Important Information

Hello all,

I'm really happy with how the blog communication and exchange is going so far.

For all of those who were not here yesterday for the group tutorial, I'm bringing you notes, informations on the brief, and key dates and times for future meetings.
Please read through carefully and get the dates into your agendas so we can really work this out as a superB team :)

The spaces we have been allocated for the exhibition are in the painting studio, the 1st one on your right when you enter the room, and the last one on the right. So we have 2 different spaces, opening, and ending the room.

With the help of Nooshin Farhid our tutor, we ended up going to the library and picking random sentences that had nothing to do with arts, philosophy or any other academical notion. Get a strange sentence, everyday based, something completely disconnected from before.

The one we all voted for was "After a long time of waiting in anxious expectation - out popped a mouse!"


Please write it down as it is the title of the exhibition, and the sentence that will guide us all to have a starting point in common, as we are ALL going to produce a piece of work, from your own practice brought to this sentence.
From this came out some very interesting ideas of works and curation for the 2 rooms. we thought it was challenging to curate very different works. We noted the element of surprise in the sentence. We thought it was interesting to have something from the everyday, unusual, a title that will add a layer to the meaning of our work and curation instead of describing it.
The moment we separated that sentence from its context, it has become something else. And this is where we are all going to start something out.

The few concepts we could extract were :
- the notion of time of waiting, a delay, an indication of a period of time. 
- the idea of expectation
- the notion of surprise, something really small, clashing with the previous part of the sentence. 

So we played around, and liked the idea of the paradox and opposites present in that sentence, like heavy/light, big/small, serious/playful.
What could surprise ?
Mirror-reflection ?

We directed ourselves to having both exhibition space totally similar, or having a tiny difference, so that the viewer, after seeing the 1st room, will expect something different for the 2nd room, and would be totally surprised to see the same things, and won't notice the slight changes as a 5cm move etc. ...

Mirroring - Surprise - Humor
An exhibition that doesn't look like an exhibition

Also we should try to find a link from that sentence to any part of our seminar themes.

Next meeting will be next Wednesday 8th, at 10:30 PROMPT, COMPULSORY ATTENDANCE FOR ALL, and please bring a proposal of the work so we can discuss and know where everyone is heading and start talking about the curation and our strategy of display. 
The meeting will take place in the studying spaces right in front of our seminar room.

some references :

Mike Nelson @ Tate Britain
Gille Deleuze - The Logic of Sense
Lewis Carroll and his double layered meaning with words.

I hope it is all clear, if any question please comment and we will answer back or if anyone who was there has anything to add please do.

to sum up the headlines  :
Surprise
2 similar rooms (so any work produced has to be produced twice)
Wednesday 8th Feb meeting at 10:30 with a work proposal and discuss the curation
Wednesday 15th meeting to finalize the curation ideas, start the performative critical writting
Wednesday 23rd Final additions and exhibition set-up

Thanks all for getting involve, this is a great opportunity to make some new, interesting work and curate it as a real exhibition.

Lina