Forum: Bread and games

About

Over the course of the exhibition, six artists will perform individual interpretations of the artworks on display, questioning the possibility of both neutral spectatorship and original authorship. Sculptures, drawings, photographs and text will be activated by artist-led guided tours, live performances, talks and sound.

Bread and games comes from the Latin phrase panem et circenses, which, in some languages, is a popular idiom for distraction, appeasement and mass manipulation. This phrase illustrates how the viewers' experience of the exhibition could be manipulated and deconstructed by each artist's intervention. Resonating with Open Space’s 2020 curatorial theme Manufacturing Memory, which examines the dichotomy between memory and technology, Bread and games provokes personal experiences with an unpredictable fictional narrative.

The sequence of interventions within the exhibition is initiated by individual installations that explore different modes of storytelling, in relation to the real and the intended, the remembered and the known - in public, political and private life. Re-appropriating the space, the six artists fictionalise the narrative of the exhibition, so that the audience experiences their new interpretations rather than the original voice of the curator. Control of the original idea is lost, allowing the audience to have memories dependent on chance and choice, rather than a singular exhibition theme.

Artists: Louise Ashcroft, Radek Brousil, Lea Collet, Rosa Doornenbal, Caz Egelie, Teal Griffin.

Thursday 27 February, 6-9pm: Louise Ashcroft

Friday 28 February, 6-9pm: Rosa Doornenbal, Lea Collet

Saturday 29 February, 2-6pm: Radek Brousil, Teal Griffin, Caz Egelie