Urgent Talk 029:
The Art of Organization - Practice of The Showroom (UK)
Japanese-English simultaneous interpretation available
The Showroom's program has a focus on commissioning artists' projects developed through collaborative and generative processes, and on how knowledge can be produced and shared with different publics. This has included the fostering of long-term commitments to numerous issues, concepts and themes, as well as to building relationships and forms of exchange with local residents, groups, and other communities of interest.
In conversation with Tanaka Koki, artist who recently produced an exhibition at The Showroom, the organization's director Emily Pethick will share examples of recent projects - including exhibitions by Tanaka (2016), Chimurenga and Wendelien van Oldenborgh (2015), and the ‘Program Communal Knowledge’ - and will open up some thinking about what kind of organizational position is produced through this integrated approach to programming.
- Date & Time
- 19:00-20:30, September 6 [Tue], 2016 (Doors Open: 18:30)
- Speaker
- Emily Pethick (Director, The Showroom, London)
- Discussant
- Tanaka Koki (Artist)
- Emily Pethick
- Director of The Showroom, London. From 2005-2008 she was director of Casco, Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht. She has contributed to magazines such as Artforum, Frieze, Afterall and The Exhibitionist, and edited books, such as Circular Facts (2011, with Mai Abu EIDahab and Binna Choi) and Cluster: Dialectionary (2014, with Binna Choi, Maria Lind and Natasa Petresin-Bachelez). Whilst at The Showroom she has co-founded the organisational networks Common Practice, London, and Cluster. She is currently working with Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam as part of the research team for a new contemporary art venue in Amsterdam.
The Showroom: http://www.theshowroom.org/ - Tanaka Koki
- Born in 1975, lives and works in Kyoto. In his diverse art practice spanning video, photography, site-specific installation, and interventional projects, Koki Tanaka visualizes and reveals the multiple contexts latent in the most simple of everyday acts. In his recent projects he documents the behavior unconsciously exhibited by people confronting unusual situations, e.g. a haircut given by nine hair stylists or a piano played by five pianists simultaneously, in an attempt to show an alternative side to things that we usually overlook in everyday living. He has shown widely: the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), the Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), the Taipei Biennial 2006 (Taipei), the Gwangju Biennial 2008 (Gwangju), the Yokohama Triennale 2011 (Yokohama), Japan pavilion, the 55th Venice Biennale. He received a special mention as national participation at the 55th Venice Biennale, 2013, and Deutsche bank artist of the year 2015 award.
