to its development and delivery; Céline Condorelli, Andy Holden, James Langdon, Niki Russell, Keith Wilson and others.

The Syllabus aims to reach artists from a wide geographic spread within the UK and, mindful of the current economic climate and changes within higher education, offers an intensive and cost-effective learning programme.

The School of the Damned 2015 are: Zoe Anspach, Robert Carter, Melanie Coles, Michael Crowe, Penelope Diaz, Jack Fisher, Victoria Fornieles, Robert Fung, Kyle Galloway, Jake Kent, Kate Mahony, Katy Mottison, Phillip Reeves, Anastasia Shin, Rebecca Townrow, Matt Welch, Mitt Wheeldon and Elise Wortley.

It is a free postgraduate art course run by, and for, its students. It provides participants with the critical space to develop and reassess their art practice. They operate without money, without a bank account and without financial obligation. School of the Damned runs a labour exchange programme with a growing number of guest artists, spaces and lecturers. They trade time for time to not only challenge the financial exclusivity of higher education but to strengthen and extend their network.

School of the Damned exists to promote access to free education as a fundamental right and stand in opposition to the current system of higher education. School of the Damned operates as a pseudo-institution without an internal hierarchy. The student body share roles and the responsibility to aid each other’s education as well as the development of the programme.

In Conversation

An in-conversation with artists from The Syllabus and The School of the Damned will be led by Amy Botfield in LT3 Foster Building on Thursday 26 November at 3pm, all are welcome.

Botfield will be asking the artists to elaborate on their experience of their respective programmes so far, and in relation to their experience of studying in institutions for their undergraduate degree.

Amy Botfield works in the arts team at Arts Council England where she supports a range of visual arts organisations including Focal Point Gallery in Southend-on-Sea, Wysing Arts Centre in Cambridge and OUTPOST in Norwich.

In addition to her work with organisations, she regularly provides advice about Grants for the arts and the Artists’ International Development Fund to artists, curators and project managers. Amy has a background in gallery management and art publishing. Recent curatorial and editorial projects include Every bird brings a different melody to the garden (2013), artist books by Lindsay Seers (2012) and Jordan Baseman (2011) and writing on acclaimed sculptor, poet and activist Jimmie Durham for the Hayward Gallery (2010).

Wysing Editions at Sunday Art Fair
15-18 October
Ambika P3, University of Westminster

Click here to visit our shop where many of the prints at the fair can also be bought online.

We will be at the Sunday Art Fair in London where we will be exhibiting some of our editions which will be for sale, including a newly commissioned limited edition print of Lawrence Lek’s Shiva’s Dreaming, 2014.

Alongside Shiva's Dreaming we will be exhibiting editions by:

James Beckett
Patrick Coyle
Michael Dean
Lawrence Epps
Naomi Harwin
Kate Owens
Elizabeth Price
Mark Titchner
Bedwyr Williams

All works are for sale and most are under £200.

The Sunday Art Fair focuses on emerging artists and international galleries and is located close to Baker Street station. Entry to the Fair is free.

Please visit the Sunday Art Fair website for information, here.

Our stand at Sunday Art Fair, London

Patrick Goddard, Serpentine Screenings
Hackney Picturehouse, London
19 November, 8.45pm

Patrick Goddard was in residence at Wysing for the Futurecamp residencies during the summer of 2014. For the Serpentine Screenings event Goddard will show two recent mockumentary films addressing money, complicity and commitment.

The first of these films, Gone to Croatan, 2014, was shot on and around Wysing's site during Goddard's residency. The screenings will be followed by a conversation with Ben Eastham.

Further information about the event is available on the Serpentine Gallery website here.

Further information about the Futurecamp residencies is available here.

Soheila Sokhanvari, Boogie Wonderland
Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London
15 October - 14 November

Iranian-born Wysing studio artist Soheila Sokhanvari is presenting new paintings and sculpture in the solo exhibition Boogie Wonderland at Kristin Hjellegjerde gallery, London.

Subscribing to the school of magical realism that enhances reality, in which the banal and everyday take on new life and meaning by being imbued with an elevated focus, the works also belie the complex political undertones of her work, allowing her to take a step back and examine events from her native country through the lens of distance and time. She investigates the concept of collective trauma as an experience that can be told through the narratives of individuals, using mainly family photographs as her source material, alongside found imagery from pop culture and news recordings.

