OTHER FUTURES
Podcast
Ben Roberts is the founding director of The Artists’ Research Centre (ARC); a curatorial platform with a focus on both epistemological and heutistic research practices, supporting artists’ practice and cross disciplinary research parternships. ARC works collaboratively making connections between academics, artists and institutions which sustain and enrich their respective work and programmes generating a diverse ecology for experimentation, generating new narratives around research and creativity.
Since it’s launch in 2016 ARC has developed an innovative model of support for artists’ practice through a programme of fellowships, exhibitions, events, publications and production in partnership with Galleries and Universities. ARC’s partners include:
Tetley Gallery, Focal Point Gallery, IKON Gallery, Essex University, Leeds University, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, Birmingham City University, Towner Eastbourne, Eastbourne Alive, Landsec Development, Brighton and Hove City Council, Arts Council England, Henry Moore Foundation
Included below is a collection of selected projects from the ARC archive.
Garden is a joint commission between The Artists’ Research Centre, Eastbourne Alive and Towner Eastbourne. Curated by Ben Roberts.
Helen Cammock was born in 1970 in Staffordshire. Cammock examines mainstream historical and contemporary narratives about Blackness, womanhood, oppression and resistance, wealth and power, poverty and vulnerability through film, photography, print, text, song, and performance. Her works often cut across time and geography, layering multiple voices as she investigates the cyclical nature of histories in her visual and aural assemblages.
In 2017, Cammock won the Max Mara Art Prize for Women and in 2019 she was the joint recipient of the Turner Prize.
This research will form the core of a new piece of writing, commissioned by the Artists’ Research Centre, which will be published and accessioned into the Library at the Forum in Southend. In addition, a programme of events relating to Beasly’s research will be presented at the Forum towards the end of the year.
‘Two Plants’ in Dip was the culmination of Becky Beasley’s research project commissioned by the Artists’ Research Centre’s Creative Libraries Programme in collaboration with Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea Libraries and Museums and University of Essex. Softback, 88 pages.
Published and distributed by Artists’ Research Centre.£8.00
In partnership with Focal Point Gallery
Supported by Arts Council England
Outcomes from the artist’s research have been manifested in new film, talks, exhibitions and installations presented across the spaces Focal Point Gallery and TV show broadcast live from the Museum in Southend.
SCREENING
Landscape - selected and introduced by Alexandre Leykauf
18-19/08/2017
Kenneth Anger | Stan van der Beek | Marcel Broodthaers | Maya Deren | Ger van Elk | Simon FaithFull | Hollis Frampton | General Idea | Alexandra Leykauf | Marie Menke | Toshio Matsumoto | William Raban | Margaret Tait | Pieter Vanderbeck | Bill Viola | Joyce Wieland
BROADCAST
Inventing the Landscape: A live studio recording
13/01/2018
Presentations, film, readings and discussion held in the disused Reading Room in Southend Museum. Recorded with an audience and live streamed, featured presentations from Leykauf on her research, papers by artist / writer Melissa Gordon and broadcaster / academic Sophie Sleigh Johnson. It included readings chosen by Leykauf, performed by members of the local acting school E15.
EXHIBITION
Caprona, 20/01 - 22/04/2018
‘Caprona’ is the culmination of Alexandra Leykauf’s Creative Libraries Fellowship curated by the Artists’ Research Centre in collaboration with Focal Point Gallery, Southend Libraries and Museums and University of Essex. The programme offers artists unique access to the Library collections and university research and archives in support of their practice.The title of the exhibition ‘Caprona’, is taken from the science fiction trilogy The Land that Time Forgot by Edward Rice Buroughs. Caprona is a mythical island in which all the evolutionary stages of life are simultaneously living side by side in a single landscape. This exhibition is a reflection of Leykauf’s research fellowship and a glimpse into her thinking about the opportunites it has presented for her own artistic practice.
aerial, 2018
HD video projection, 42 mins
During the course of her Fellowship in Essex, Alexandra Leykauf visited museum and library collections across the county. In the Forum Library she discovered a collection of aerial photographs of Southend and the wider county. The photographs document the landscape and many of the historic sites now only visible from the air — of buildings and earth works long since vanished. Within these photographs, Leykauf was interested in how it was possible to see across great periods of time in a single image, from bronze age settlements to Roman occupation and beyond. She says: Essex is full of castles, monuments and archaeological sites. But most of the county’s history is underneath... the ancient barrows and crop marks which appear fleetingly over the summer and can only be seen from the air. The appearance of these traces depends on the time of the year, on the growth of vegetation... Here we may see a relationship with photography, where traces also appear on a surface. Combining these images with audio field recordings made at number of sites, Leykauf has worked with a film editor to develop a new approach to film making within her practice, using single and layered images with animation techniques. The resulting film is a document of her research, a record of her travels in the Essex landscape and an experiment in film making.
Cliché Verre, 2018
Photogram prints on photographic paper
This experimental, site specific work was made using the large windows of the gallery. The prints were made at night by making a gouache painting directly onto the windows, and using natural light to expose the prints.
In part they are an experiment by the artist to trial using the photogram technique at this scale. They are also a response to histories of landscape painting, abstraction and photography, making connections between the flat verticality of Chinese landscape painting, the role of empty canvas as a space for the imagination and western traditions of abstraction. The use of the epic landscape format, requiring the viewer to physically move across the surface of the work, as with a Chinese scroll for example, also suggests a form of narrative which is at odds with the work’s abstract forms. Landscapes in both painting and photography are often depict-ed as prescriptive spaces suggesting wilderness, human achievement or disaster. This work purposefully avoids such specifics suggesting a more nuanced reading of how landscapes can be rendered as art works and in the mind of the viewer.
Building on her existing practice, Sworn will use the Fellowship to continue her investigations into forms of early theatre, the ways in which travelling performers took on multiple identities and their relationship to audiences. She will explorethe significance of the spaces and contexts of travelling entertainments and the
evolution of these ideas through the ways in which that have become manifested in contemporary culture via the development of social media and mobile screens.
Sworn drew on the breadth of expertise and knowledge at the University of Leeds to inform her research, working with its Centre for Audio Visual Experimentation (CAVE) and National Centre for Innovative Robotic Systems, among others.
During the Fellowship, ARC worked with Sworn to develop her research interests, brokering conversations with academics and artists working in related fields in Leeds, around the UK and internationally. As a result of these conversations, ARC developed a program of events, hosted at the Tetley to support + enrich Sworn’s work, offering audiences access to process of her creative research / thinking through a range of events including talks, screenings and performance produced in collaboration with ARC, culminating with a symposium hosted in collaboration with the University.
EVENTS
Performance
30/11/16
New work by Corin Sworn / Cara Tolmie
Film: Sylvia Scarlett
19/1/17
Film about hidden identity. Selected by Corin Sworn
Artists’ Film
5/2/17
Experimental artists’ films selected by Corin Sworn
Artists’ Talk / Performance
4/2/17
(Part of Uncertainty symposium organized by Leeds Beckett University)
Live Library: Performing Selves
4/3/17
Talks + performances by international artists / academics on the performance of identity
In parternship with Tetley Gallery and University of Leeds
Supported by Arts Council England