Melanie Gilligan:
Crisis in the Credit System
Lawrence Abu Hamdan:
Marches
Ruth Ewan:
Did you kiss the foot that kicked you?
INTERACTION
Artangel Interaction enables small groups of people drawn from a wide range of different communities to collaborate in participative projects with emerging artists. Taking place outside institutional settings, projects engage with temporary communities built through a patient process of discussion and creative exchange.
Artangel Interaction launched in 2006 with Nights of London a focus on the different people who work, wake and watch over our nocturnal city; those who drive the pulse of London while the rest of us sleep. Nights of London realised new projects including David Blandy's Radio Nights, Sarah Woodfine's When Night Draws in and Janice Kerbel's Nick Silver Cant Sleep, a play for BBC Radio 3 exploring the relationship between insomniacs and night-flowering plants.
Connecting these nocturnal strands, Sukhdev Sandhu's Night Haunts materialised as a series of monthly episodes on a specially designed website www.nighthaunts.org.uk. In collaboration with musician and sound artist Scanner and designer Ian Budden, Sandhu ventured across London after dark in the company of night cleaners, Samaritan call centres and the dedicated nuns of Tyburn who pray for the soul of the city twenty-four hours a day.
In 2007 Artangel Interaction produced the first Jerwood Artangel commission Ruth Ewan's Did you Kiss the Foot that Kicked You? a rush hour collision between London's commuters and its buskers, over a hundred of whom had integrated Ewan McColl's Ballad of Accounting into their morning and evening repertoires.
The new Artangel Interaction programme takes the language of its articulation as a starting point, focusing on what interaction actually means for all involved. Future projects will draw out and highlight a process that allows communities to emerge organically through the creative exchange. Taking issues that are highly pertinent to our times, both politically and personally, these works thoughtfully play with notions of collaborative practice.
In 2008, Lawrence Abu Hamdan produced sound-based project Marches, and Melanie Gilligan made Crisis in the Credit System, a series of video vignettes inspired by recent events in the world economy.
Future
Artists Ceri Buck, Sarah Cole, Lucille Power and Charlotte Prodger are exploring the notion of the Temporary Autonomous Zone, or 'TAZ', in relation to creative process and interaction. Each artist is collaborating with groups or individuals - including young mothers, truckers, Loughborough Estate residents and a silversmith, and in doing so prepare the ground for a momentary creative uprising.
Karen Mirza and Brad Butler are currently working with Pakistani communities in Karachi, exploring how violence inherent in political structures is played out in social spaces. Their project will culminate in London and elsewhere in 2009.
Emma Hedditch is charting the many interactions, often hidden, that take place as a project is realised, in a specially designed social networking site involving participants, artists and Artangel employees.