Further information about the exhibition is available on the Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery website, here.

Further information about Sokhanvari's work is available here.

Lisa Wilkens, The Shadow of an Unseen Power
PAPER, Manchester
12 September - 24 October

Wysing Studio Artist Lisa Wilkens is having her first solo show at PAPER in Manchester.

The Shadow of an Unseen Power is an exhibition of drawings informed by the artist's personal experiences of anti-nuclear war activism growing up in Germany in the 1980s.

For further information about the exhibition on PAPER's website click here.

For further information about Wilkens' work at Wysing click here.

The boys the girls and the political
Lisson Gallery, London
17 July - 5 September

Wysing residency artist Alice Theobald will be showing her work developed for The Fifth Artist residency exhibition at Lisson Gallery's The boys the girls and the political.

Theobald's work, Today left for the sake of coming back tomorrow (or) impossible loves, shown in The Fifth Artist, is a sculptural video installation made up of dramatic verses and a composed soundtrack. Described by Theobald as existing in ‘non-time’, the works use nuanced wordplay and are absurdist in content. Speaking of love, loss, uncertainty, optimism and dejection, there is a sense of faux sentimentality that permeates the scene and which strikes a balance between irony, desolation, cliché and empathy all imparted with tragicomic pathos. The song Being Bored is arranged and performed by Phoebe Blatton and Alice Theobald.

The boys the girls and the political will also include works by Am Nuden Da, Lucy Beech and Edward Thomasson, Elaine Cameron-Weir, George Henry Longly, Jesper List Thomsen, Beatriz Olabarrieta, Ben Schumacher, Richard Sides and Cally Spooner.

The exhibition brings together 10 international artists working in close intellectual proximity to one another and articulates a group dynamic built upon multifaceted working methods, collaboration and an interest in material transformation. Curated by Hana Noorali and Lynton Talbot, the exhibition features performance, film, painting and sculpture and points towards a way of working informed by the vernacular of technological landscapes and an openness to collaborative exchange. Establishing a timely discourse that asks questions about the dissemination of information and the use of language as artist material, The boys the girls and the political encourages a fluid and immersive reading of the way in which these artists work.

Further information about exhibition is available on the Lisson Gallery website here.

Patrick Goddard, Gone to Croatan
Outpost, Norwich
2 - 31 May
Opening: 1 May 6-9pm
Performance: 8pm

Patrick Goddard completed a residency over the summer of 2014 during FutureCamp, where he realised the performance APOCALIPSTICK during the public event program Private vs Public: Activism, Economics and Politics Today.

During his residency at Wysing, Goddard developed the film Gone to Croatan (35min, 2014); the first in a series of films collectively entitled Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap that explore the fundamentals of money: what exactly it is, how and by whom it is created. The film is written and produced by Patrick Goddard, featuring Adam Burton and the artist himself.

Patrick Goddard’s recent works have taken the form of videos, books, performances and sculpture; all with an emphasis on poetry, observational anecdotes or research led articles. Without becoming politically illustrative, many works explore socio-politically loaded issues and although the topics explored can be wide ranging – from conceptions of evil to class politics, sociology to anarchy, the uncanny to the absurd – the works are linked via their tone or approach. Saturated with a sense of pathos, narratives undermine themselves with a self-defeating humor, playfully calling into question the sincerity or authority of the narrator and through this, the artist.

Recent shows include: a solo presentation, Revolver II, Matt’s Gallery, London, Autumn 2014; a group show, Objective Considerations of Contemporary Phenomena, M.O.T. International Projects, London, Autumn 2014; a group show, IV Moscow International Biennale of Young Art, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, June-August 2014.

Bettina Furnée, Counting in another language
Ruskin Gallery, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge
23 April - 16 May

Counting in another language brings together recent digital and moving image work by Wysing Studio Artist Bettina Furnée, addressing themes of displacement, alternative realities and language.

