With contributions from art.coop; Centre for Plausible Economies, The Showroom, ruangrupa and The White Pube. 

Join us on Tuesday 12 October from 4-6.30pm for this online peer-to-peer discussion that combines the critical with the practical; with a focus on how to describe and organise art worlds that we want to inhabit. Art on the Scale of Change focuses on tangible, emancipatory possibilities for the future, grounded in interdependence, equity and sustainability.

A group of cultural workers, curators, writers, critics and artists come together to describe operational modes that resist definition by the market and neoliberal institutionalisation. The intention for the evening is to be aspirational, practical and self-critical, and to remind ourselves of the possibilities of allowing ideas to become realities.

Speakers include Zarina Muhammad from The White Pube who recently published Ideas for a New Art World; Caroline Woolard from art.coop who are rewriting the rules for art funding based on solidarity economies, and Farid Rakun and Reza Afisina from ruangrupa, who have announced the principles of Lumbung for documenta15. A lumbung – or rice barn – is a place to store communally-produced rice as a common resource for future use; to heal today’s injuries, especially those rooted in colonialism, capitalism and patriarchal structures.

The event is part of COMPOST, a collaborative exhibition between The Showroom and artist Kathrin Böhm, who share a desire for not continuing business as usual and are making use of COMPOST as a moment to reflect and produce fertiliser for future use. Curator Lily Hall and Managing Director Seema Machanda are joining the discussion as the core team of The Showroom, who want to actualise organisational development embedded in values grounded by a commitment to interdependence; and Kathrin Böhm and Kuba Szreder from the Centre for Plausible Economies c/o Company Drinks, who are proposing Interdependent Art Worlds.

COMPOST explores and reformulates twenty years of artist Kathrin Böhm’s practice. For six weeks throughout June and July 2021, a cumulation of objects and methodologies filled the gallery space at The Showroom, opening up an invitation to contribute to a process of fertiliser-making: to sieve through, to assess, to archive, and to reformulate Böhm’s practice by making use of her methods of production, working one-to-one, collaboratively and in public.

The event is taking place in the last week of COMPOST, as an exhibition in-use, organised around principles of transparency in regards to the economic, social and material processes towards its realisation and de-materialisation.

Reciprocally COMPOST constitutes a shared process of redefining institution-building for The Showroom; taking this approach to artistic production, exhibition-making and new models of sustainability as a method of enquiry. If under the one-to-one circumstances offered by COMPOST everyone becomes a co-producer through usership, what kind of collabvorators and stakeholders do these processes generate? And if usership is piling-up, reviewing, archiving, socialising, reading or simply being in the space, how does this determine, augment or change the nature of the exhibition-in-use and the work itself over time?