OTHER FUTURES
Podcast
SECLECTED EXHIBITIONS
Summer House is an installation and programme of events by Croydon based RESOLVE Collective working with Black community practitioners and artists in Croydon and Brighton. The project asks how it might be possible to build recuperative and organisational spaces for those who are working to sustain their communities. To do so, Summer House appropriates the Brighton CCA gallery as an open space for generative rest, gatherings, and organising for this enduring work. Incorporating both sculptural and live elements, the installation centres on groups of ‘work and leisure’ furniture, built using salvaged materials from industrial and commercial sites around Croydon and Brighton. A public programme pairs three Brighton practitioners with three Croydon practitioners for a series of open events and closed exchanges, exploring the shared value in their respective work.
Brighton-based artist manager and youth worker Bobby Brown will meet London-based Ella Adu, architectural designer and member of Tanum Sound System; Carolynn Bain of the inspirational Afrori Books will collaborate on a photo exhibition and talk with Croydon-based photographer Theo Mettle, celebrating the lives and work of Black women in Brighton; and writer and curator Pacheanne Anderson will co-curate a multi disciplinary exhibition of student work, culminating in a public conversation with Croydon-born interdisciplinary artist, writer and teacher, Rosa-Johan Uddoh. Details of all events are available in the gallery and online at www.brightoncca.art
RESOLVE have twinned their Croydon base with Brighton to explore their commonalities and differences as communal sites of creative production. Croydon and Brighton are united by more than just a transport link. Family and friendship networks regularly extend from the shopping centres to the shores and what defines both places is frequently shared by a common public. More importantly, actively disempowered communities in both Croydon and Brighton are engaging in radical new forms of industry; world-building and organising work that supports their networks where mainstream provisions have failed. Through this project RESOLVE have sought to celebrate this work, and highlight the inequitable processes that require it, as they see friends and colleagues forced back and forth from the city to the shore by rising prices, hostile industries, and lack of work and opportunity.
Summer House is a vision of redistributed resources and tools for a more just future, manifested through a series of collaborations between these two locations.
Summer House is supported by Art Fund.
Special thanks to University of Brighton Design Archives, millimetre designers and makers, The Flint Wall Company.
RESOLVE Collective is an interdisciplinary design collective that combines architecture, engineering, technology and art to address social challenges. Much of their work aims to provide platforms for the production of new knowledge and ideas, whilst collaborating and organising to help build resilience in our communities. An integral part of this way of working means designing with and for young people and under-represented groups in society.
Today’s gift is tomorrow’s commodity. Yesterday’s commodity is tomorrow’s found art object. Today’s art object is tomorrow’s junk. And yesterday’s junk is tomorrow’s heirloom
This exhibition, was following a sustained period of research by Lloyd Corporation over the last 18 months, is formed of two related installations.
Taking as a starting point the history of the barrel as a unit of measurement, symbol of trade and embodiment of trading narratives; the work reflects on the implications of global economic policy for local economic infrastructures. How for example do global systems of production impact on small, marginalised economies and communities, creating underground markets and supply routes? In an economy built on production and consumption of the new, what mechanisms are used for materials and items to circulate outside the distribution chains which produce them? How do those systems impact the lives of those sustained but this exchange economy?
Together the installations are an exploration of material, political and social structures of trade and exchange and are part of a series of exhibitions at Brighton CCA focusing on social isolation, environmental change and economic marginalisation.
Describing the genesis of their research the Lloyd Corporation said
We were in a small flea market shop on The Lanes in Brighton, one of the only ones open on a non-market day, during the early phase of Covid lockdown easing … we’ve always been drawn to these kinds of places. Where piles of stuff cascade onto one another, a clumsy and ambivalent materiality that doesn’t call out to be seen. Messy and informal with an unruliness to its staging that at least appears to evade composition and discipline. What Jane Bennet calls ’vibrant matter’. One never knows how long these things have actually been there for, placing them somewhere between alive and obsolete, trash or treasure, transient but enduring, trade and collection, commodities or gifts; and back again.