Her solo show at The Ruskin Gallery at Anglia Ruskin University includes three different time-lapse sequences for Here’s Luck, shot on a pocket camera during an Eastern Exchanges residency in the Caribbean. The short films document the workings of the tides and currents on an emergency shelter on a deserted tropical beach, with the same scenario filmed on different days. The films are combined with narrative texts contributed by people of the local Bahamian community (mostly of African or European lineage). These were written, read aloud and recorded in response to the films during the Instant Writing Event, held at The Hub in Nassau in July 2011. All contributed texts are published together in a print on demand pamphlet produced by AND Publishing.

Also shown is a series of four recent short digital films, which were shot at Anglia Ruskin University’s film studio as part of Furnée’s participation in the AA2A access scheme in 2014. Domestic Celestial Events shows a variety of household objects filmed against a spacey black background. The footage is combined with a soundtrack of recorded interviews with couples contemplating the possibility of going on an extended trip to the moon with their partner. 

A transcription of the spoken words appears as ‘subtitling’ in juxtaposition to the images, expanding both use and meaning of language. The interviews and texts were created in collaboration with writer Lucy Sheerman, and the voices recreated by actors.

The main screen in the gallery shows, over the duration of the exhibition, a slowly changing random display of individually selected lines taken from the interviews with these couples, reflecting inner life onto outer space. These lines form an ambient and ambiguous presence, touching on assumptions, hopes and desires we harbour for an alternative future, and the faith we invest in each other.

All films are shown on digital screens in the gallery, installed together with some of the household objects that appear in the films, such as lamps, fruit on a table, and a large potted plant.

Bettina Furnée's work ranges from small text and moving image pieces to complex and collaborative environmental projects, and has included new media since 2005. Using language as material, her work is rooted in different notions of site, underlining our accidental place and time on this earth.

Caroline Wendling, Oaks & Amity
Deveron Arts, Huntly, Scotland
March - September

Oaks & Amity is a long-term art project that addresses the fragility of peace and ecology and their need to be carefully weighted and sustained in the future. Wysing Studio Artist Caroline Wendling is a French artist from Lorraine, a historically turbulent area formerly annexed by Germany.

Caroline joined Deveron arts in Autumn 2014 for a project connecting several themes - that of pacifism, friendship, humanism, ecology and sustainability.

With Deveron Arts based in Huntly, Scotland, various aspects of Oaks & Amity project take place in and around the town and work directly with its inhabitants. Huntly has a strong military history through its connection with the Gordon Highlanders infantry regiment but also through its lesser known stories of pacifist activism from its conscientious objectors. Throughout her stay Caroline investigated both sides of the local history and used it in a variety of community art projects. Caroline’s residency culminated in planting of White Wood located in the Bin Forest outside of Huntly. One hundred years after World War I, the planting of the White Wood commemorates the peace between three nations, Scotland, Germany and France, as well as the lesser known war histories of the citizens of Huntly. The forest symbolises unification of three countries; with acorns of oak trees brought from Germany, planted in British soil and accompanied by white lime stones delivered from Saint-Pierre-Aigle in northern France.

The starting point and inspiration of the White Wood project is 7000 Oaks, a mass planting happening organized by artist Joseph Beuys, in Kassel, Germany in 1982 for Documenta VII. During Kassel Documenta XIII in 2012 Deveron Arts collected one hundred acorns from Beuys’ mother oaks and planted them in their Huntly based office garden.

For the Oaks & Amity project forty-nine of the strongest oak saplings were selected to form the core of the White Wood. Each of the oak trees is planted together with one of the French stones buried next to it, which serves as a reminiscence of soldiers who died a century ago without their graves. As the oak trees grow, the stones are gradually lifted out of the ground by the roots, thus proving that history is still present, even if not seen at first sight. White Wood is planted in carefully arranged geometrical patterns to be differentiated from its surrounding areas and to be recognisable for generations to come. The main clearing of the wood is shielded by three concentric tree circles followed by a rectangular net of birch trees that finally merge into a more organic array of minor trees and offer a gradual and unobtrusive entrance to the site.

On 27 and 28 March 2015 with help of nearly 150 planters, including children from Huntly Schools and students from Argentina, the oaks were planted together with over 750 other trees and more than 1000 flower bulbs. All were meticulously chosen by Caroline to be native flora to Scotland and toned in white as representation of peace, whether according to their overall colouring or colour of their blossom. The selection included plants such as silver birch, rowan, ramsons, snowdrops, foxgloves, wood anemone and others. The White Wood will grow to its full size within the next 300 years providing a memorial site for rest and reflection but also a vibrant place for a variety of talks and events. With proper care the White Wood will become a lasting symbol of peace, ecology, friendship and longevity.
Text by Alice Maselnikova

Further information about the project is available on the Deveron Arts website here.

