installation

Free Trade detail ceramic

admin — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 14:26:08 +0000

Ceramic prices
Free Trade 2003

Use Value

admin — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 13:51:58 +0000

Sub-Title

Commissioned by Lisa Corrin at the Serpentine Gallery as part of Give & Take

End Date

1 Apr 2001

Start Date

30 Jan 2001

Location

Victoria and Albert Museum: London

Body

In recent years we have have developed a number of projects with museum collections, retail stores, art galleries and places of education; all of which play a central role in structuring the exchange ofvalues, between people and things. Rather than conceiving an artwork that is taken to a designated space of display - conventionally an art gallery -we are interested in developing a range of practices relevant to the context of a particular project.

Use Value is a sound installation created specifically for the top-floor ceramics galleries at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

We are aware of how the conventions of the museum -its habits of classification, display and exhibition- turn all artifacts, whatever their provenance, into potential works of art: objects to be looked at. Removed from the everyday flow of things, or diverted from their rich and varied lives -where they are used, broken, abandoned, found repaired and re-used, inherited, lost or given and received as presents - the museum object is doomed to live forever in the conservation perfection of the vitrine.

Use Value returns an astonishing collection, to the social world of things.

Filtered through the ceramics galleries are audio recordings of various locations. As you browse the tableware the sophisticated chatter of the restaurant accompanies your stroll, only to be interupted by the clamour of school children scoffing their lunch. Remember the tenderness expressed in washing-up, or the lonliness of eating alone, and beware the horror of the accident as crockery shatters on the kitchen floor.

Our invitation to the museum visitor, is to vividly re-imagine the places and practices where these things belong.

Visit our hosts the Se rpentine Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum

Collected

admin — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 13:36:58 +0000

Sub-Title

a multi-site exhibition curated by Neil Cummings, coordinated by The Photographers Gallery, London

End Date

21 Jun 1997

Start Date

26 Apr 1997

Location

Body

On an individual and national scale we are associated with a bewildering array of clothes, tools, art, bibelot, gifts, cuisine, souvenirs, technology and rubbish. Objects are spilling from every shelf, cupboard, display case, vitrine, supermarket, gallery, shop, museum and land-fill site. Societies are collective, we are defined by evolving methods to classify, structure and direct this material avalanche.

The activity of collecting, perfectly plays out the tension between the drive for order and the tendency towards excess and chaos implicit in our material relationships. The collection cuts across all categories of objects, from the almost worthless to the literally priceless. Collected things hold the promise of a coherent space within the profligate material world.

Conventionally, thinking about collections focuses on works of art, specific national collections or the powerful men (sic) who assembled them. The site of collecting is presumed to be the public museum, or a certain class of private household -now bequeathed or bought by the state to become a museum (visit Sir John Soane's House). Museums are the space we have evolved to collect material things. Treasures of all kinds, looted, bought, found or stolen are woven into narratives of possession and belonging. Objects, acquired, classified, catalogued and displayed are used to support images of nationhood, or intense personal obsessions. Obviously, we are increasingly familiar with the idea of the museum as the ultimate destination of all past objects, or at least surviving examples of those things. Recently it would seem, the museum has come to dominates the horizon of every material thing. To achieve museum status -as an object or individual- is to participate in the past of the future.

The exhibition Collected recognizes the museum as the ideal image of the collection, but also explores stores, shops, flea markets and domestic spaces as the sites -amongst others- for engaging in contemporary collecting. Retail culture has exploited our drives to accumulate in series, to complete the set; things are manufactured to be collectable.

At the Photographers Gallery, Christian Boltanski`s, Inventory of a man from Oxford, 1974 makes a collection of one persons belongings through the activity of photography. Both Ming de Nasty and Mo Wilson, have made portraits of local collectors who participated in Wallsall Museums Peoples Shows. Lea Andrews tape slide work, tenderly opens the gap between a personal attachment to belongings, and the distant opinion of 'experts'. Louise Lawler showed a series of photographs that record the relationships of power implicit in the ownership and display of art. James Sillavan turns the obsessive activity of photography into the medium of collecting, developing his own extraordinary typology of things. Fred Wilson exhibited a set of images exploring how museum culture pictures 'the other' in a strange hybrid family album.

