This programme takes place within Theaster Gates’s installation Black Image Corporation presented by Prada, The Vinyl Factory, and The Showroom. Collective Intimacy is inspired by Gates’s ethos of collaboration and The Showroom’s commitment to togetherness and communal knowledge, taking on multiple trans-located narratives of the current Black experience as a point of departure for a cosmopolitan worldview. In response to Gates’s reactivated spaces in Chicago and how his socially engaged projects enable communities to connect and grow, Collective Intimacy aims to create a new space for people to gather, listen, converse, and contemplate amongst a fusion of art, design, music, and everyday life.

Black Image Corporation presents distinct spaces creating a myriad of possibilities for collective engagements, featuring an installation of Gates’s art objects, furnishings, and new films that capture the methodologies of urban renewal and community activation founding his practice. Pieces from Chicago imbued with powerful histories, uses, and localities resonate with distinctive lounge design from here in London – like a love letter between two cities, under the roof of a new House. Taking place at both 180 The Strand and The Showroom, Collective Intimacy hosts interdisciplinary interventions by artists, musicians, designers, writers, thinkers, collectives and members of the public, who are all invited to distort notions of selfhood and togetherness in the spirit of creating a global community.

Programme:

12pm – 3.30pm Live DJ Sets by The Vinyl Factory Radio, The World’s First Vinyl Only Broadcast Platform, featuring Delia Tesileanu, Music for Architecture – Peter Adjaye & Nabihah Iqbalv

12pm – 2pm An introduction to POCC, a talented community of black and brown creatives, followed by a screening and Q&A from talent within the Collective led by members Kevin Morosky & Tanya Ramsurrun

2pm–3:30pm Project O (a collaboration between Alexandrina Hemsley & Jamila Johnson-Small) present their video Saved (2018)

3.30pm – 4.30pm Artist Beverley Bennett presents and interactive sound and sharing session reflecting on her Simon Says/Dadda collaborative research project with Director Elvira Dyangani Ose

4.30pm – 5.30pm Artist Phoebe Boswell presents The Lighthouse, a live performance soundscape of invited women collectively reading from gathered texts, alongside a screening of Ythlaf (2018)

5.30pm – 7pm Artist Larry Achiampong screens Sunday’s Best (2016) and invites artist Phoebe Collings-James for a sound session alongside a performance by Christian Bravo and James Jordan Johnson activating Achiampong’s Relic Traveller Flag