Information about Caroline Wendling is available on the Wysing Studio Artist page here.

Caroline Wright, Sawdust and Threads
Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery
16 May - 27 September

Sawdust and Threads is a residency and exhibition that takes de-accessioned museum objects as its material. The project was conceived by Wysing Studio Artist Caroline Wright and Harriet Loffler, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Norwich Castle in partnership with the Polar Museum in Cambridge and UCL Museum & Collections in London.

At each of the partner venues, Wright has undertaken a short residency during which time she has made detailed drawings of a number of chosen de-accessioned museum objects. Ranging from a rubber bedpan to a wicker signal ball, a pair of Inuit moccasin liners to a lace collar, the objects reflect the collections of the three museum collections. After the drawings are completed Wright then carefully and painstakingly deconstructs each object reducing it to its component parts.

For the exhibition at Norwich Castle all the drawings will be assembled, along with the museum objects in their various states of deconstruction. The artist will also be in the gallery on particular days so visitors will be able to watch the artistic process unfold and to see the objects in their different states.

The project poses questions around the nature of museum collections. Who owns these objects and how is the value of an object defined? Is value being removed or re-ascribed during this process of deconstruction? In her practice, Wright explores loss, repetition and the transformation of objects. She references the Freudian argument of the return to the inanimate in order to gain control. A publication exploring these and other related issues raised by the project will be launched on 11 July at Norwich Castle.

Emma Smith, 5Hz
Arnolfini, Bristol
20 March - 6 April

Wysing Studio Artist Emma Smith presents 5Hz – an interactive exhibition that invites audiences to experience a new human language.

The concept of Emma Smith's work is to imagine an alternative evolution of voice and create a language that strengthens human connection.

5Hz is the result of a collaborative research process with psychologist Laurence White (Plymouth University), cognitive neuroscientist Nina Kazanina, and musicologist Emma Hornby (both University of Bristol). Building on this research, Emma Smith worked with Laurence White to create a language for the role of social bonding.

The exhibition will introduce audiences to this new vocal practice through interactive events and installations including a sound chamber installation where visitors can try the language themselves, the presentation of the language's visual transcription, an interactive sound library and research space, fun online experiments, and live choral performances. There will also be a programme of workshops, activities, talks and discussions that will explore aspects of human voice.

The exhibition has been developed from a series of electroencephalography experiments, language evolution workshops and public research labs that took place at Arnolfini in 2014. Further information about the exhibition is available on the Arnolfini website here.

Mapping Artists' Associate Programmes in the UK
Chisenhale Gallery, London
Saturday 28 March, 3pm

Wysing Director Donna Lynas will be speaking at the event Mapping Artists' Associate Programmes in the UK. The panel discussion will launch a new report mapping artists’ associate programmes at cultural organisations in the UK by independent researcher Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt.

Commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery and supported by Paul Hamlyn Foundation. Chaired by Laura Wilson, Offsite and Education, Curator, Chisenhale Gallery, other speakers include: Ed Atkins, artist; Marianne Forrest, Co-Director, Auto Italia; and Lena Nix, Artist Development Manager, Space Studios.

More information and details of how to book are available on the Chisenhale Gallery website here.

Joey Holder, proteus
Channel Normal
10 - 24 July

Joey Holder was in-residence at Wysing during the spring as part of  The Multiverse residency this year. proteus is a sketch for a large-scale unrealized video work by Holder which will be shown on Channel Normal.

Produced in close collaboration with two Biologists based in Cambridge, the piece explores how accelerated digital developments are being used to derive data from DNA.

Mixing footage from deep sea explorations with genetic charts she investigates complex natural systems in an extended virtual web; challenging our perception of evolution, adaptation and scientific progress.

www.channelnormal.com

The Moving Museum, London, booth 847 at The Armory Show, New York
5 - 8 March

Wysing Studio Artist Soheila Sokhanvari is exhibiting at The Armory Show in the booth of the not-for-profit organisation, The Moving Museum, London, on Pier 94, alongside Amelia Ulman, Ben Schumacher, Iz Oztat, Jeremy Bailey.

