Small - and medium - scale art organisations play an essential catalytic and progressive role in the field of contemporary art as producers, distributors and channels of support.

Taking the opportunity of the Circular Facts collaboration, this gathering investigates the role of these types of organisations in their local scenes, the networks of collaborations in which they affiliate themselves, and how they define their mandates in relation to artistic practices.

Programme Outline

Friday May 6

6pm: Introducing Circular Facts

7pm: Performance by Hassan Khan (artist, Cairo)

Saturday May 7

11am: Presentation by Agency (artist, Brussels)

12pm: Lunch Break

1pm: Session One: How to work?
This session will focus on how artistic practices inform institutional methodologies, and how artistic practice can inform institutional programming and structures. The session will begin by 10-minute presentation by each of the participants situating their practice in relation to the panel’s specific topic.

Participants: Norma Jeane (artist), Natasa Petresin (Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Paris) and Francis Mckee (Center for Contemporary Art, Glasgow)
Moderator: Mai Abu ElDahab (Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp)

3pm: Coffee Break

3.30pm – Session Two: Whom we’re working with?
This session will look at forms of informal communities and the building of institutional affinities based on common goals rather than structured networks. The session will begin by 10-minute presentation by each of the participants situating their practice in relation to the panel’s specific topic.

Participants: Frederique Bergholtz (If I Can’t Dance.., Amsterdam), David Reinfurt (Dexter Sinister, New York) and Mia Jankowicz (Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo)
Moderator: Binna Choi (Casco-Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht)

5.30pm: Coffee Break

6pm: Norma Jeane Event (artist)

Sunday May 8

11am: Session Three: What we do?
The session will look at possibilities of defining the authorial position of institutions, and the implications of this position of authority. The session will begin by 10-minute presentation by each of the participants situating their practice in relation to the panel’s specific topic.

Participants: Dan Kidner (City Projects, London), Will Bradley (Kunsthalle Oslo), and Giovanni Carmine (Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen)
Moderator: Emily Pethick (The Showroom, London)

12pm: Lunch Break

1pm: Radio play by Ruth Buchanan (artist, Wellington/Berlin)

3.30pm: The End

Artists’ Events

Hassan Khan: A SHORT STORY BASED ON A DISTANT MEMORY WITH A LONG MUSICAL INTERLUDE
Friday May 6, 7pm

A performance with multiple starting points: a suspenseful short story written in pulp literary Arabic for a cancelled exhibition; the ongoing attempt to discover the work; the direct and abstract power of music; childhood memories; the driving anger the artist depends upon when writing; and the elusive search for a simplicity that remains complex.

Agency: Assembly
Saturday May 7, 11am

Agency will call Thing 000884 (Catalogue of the Private Library of the Late Dr. I. T. Talbot of Boston) forth from the list. Thing 000884 concerns a 1912 controversy around an auction catalogue that reprinted letters written by Mary Baker G. Eddy to her cousin.

Norma Jeane: All Cats are Grey in the Dark
Saturday May 7, 6pm

Rationality is a weak tool when not sustained by a variety of physical and emotional information. The purpose of understanding the complex apparatus of relations throughout the contemporary art system is often far from been reached for a limitation of points of view. Norma Jeane’s contribution to Circular Facts takes the shape of a sensual invitation to dive deep inside the very matter of things. Participants will be faced with a rich cocktail buffet composed of uncoloured drinks in uncoloured glass containers, with no indication of their contents. Each participant’s satisfaction and eventual inebriation will be fulfilled at the condition of letting themselves go to the risk of a full experience.

Ruth Buchanan: The weather, a building
Sunday May 8, 1pm

In her work, Ruth Buchanan seeks to address the condition of artistic agency today – both as a physical position and a material form – and does so by bringing various elements together in precisely choreographed spatial and temporal situations. “The weather, a building” continues this interest and explores the manifold ways in which we inhabit space.