NEW INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL AT ELEVATOR GALLERY 

NEW INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL AT ELEVATOR GALLERY

PRIVATE VIEW
Private view: Thursday 11th february 6 pm - 9 pm

Exhibition runs from Friday 12th February - Sunday 28th February

Elevator Gallery, Mother Studios, Queens Yard, White Post Lane, Hackney Wick, London, E9 5EN

Opening Times: Thursday - Sunday 12 - 5 pm

This show is organized by New International School (NIS) and hosted by Elevator Gallery in East London.

Curated by Shahin Afrassiabi


Andreas Waldén
Jarkko Räsänen
Linda Reif
Matt Packer
Olivier Lemort
Jaakko Karhunen
Lotta Ingman
Arvid Hedin
Emma Holmes
Lukas Hoffman
Hanne Granberg
Sarah Gerats

This will be a first London showing for the majority of the participating artists. This exhibition is not a thematic exposition of a curatorial agenda. What brings the artists together is the fact that they have all been involved at one time or another with New International School (NIS) during the past 5 years. Their individual artistic concerns may not necessarily coincide and for the moment that is not our (NIS) concern, nevertheless they together with their works constitute a part of a community contributing to an emergent discourse.

This will be an attempt at delineation and separation and the question of “to what end?” will always be present; to what end and for whom? The work of art projects a hypothetical community of shared interests. The direction of the hypothesis is determined first in school then studio and exhibition respectively. The purpose of this exhibition is not to bestow
‘legitimacy’ before the event but to see what is possible. To that end the backdrop is of crucial importance. NIS will provide the backdrop against which the artists and their works are the actors and generators of an
emergent community. NIS is school studio and exhibition. It is works, collection and factory. It is film studio, archive and library. It is regeneration plan and architecture from the ground up. It is a collective of individuals who will have had nothing in common with each other and reserve the right to change their minds as often as necessary.

New International School came about as a response to the over bureaucratization of art education. NIS contends that art education is the very practice of art in emergence and cannot be formalized or contained by external concerns to those practices. NIS is first of all a mobile coalition of artists whose interests among other things, is in examining the limits and limitations of art as it is practiced in economically buoyant zones. The marginality of locations is not seen as a subject for artists and other specialists to comment on or react to, but an opportunity to re examine their own practices in an expanded understanding of context and engagement.

The international outlook of the group will retain a multi-voiced relationship with all of its locations. The projects are structured around loose groupings of individuals who act as peers.

NIS meets at the Treignac Projet , France each summer to exchange ideas, discuss new projects and introduce new participants. it is based on a seminar talk system, where artists are invited to present their work or other related projects.

Discussions are continued throughout the period of stay (one week) and the participants responses take many forms including work done on site or initiating projects in other locations.
The mobility of NIS is dependent on the individuals who take part and conditions the schools mutability from the outset.

The individual works in this exhibition speak for themselves. Each projects an idea strongly and clearly leaving no doubt about it’s own referential space and a certainty about it’s relationship to those spaces’ potentialities both in the sense of reification and utopia.

What is new here is that the energy of the exhibition is directed towards the foundation of a new community. The works are not so much experimental as they are experiential in the sense that they represent work done. The work done is a confrontation with subject matter which is not merely reflective. On the contrary what emerges is the direct result of an engagement. It is this attachment which generates the work; the work done and to be done. To be done not only in the sense that the artist will work again but also in that what is done is unquestionably an exemplar, a singularity. Singularity by necessity generates work.

New International School (NIS) frames the moment of recognition and collaboration. It remains to be seen what this recognition untangles, what the works together amount to and how they shape what NIS is to become.

The first NIS collaboration was the film ‘a tergo’ the trailer of which was shown at Limoncello Gallery in 2009. This group exhibition introduces a new set of possibilities.

NIS was set up in 2004 and held its first seminars in 2006 in Treignac Projet France.

For further information on NIS go to: www.newinternationalschool.org
For information on Elevator Gallery go to: www.elevatorgallery.co.uk

Shahin Afrassiabi is an artist working and living in London. He set up new international school with sam basu in 2004.
http://www.elevatorgallery.co.uk