The Armory show is a leading international contemporary and modern art fair and one of the most important annual art events, which takes place every March on Piers 92 and 94 in central Manhattan. The Armory Show is devoted to showcasing the most important artworks of the 20th and 21st centuries. In its sixteen years the fair has become an international institution, combining a selection of the world's leading galleries with a programme of arts events and exhibitions throughout New York during the celebrated Armory Arts Week. The Armory Show exhibits a select number of exhibitors from museums, to not-for-profit galleries to art foundations with a desire to promote arts to a greater public.

Click here for more information about Soheila's work as a Studio Artist at Wysing.

Love Thy Neighbour
Museum of Religious Art, Lemvig, Denmark
18 January – 17 May

As part of her residency in the Department of Overlooked Histories Emma Smith composed a new bell ringing composition: Bourn Bounds Bob Major in collaboration with the Bourn ringers and experts from Cambridge University.

Exploring the history of ringing as a mode of communication, Smith mapped the mathematical diagram of a traditional method used by the church’s ringers onto the geographic area over which the sound could be heard. Using the thoroughfares and byways of the village of Bourn to dictate the composition Smith then converted this geographic map back into sound, creating a sonic rendering of the landscape over which the sound could be heard. The composition takes a journey from the bell tower, down all village roads, to the extent of the parish boundary. The resulting composition incorporates a series of transitions in order to be played in accordance with the practice of change ringing. The score was rung in Bourn church as a public performance on Saturday 12 November 2012. To accompany the performance Smith also created a set of handchimes, courtesy of Whitechapel Bell Foundry, to tonally match the bells in Bourn Church. These are presented in an oak chest which has the score engraved on its lid. This work was exhibited at Wysing Arts Centre along with a limited edition print of the score, available to take away for free from the gallery. The gallery based work is currently shown as part of the group exhibition Love Thy Neighbour 18 January – 17 May 2015 at the Museum of Religious Art, Lemvig, Denmark.

Jerwood Encounters: The Grantchester Pottery paints the stage
Jerwood Space
16 January - 22 February

Jerwood Encounters: The Grantchester Pottery paints the stage is the next exhibition in the Jerwood Visual Arts’ Encounters series curated by The Grantchester Pottery, an artist collaboration between sculptor Giles Round and painter Phil Root.

Founded in 2011 when Root and Round were in-residence at Wysing, The Grantchester Pottery takes the structural framework of an artist’s decorative arts studio, drawing historical precedent from Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops. Working from Wysing's ceramics studio, it seeks to produce a series of utilitarian ceramics together with other decorative household items such as printed & woven textiles, wallpaper, painted furniture and hand painted murals. It draws inspiration from Cambridgeshire and specifically on the rich heritage of Art & Literature that surrounds Grantchester as a historic meeting place for writers, poets, artists & philosophers. The Grantchester Pottery is a fictitious nod towards this specific history whilst at the same time using it as a basis for conceptual departure.

In this exhibition works by The Grantchester Pottery’s associated artists will be presented together for the first time and framed by an adaptable stage set designed by the company. As with the convention of stage theatre, all works will face the same vantage point, towards a hypothetical audience. The visitor enters centre stage and is immersed in the set of a three act melodrama singularly aligned for an ideal and impossible vista.

The exhibition will comprise printed fabric, paintings, tapestries, ceramics, sculpture, and the realisation of three large painted murals by The Grantchester Pottery directly onto the gallery walls.

Featuring work by Michael Fullerton, Sophie von Hellermann, Maria Loboda, Anne Low, Dietmar Lutz, Edwin Pickstone, Phil Root, Giles Round, Cally Spooner and Sam Windett.

Solo Exhibition
Seventeen, London
15 January - 14 February

David Raymond Conroy was in-residence at Wysing during Futurecamp over the summer of 2014. His solo exhibtion at Seventeen in London includes new work developed during his time at Wysing.

He thinks he can look at some thing, some specific thing, and if he looks carefully enough, it will explain his world to him. He knows the world is a place invented as much as observed. This thing must be imagined and designed, manufactured and presented. He cares little for trees or hills – any countryside wowing comes not from his heart. He knows he can never see things clearly, as they really are: his eyes always get in the way and in this he is far from alone.

