L’Atelier est Mort, Vive l’Atelier!
Springhill Institute

Venues:
Grand Union, Unit 19, Fazeley Industrial Estate, Fazeley St, Digbeth, Birmingham, B5 5RS
Eastside Projects, 86 Heath Mill Lane, Birmingham, B9 4AR
Mona Casey Projects, 119 Floodgate Street, Digbeth, Birmingham, B5
VIVID, 140 Heath Mill Lane, Birmingham, B9 4AR
Times: 4-8 Nov, 12-5pm

With a performance by Nina Beier

Poster commissions by Nina Beier, David Blandy, Ruth Buchanan, Ellie Harrison, Kelly Mark, Nicholas Matranga, and Richard Peel

A work of art may pass many stages; conception, experimentation, discussion, production, more discussion, marketing, transit, presentation, documentation, reproduction, critical analysis, sale, storage, positioning within art history, repetition, rediscovery, and more discussion. Any single work may take all or only one of these positions, in any sequence over time, without defining one perspective from which it is properly seen.

‘First Person Singular’ by Nina Beier operates on a simple instruction to gallery attendants: When alone in the exhibition space to sing all the songs he/she can think of that employ the word ‘I’. By activating the passive player in the exhibition, yet keeping the activity private, the exhibition, when empty of visitors, transgresses from being idle in the mind of the absent viewer. As with the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat, the viewer outside of the space can imagine a visitorless exhibition simultaneously as idle and as filled with the singing of the gallery attendant, while all the time unable to know if indeed there are no visitors in the space. Beier’s intervention, while starting with a simple instruction, creates a complex web of interconnecting questions as to where the work is produced, who the work is for, where it exists and where it is experienced.

In 1979 Daniel Buren described the works of several artists when removed from the studio to a gallery. He said of them ‘torn from their context, one could say their environment, they lost their sense, their life…as if they became frauds’. This idea of the studio as the natural context for a work, the only place where the work is properly seen, is problematic if only because of artists who base their practice elsewhere. But whether in a café or bedroom, on location, in a work in process in the gallery or in a mere suggestion made to the viewer, the studio can be taken as a metaphor for the place where the work is made, an ephemeral or multi-dimensional place far more difficult to define than a room with canvases and coffee cups. The proposition of the studio as the origin of a work has been embodied in a newsprint poster-book in which seven artists were commissioned to create a poster in response to the question ‘where is your work’, while thirty artists were asked the question ‘what is your studio’.

On Sunday 8th Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry, initiators of Springhill Institute, will give a talk followed by a discussion on the propositions of the project. The talk will draw on the various elements of the project to raise ideas and issues about the indeterminate location of experience.

L’Atelier est Mort, Vive l’Atelier! poster-book is free throughout The Event. Design by Nina Støttrup Larsen and Ziga Testen.

Talk and discussion: Grand Union – 2pm – 8th November

Springhill Institute is a project initiated in 2003 by artists Karin Kihlberg and Reuben Henry. Springhill Institute is defined through various nomadic activities, including artists residencies, exhibitions, publications, talks, collaborations and more.