Symposium: Aesthetics, Poetics and Fiction as Tools for Change

2 December 2017

SPACE Mare Street
Sat 2 Dec, 11am - 3pm
£8/6 Tickets available here
All welcome

A symposium chaired by Ben Cranfield expanding on the current exhibition, BearMotherHouse, by the artist-duo, Fourthland. Exploring object-making, aesthetics, fiction and the poetic in art as tools for community formation and social change.
 
Speakers:
David Burrows
Alberto Duman
Jade Montserrat
Annebella Pollen
 
Respondents:
Nathalie Boobis
Fourthland
 
The first half of the session will focus on the transformative power of aesthetics, poetics and fiction in the context of visual art. While the afternoon will look more specifically at how these can be used as tools and strategies beyond the gallery to enact social change and establish communities.
 
BearMotherHouse is an interactive installation that offers a mythical and domestic experience created by the artist collective Fourthland in collaboration with Xenia, a friendship and English language project for migrant and English-speaking women based in Hackney.

Fourthland (Louise Sayarer and Eva Knutsdotter) is an artist collective that uses objects, ritual, storytelling and enactment to co-create public space and performances. Recent solo works include Permissible Notations of with Rosalind Fowler at PEER, London (2017); The Storm within Jeremy Deller’s Utopia Treasury, Somerset House, London (2016); back to where we have not quite been, Arnolfini, Bristol (2015); The Collective Tongue, Errant Bodies, Berlin; and everything happens on the street, PEER, London (2015). They have had recent residencies at CASS School of Art and Design, London (2016), Cabot Institute of Climate Change, Bristol (2015), and presented workshops at The Round Chapel, and Birckbeck, London (2016); Bergen Academy of Art, UCL Urban Lab, London and South London Gallery Local (2015). Fourthland also run a twice-yearly nomadic residency programmeyörük—a creative and holistic retreat co-hosted with different alternative communities around the world. 

Xenia (based in Hackney, London) brings migrant, refugee, asylum-seeking and British women together for welcoming workshops that encourage English language practise and meaningful two-way social integration through creativity and friendship.