He can never understand himself. He’ll always be too close to focus, too invested to be fair, too anxious to be smart, far too much in hate or love. He thinks about recognition, about price, about cost. What it often comes down to, he fears, is the slightest of signs – the stitch of a hem, the pearl of a button. How much an object can convey a complex geometry of recognitions, if only to distract from the inevitably felt but now half concealed inner flaw, a weakness threatening to show itself to anyone who cares to look. This is a system of social relations so complex and connected, so culturally developed and refined, that no element either at the level of worldly referent, abstract concept, or material sign can be expected to be overlooked.

He knows that everything will be cared about by someone: a cup or a glass, a grin or a sneer, a hand on a shoulder or one on the hip. People know about the social game of umbrellas vs. hoods and they play their cards accordingly. Judgments stratify as well as any pay-cheque.

The hug, the kiss, the cheek, the air.
The wink, the smile, the nod, the blank.
The like, the fave, the follow, the share.
The measures go on and on.

He smiles a lot. He has yet to learn quite when talk is correct, quite when silence is lumpen and rude. It isn’t done to nudge or tease; one must be charming and witty. He often remembers he has forgotten to thank his hosts, and that he should drink far less.

Lotte Juul Petersen will be speaking about Wysing's residency programme at Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast on 11 December, 3pm following an invitation from the Centre for Contemporary Art in Derry.

Details on the CCA website, here.

Lotte has been a Curator at Wysing since 2008. She has a MA in art history and cultural studies from University of Copenhagen and University of Leeds. Following her studies she took part in a Nordic-Baltic curatorial platform arranged by FRAME Finnish Fund for Art Exchange.

Before joining Wysing, Lotte developed the residency and artistic program at the Factory of Art and Design, Copenhagen, during which time she was also employed as curator at the Fynen Art Academy. Prior to this she was part of the curatorial team at CPH Kunsthal, directed by Jacob Fabricius, and at Malmö Konsthall, Sweden.

As Artists and Programmes Curator, Lotte has worked closely with many artists at Wysing including Asli Cavusoglu, Akassen, Celine Condorelli, Luca Frei, Laure Prouvost, Christodoulos Panayiotou and Giles Round. Additionally she has worked with Ann Lislegaard, Adrian Piper, Pilvi Takkala, Mette Winckelmann amongst others.

5 December 2014 to 30 January 2015
Galleria Fonti, Naples

In 2013, whilst in-residence at Wysing, Seb Patane met fellow resident artist Gustav Metzger. The meeting prompted Patane to ask Metzger to be recorded reading a short section of avant garde theatre director Erwin Piscator’s book The Political Theatre (1929), which Patane was reading at the time. The resulting work, Gustav Metzger as Erwin Piscator, Gera, January 1915, will be shown at Galleria Fonti, Naples, alongside Abdomen, a longer, almost suite-like sound piece.

In Abdomen, the voice of Metzger again lends an unsettling start, followed by an audio collage including original musical interventions, recordings of the Cambridgeshire countryside, and a reading of a passage from The Good Soldier Sveik, a satirical war novel by Czech writer Jaroslav Hasek (1923), from another Wysing fellow resident artist, Cécile B. Evans. The piece, like the sound for the video, is composed by Patane, with long time collaborator Giancarlo Trimarchi.

Finally, the conclusive part of Abdomen features a short song written by Patane and sung and arranged with Berlin based musician Andrew Moss, a song inspired by Patane’s own occasional bouts of hypochondriasis, but also by the letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ford Madox Brown about a very ill and dying Lizzie Siddal, “I have been in the most agonizing anxiety about poor dear Lizzie’s heath, she has seemed ready to die daily and more than once a day” (1860).

Patane utilizes this juxtaposition between historical and personal source material in order to cross it with contemporary musical references, the process ultimately aided by a kind of psychedelic approach to music making. The artist’s aim is to create a current video/soundscape that hints at timeless and universal notions of ideas of anxiety; this leads towards a sense of lack of control over physical and emotional transformation and the horrors of war, clashes and conflict, albeit hinting at change and a death seen ultimately as renewal, followed by its consequent rebirth.