In the South Gallery the visitor encounters a darkened room illuminated by the light from three slide projectors. Each shows a looping collection of signs, adverts and notices from the streets, photographed by the artists over years across multiple locations; London, Athens and Brighton among them. These places refer both to the site of the exhibition and locations in which the artists – separated physically – found themselves during lockdown. The images form a kind of visual conversation, documenting the artists’ respective attention to the city and the ways public spaces become contested sites of communication. Each collection is a snap shot of a place, a society, a history of activity frozen in a moment; a kind of infinite broadcasting of announcements at times urgent, at others redundant. Placed in order by the artists for the start of the exhibition, the motion of the projectors generates a vast, unknowable series of image combinations. The layering of narratives and images mirrors the experience of encountering new versions and announcements in the streets; creating a unique set of stories at each visit.
In the related installation in the North Gallery, Lloyd Corporation have constructed a sculptural work of five shipping crates. Each is filled with goods collected by the artists in the run up to the exhibition from auctions, abandoned storage units, internet sites, junk shops and street finds. The work is a reflection of the history, systems and culture which enable the movement of goods outside the mainstream; from barrels and blind auctions to shipping crates and the recycle economy. The installation suggests the inadvertent ways in which these assembled items create narratives around themselves and the lives they inhabit.
Through this exploration of object biography, of collections and material accumulation, the artists create a network of connections between the items themselves and the activities and circumstances that link them together; of both global capitalism and informal local economies.
As part of the commission, Lloyd Corporation’s evolving research process has been made available in the Studio Dialogues section of the Brighton CCA website. The exhibition will also be accompanied by a public programme of talks, screenings and workshops further developing ideas from the exhibition and related research within the University. In addition, a new text further contextualising and responding to the exhibition commissioned from Dr Nina Wakeford, artist and Reader in Sociology at University of London, Goldsmiths is available in the gallery and online.
Lloyd Corporation are an artist duo based in London and Athens.
Untitled, circa 1994 by artist Giles Round was presented across the North and South Galleries, combining archival research with the production of new work, presentations of modernist design and a programme of live events. Design is a register of our changing priorities, tastes and politics and therefore can be a lens through which to understand the evolution of society. This exhibition draws on Round’s long standing investigations into these narratives – of product design, histories of display and the ways in which we choose to identify, record and organise them. It is a meditation on the evolution of ideas and how they are communicated.
The project also marks the start of a new collaboration between Brighton CCA and the University of Brighton Design Archives. An artist or designer is invited to spend time exploring the collections with the Design Archives team, to then use their research as the starting point to develop a new body of work. Each exhibition will be framed jointly by the holdings of the archives and the chosen artist’s wider practice, offering insight to their ideas and creative process.
Giles Round is an artist working across sculpture, print making, architecture with extensive knowledge of the histories of design and display. Round’s father was a chartered electrical engineer who worked for the LEB (London Electricity Board). Beginning with this personal history and following an extended period of research in the Design Archives, Round has chosen to focus on holdings in the archives of Bernard Schottlander, Theo Crosby and FHK Henrion relating to lighting design. The exhibition is a reflection of how the work of these designers has been recorded and what role the archival images play in our understanding of them. Untitled, circa 1994 refers both to the date when the Design Council Archive arrived at the University of Brighton and to the problem of naming things as they evolve and change over time.
The exhibition is in two halves. In the North Gallery, Round has created a working studio space and sculpture workshop offering an insight into his creative practice. Images and materials selected from the archive’s collections inform the production of prints and sculpture. The work table at the heart of the installation has been designed by Round and produced specially for the exhibition, shown alongside a selection of classic modernist furniture and lighting. Over the course of the exhibition Round will use this space to produce new work, collaborating with the Print Making Department in the School of Art. Additionally the gallery will host a social space for events and screenings of The Queer Cinema and the Movies of Gus Van Sant Film Club – a nomadic project and porous collective dedicated to queer filmmaking.
