Trading Places Programme

Representation or Action Saturday 22 May 1200-1600h

Smaller groups discuss issues of represenation and action over packed lunch.

This afternoon discussion facilitated by artists Susan Kelly and John Nassari will consider the diverse approaches employed by Trading Places artists to represent experiences of migration.

Who speaks, who listens, who acts?
What is the potential for art to effect change?
What are the after effects of collaborative practice?

Trading Places artists participating in the discussion include Zeigam Azizov, Big Hope (Miklos Erhadt and Dominic Hislop), Grassroots Collective (Leticia Valverdes), Edina Husanovic, Adla Isanovic, Klub Zwei (Simone Bader and Jo Schmeiser), Martin Krenn, Maiz (Erika Doucette and Rubia Salgado) and Lisl Ponger.

Representation or Action will be followed by a collaborative performance Fly No Fly Zone led by allsopp&weir at 1600h.
'Battersea Park, London will be officially inaugurated as a Fly Zone. Participants are invited to attempt to organise themselves around a specially modified kite/surveillance camera. Join us. Become weightless. Try and get it up. Look to the sky. Lose your footing, grounding and landmarks. Escape the Closed Circuit.' allsopp&weir.

Susan Kelly is an artist and researcher. She is currently researching immigrant communities, migration and contemporary art practices as part of her PhD at University of London, Goldsmiths College. From 1998- 2001, Kelly lived and worked in New York, where she developed an archival project called ‘Supposing a State’ in the Lower East Side as part of the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Programme. She also took part in the World Trade Centre’s 91st floor studio residency and the Sixteen Beaver Street Collective. Kelly’s work has been included in exhibitions at Art in General and the Kent-Gallery New York, The Brewster Project, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s World Views exhibition at the City Museum of Skopje, Macedonia and the Lenin Museum, Tampere Finland.

John Nassari is also an artist and researcher. His project Photoinsight is documented in the Trading Places exhibition (www.photoinsight.org.uk). Photoinsight is a website which aims to offer a platform for discussing issues of ethnicity, identity and cultural difference. There are extensive reading lists and links, a bulletin board and chat rooms . Experiences is a section of the website which celebrates new work by refugees with images and text that explore reflections of home and here. John is currently working towards a PhD on Identity, Ethnicity and Visual Representation at University of East London which brings together his own experience, art work and the problematics of representing experiences of displacement.

allsopp&weir have been developing Proposals for Fly Zones. Their second proposal will take place in Battersea Park. Their first experiment was outside Peckham Library on Saturday 8 May 2004.
'Proposed are potential temporary communities of flight. Set to a soundtrack of flight messages, choreographies of lift, crash and drag, infused by the whims of the wind, are recorded for future broadcast. Adopting the technology used in the pursuit of clandestine populations, but in relation to utopian notions of play and community, ‘Proposals for Fly Zones’ suggests oscillations between face/sky, security/flight, exposure/clandestinity, an intense resonance approaching escape velocity.'

The above event will take place at Pump House Gallery, Battersea Park, London SW11 4NJ

At the beginning of the event we all gathered on the second floor and wrote our key questions in response to the exhibition.