4 December, UCA Canterbury
12 noon, Fine Art Department

Donna Lynas will be talking about Wysing as part of the Collaborative Research Group; a new internship and education programme that sees a collaboration between University of the Creative Arts (UCA) at Canterbury and CRATE, Margate. 

Donna Lynas has been Director of Wysing Arts Centre since 2005, before which she was Curator at South London Gallery for six years and where, alongside curating exhibitions, she established the gallery’s influential performance and off-site programmes. At SLG she worked with artists including Christian Boltanski, On Kawara, Joelle Tuerlinckx and Keith Tyson on their solo exhibitions and projects, alongside curating a number of group exhibitions.

Prior to that, Donna was Curator at Modern Art Oxford (MAO), where she worked with a number of artists, including Willie Doherty and Mona Hatoum, on their solo exhibitions. She also re-configured MAO exhibitions as part of a touring programme, working with Marina Abramovic, Louise Bourgeois, Douglas Gordon and Tony Oursler amongst many others.

Donna moved to Wysing in order to develop a new model of working, that placed the emphasis on thinking and making rather than exhibiting. It has been her aim to establish a productive environment in which artists can work and she has developed Wysing's identity as a research centre for the visual arts; introducing experimental artists' residencies and retreats, and commissioning and curating ambitious projects including the annual festival of art and music. 

Alongside residencies, Wysing operates artistic retreats, artists’ masterclasses and an annual summer school. In 2015 it will launch, the Syllabus, in partnership with Eastside Projects, New Contemporaries, Spike Island, Studio Voltaire and S1, a new programme that supports an annual cohort of ten artists across ten months.

Donna studied Design at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee before moving into sculpture, working from studios in Dundee and Reading.

James Richards was in-residence at Wysing during the summer of 2014 and whilst here developed a number of new works and made a new version of the work Rosebud, currently on show as part of the Turner Prize 2014 exhibition at Tate Britain.

Other works created at Wysing and now being shown elsewhere include Raking Light, at Cabinet gallery, London from 11 October to 6 December 2014 and work for the ars viva prize at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, from 19 October to 19 February 2015. 

Watch the Tate Shots video of James, speaking from his Wysing studio in August 2014, by clicking here.

The Crime Was Almost Perfect
Witte de With, Rotterdam
24 January – 27 April 2014

In 2009 Wysing commissioned the work Untitled (Gold) by Bik Van der Pol as an outcome of the Generosity residency. The work has remained on site as one of our outdoor sculptures until recently when it was sent to be on show at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam as part of their exhibition The Crime Was Almost Perfect.

The work of Bik Van der Pol explores the potential of art to improve situations, add what is missing or highlight what’s hidden. The result of their research into the notion of generosity was Untitled (Gold), a work which looks at the perceived opposite of generosity – greed. The motto depicted in the work is an extract from a poem by the British poet Thomas Hood, which discusses how gold is a material that continuously tests both our generosity and our greed.

The exhibition at Rotterdam's Witte de With brings together over forty artists who cross the bridges linking art and the aesthetics of crime. Like any good detective story, art history is filled with enigmas, myths, and riddles waiting to be unraveled. Solving these intellectual puzzles is a common pleasure and few are immune to such a cultural temptation.

Although the link between art and crime can be traced back to ancient times, Thomas De Quincey explicitly theorized this connection in his notorious essay “On Murder Considered As One Of The Fine Arts” (1827). The nineteenth century also saw the growing importance of photography both in the development of criminology and in the new sensationalism of the tabloid press—two phenomena that popularized the genre of the detective story. Cinema soon became the perfect medium for capturing the dubious charm of violence and transforming it into pleasurable images.

Following De Quincey’s ironic proposal to analyze murder from an aesthetic point of view, The Crime Was Almost Perfect is an exhibition that invokes the spirits of visual art, architecture, cinema, criminology, and the modern crime genre, transforming the rooms of Witte de With and the streets of Rotterdam into multiple ‘crime scenes’.

Beyond crime, there is Evil. Thus The Crime Was Almost Perfect necessarily examines the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. Questioning the role of authorship, authenticity, trickery, and fraud, the exhibition blurs the dichotomy between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ taste, while also highlighting the double bind of ‘crime as art’ and ‘art as crime’.