In the South Gallery, Round has devised an installation recreating a series of still images, which he discovered in the Design Council Archive, from Lighting, produced for the Design Centre. The monochrome photographs have both the paired back quality of a still life or theatrical set. Working with the gallery’s street front location, Round has created a contemporary manifestation of these images using a combination of industrial light fittings and digital software to create a changing installation fully coming to life during the hours of darkness. A set of the original images, demonstrating the effect of different forms of lighting, can be found in the North gallery. Over the course of the exhibition, sculptures produced in the studio workshop – inspired by the archives – will gradually be introduced generating a layering of images and readings of the collection within the gallery space.
This new collaboration offers a chance to encounter the University of Brighton Design Archives collections through the work of artists. This process based approach to exhibiting an artists’ work is at the heart of the project with the public programme of artist led studio tours, workshops and screenings offering further alternatives to engage with Round’s practice as a whole. In addition, a display of related materials from the Design Archives will be presented in the Atrium Gallery in February.
Untitled, circa 1994 inlcudes works commissioned by 80WSE, Cove Park, Emalin, The Hepworth Wakefield, Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts, The National Trust, The Queer Cinema and the Movies of Gus van Sant Film Club, Ian Round, Serpentine Galleries and Spike Island.
Articulated wall lamp with two red reflectors by Bernard Schottlander, courtesy of University of Brighton Design Archives Bernard Schottlander Archive.
Thanks to: University of Brighton Design Archives team (Sue Breakell, Lesley Whitworth, Barbara Taylor and Sirpa Kutilainen), Vic Brooks, Sophie Brown, Wayne Case, Dido Crosby, Ray Dennis, Henrion Estate, Jochen Holz, Chris Hunt, Nicola Lees, Lucia Pietroiusti, Laure Prouvost, The Queer Cinema and the Movies of Gus Van Sant Film Club, Race Furniture, Andrés Ros Soto, Ian Round, Serpentine Galleries, Holly Shuttleworth, Patrick Staff, Kostas Stasinopoulos, Leopold Thun and Evan Calder Williams.
PLAY VIDEO
Material Environments presented at The Tetley was a site not just for the display of artwork but of live production, experiment, making and participation. Five artists were invited to work across the gallery’s spaces, to experiment with ideas of physical and psychological transformation. The resulting works, engaged with subjects ranging from social media, botany and chemical science to architecture and music, will grow and evolve over the course of the exhibition, operating as installations, workshops or laboratories. Taking as its starting point an interest in the process of artistic research and production, 'Material Environments' makes this process visible for the audience to see, experience and be involved in.
The exhibition departed from an experience of art based on the environments in which we usually find it – paintings in a gallery and performance in a theatre – towards an understanding of art as something which actively defines our environment.
PHOEBE CUMMINGS makes baroque ceramic sculptures, combining impossible assemblages of plants, fauna and with lush, imagined landscapes. A huge new immersive environment in the Leeds Beckett Atrium will house her delicate sculptures made from unfired clay.
KEITH HARRISON employs complex scientific and engineering processes, testing the material properties of clay, sound and electricity. Recent projects have seen him firing clay with electrical currents and flying a car through a forest. At The Tetley, Harrison will develop a new work spanning two interior spaces, which responds to the industrial heritage of the building, once the headquarters of Tetley’s brewery.
SERENA KORDA continues her research into the relationship between acoustics, emotional states, the paranormal and the extraterrestrial through a new series of soundworks recorded in Todmorden, a town with a rich history of unexplained events. She will also create a ‘glass harp’, an instrument once associated with causing madness and hysteria for its players and listeners, which will form the centerpiece of a new performance work.
HAROLD OFFEH will create a live archive entitled The Real Thing: Towards an Authentic Live Archive. Concerned with ideas of reality, realness and authenticity, concepts which have taken on new meanings in our increasingly mediated lives, Offeh’s evolving installation will bring together artefacts, images, actions, performances and workshops.
JOANNA PIOTROWSKA’s photographic series Shelter sees her visiting people’s homes and inviting them to create constructions, dens and habitations from the furniture within their living spaces. The resulting constructions reflect their creator’s inner life, history and state of mind, transforming space and material into something deeply personal.