Collected slipped out of the Photographers Gallery and wandered through various contemporary sites in central London.

Fred Wilson and Richard Wentworth worked with, and exhibited in the Egyptian department at the British Museum. Andrea Fraser investigated the difference between the Inventory, Bequest and the Collection at the Wallace Collection. Susan Hiller inserted a small obsessive collection within the body of The Royal College of Surgeons of England, Huntarian Museum. Guillame Bijl curated a furniture collection in the vitrine of Habitat's premier store. Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska developed a guide, Browse which linked the British Museum and Selfridges Department store. Paul Smith displayed a selection of his own private collection in his Floral Street shop windows, and Richard Lowe an `Egyptomania' collector opened his astonishing apartment for public tours.

The journal Inventory produced a special Collected themed edition

Special thanks is due to Paul Wowbell then director of the Photographers Gallery. And James Putnam, John Reeve and Callum Storrie at the British Museum

To glimpse some background thinking, take a look at Everything a short essay that explores curation in relation to a wider circulation of material things. First printed in Curating; the Contemporary Art Museum and Beyond, edited by Anna Harding, Art and Design Magazine 1997

Contents: 31 Tiensevest

admin — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 11:25:08 +0000

Sub-Title

Installation and CD Rom

a collaboration with Bert de Leenheer & Dirk Vanhecke

End Date

Start Date

1 May 1997

Location

Gallery Transit, Leuven Belgium

Body

We were invited by Gallery Transit to make a project for the 1996 opening of their new gallery space.

In 1994 the gallery relocated in a beautiful Art Nouveau inspired town house. The only previous occupants, the owners, had stored throughout the house all their belongings, clothes and furniture. Transit moved all their accumulated possessions, as well as the gallery, into the building. They decided to leave only the salon, the physical core of the house free of domestic objects, painted white as the exhibition space.

Two pairs of lives at either end of the century have been laid over one another, the similarities and differences can be found in the stored chaos of material possessions.

With every room of the house nearly full, the conventional classification of things has collapsed. Paintings are stacked on top of furniture, souvenirs mix with food, clothes merge with packed libraries; whose, when, and where, are difficult questions even for the occupants to answer. Into this extraordinary situation we came to work. What began as a photographic inventory -following the logic of Lost Property - gradually disintegrated. However tempting, it seemed dishonest to introduce a stranger's order - to put words into people's mouths - into the complexity of this material entanglement.

What evolved were 148 images and sound, presented in a form of a slide show viewable from the living room of 31 Tiensevest during the duration of the exhibition.

We produced a limited edition CD rom as a catalogue of the project, it contains all the images and features a soundtrack specially composed by the Bammer Project.

Contents:31 Tiensevest was included as part of Material Culture at the Hayward Gallery, London 1998.

In 2007 we made a new yet related project for Transit entitled ArtLife

Free Trade Spread

admin — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 20:17:53 +0000

Installation
Free Trade, Manchester 2003

Free Trade Trafford park

admin — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 20:17:23 +0000

Great Exhibition
Trafford Park, Manchester 2002

Free Trade Model

admin — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 20:16:49 +0000

Installation planning
Free Trade, Manchester 2003

Free Trade Films

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Film Stills
Free Trade, Manchester 2003

Collected Wallace collection

admin — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 15:52:08 +0000

Wallace Collection
Collected London 1997

Collected Soane museum

admin — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 15:51:41 +0000

Soane Museum
Collected London 1997

installation

Free Trade detail ceramic

Use Value

Sub-Title

End Date

Start Date

Location

Body

Related Films

Related Projects

Related Publications

Collected

Sub-Title

End Date

Start Date

Location

Body

Related Films

Related Projects

Related Publications

Contents: 31 Tiensevest

Sub-Title

End Date

Start Date

Location

Body

Related Films

Related Projects

Related Publications

Free Trade Spread

Free Trade Trafford park

Free Trade Model

Free Trade Films

Collected Wallace collection

Collected Soane museum