Bubblegum Club

Tag: curators

  • The Black Lunch Table – engaging communities through candid conversations

    The Black Lunch Table – engaging communities through candid conversations

    The Black Lunch Table (BLT) is an oral-history archiving project staged as an ongoing collaboration between visual artists Heather Hart and Jina Valentine. Since its inception in 2005, BLT has been engaging communities, questioning dominant narratives and histories of acceptance through facilitating candid conversations. Placing itself firmly at the intersection of authorship, reflections and living attitudes in an internet age.

    The lunch table is centred around the idea of a literal as well as a metaphorical table —participants are invited to come together and share thoughts, ideas and experiences around critical discourse. This idea of sitting together and engaging in critical discourse goes a long way towards removing the separation between the intellect, the body and the soul. A sense of community is formed and previously disembodied knowledge becomes accessible through an integration with lived experience.

    BLT is geared towards cultural producers and local communities of the African Diaspora including academics, emerging artists, curators and researchers —focussing on writing and rewriting contemporary history. This rewriting forms part of an important aspect in questioning who breaks through the art canon; how we measure and value art and which stories we chose to prioritise.

    The BLT prides itself as a vector through which interdisciplinary and intergenerational discussions find new life, with these discussions further playing a role in canonising previously erased and forgotten narratives. One could think of this as a recounting of contemporary cultural history, which speaks to the creation of new knowledge. Thereby deconstructing and redefining our relationship with existing knowledge systems and allowing for a multiplicity of narratives as well as the decolonisation of that knowledge.

    Archiving is an important part of the project, further recognising that publication and documentation form part of representation where authorship is treasured. “Each roundtable’s dialogue will be documented on our online archive. The archive structure will enable web visitors to search this dynamic database using a variety of metadata tags.” – BLT website. This archiving aspect is further achieved through what is called the Wikipedia edit-a-thon, where participants can contribute robust Wikipedia entries on various artists in the African Diaspora.

    Marginalised communities and artists on the fringe continue to be sidelined when it comes to global discourse and critical conversations —our stories often reduced to subjective tales in relation to the more “objective truths of the dominant culture”. BLT assists in bringing forth these ideas and narratives, allowing for divergent interpretations and reinterpretations.

    Initiatives such as these play a critical role in normalising the idea of speaking the unspeakable and telling stories that have been muted. With a dedication on bringing forth new agendas, a space is created to push beyond the tired conversations that are often facilitated by the comfortable dominant culture. Through its facilitation, BLT is reminding us that telling our own stories is a form of resistance in a world that continues to be exploitative, exclusionary and elitist.

  • Infinity Studio at Kampnagel – reflections on privatization, militarization & escapism

    Infinity Studio at Kampnagel – reflections on privatization, militarization & escapism

    Following on from the 5 day residency in Johannesburg at the end of April, Bubblegum Club along with the artists selected to be part of the Infinity Studio programme are in Hamburg for the final stage, their participation in the Live Art Festival #8: SUPERSPACES. Within this frame the work produced will see an expansion on their exploration of privatization, militarism and escapism in Johannesburg – the foundational concepts for the programme.

    Creative Director of Bubblegum Club, Jamal Nxedlana had an interview with Caroline Spellenberg from Kampnagel to chat about our platform, CUSS and the Infinity Studio programme taking place in the space.

    On your website you describe yourself as a “cultural intelligence agency” – what do you mean by that?

    It means that research is at the heart of our practice. Cultural insight or intelligence informs everything we do, from the type of content we publish to our curatorial projects and the visuals we produce.

    Bubblegum Club is commercial image campaigns & promotion, publishing & journalistic writing, artistic and curatorial work. What is the core interest connecting all these practices?

    Although we do connect these practices it was never our main intention. It was more about  creating a space, building a network and developing an operating model for ourselves and other cultural practitioners. And in order to do so we felt that centering our practice around digital publishing made the most sense, especially in Johannesburg where there aren’t many opportunities, particularly for explorative practices.

    You are also almost the same group of people who works under the name CUSS as a curators collective. I saw a programme you did at the KW in Berlin in the frame of the 9th Berlin Biennial. After this we started to talk and we invited you to curate a programme at Kampnagel for the Live Art Festival #8. How did you develop the concept for “Infinity Studio”?

    The idea has developed quite a lot from when we first started speaking. Initially we were interested in creating a space or studio for independent cultural producers. We imagined the space as a time capsule, organised and conceived in a way that would recreate the creative energy or mood that we felt and that was so stimulating for our practice between 2010 & 2012. In that moment we felt a sense of infinite possibilities, and that where the name Infinity Studio comes from.

    Over time we identified a focus for the studio, which was to look at privatisation, militarisation and escapism in Johannesburg’s urban landscape. We organised a residency comprised of a 5 day immersive cultural tour. This allowed us to expose and immerse the invited artists to the spaces that we were looking at as the curatorial team. The programme we will present at Kampnagel in June will be based on the experiences from this residency.

    Coming from the curatorial perspective of a theatre some things strike me about the way you work: For one, you invite a lot of quite different artists to participate with individual contributions, maybe extending the idea of a “group exhibition” into live art? How did you choose the line-up of 13 artists for the “Infinity Studio”?

    Yes, but from group exhibition to group work to live art. We looked for people with particular skill sets. For example, writers, vocalists, music producers, digital artists and fashion designers. People with skills that could be combined to produce components for a one group work. The other thing that was very important to us was the way people practice, for example, are they able to work in a group and practice across their area of interest or discipline?

    Also, what strikes me is that you think a lot about the space, the framing and communication around the project. The ways of presenting the artists – which is part of the work as curators – becomes artistically itself. Can you describe your working methods for this?

    Curation has always been an artistic practice for us and it’s no different with this project. Our role has been to create the platform and quite literally the stage on which the work is set and will play out.

    The title of the Live Art Festival this year is SUPERSPACES and is presenting artistic and curatorial ways of creating specific set ups of space, art experiences and ‘users’. Can you connect the “Infinity Studio” to this?

    I think it connects to this in the way we are approaching the relationship between the audience and the performers, as well as the relationship between the audiences space and the performers space (the stage). We will use curation to reorientate these relationships.

    As content you choose to present insights into the urban cosmos of Johannesburg: your key words for this are “privatization, militarization & escapism”. Can you give us a little background on this?

    It was really when we started thinking about the residency and what our plans were for it. We were thinking about the artists and the aspects of their work that we were interested in and how we could use the residency to focus in on those specific areas of their practices. As we identified spaces and mapped out activities for the residency or cultural tour, we started noticing themes and tropes which we distilled to “privatization, militarization & escapism”.

    Your background is in visual arts and, I think, this is the first time you work in the context of a theatre institution, right? What differences between the two systems do you notice?

    Yes it is. I haven’t noticed too much difference, especially because we are approaching this as we normally would. The only difference is the framework within which we had to work, that being the theater and the theater production. We had to slightly alter our thinking when it came to how we think about audience and how we programme the shows.

    The Infinity Studio performances will be taking place from the 7th – 9th June. Check out the Facebook event for more details.

    INFINITY STUDIO is produced by Kampnagel and Bubblegum Club, with the support of TURN – Fund of the Federal Cultural Foundation of Germany as well as the Goethe Institute.

  • Medrar for Contemporary Art – A Platform for New Egyptian Artists

    Medrar for Contemporary Art – A Platform for New Egyptian Artists

    A series of summer workshops held at the faculty of Art Education at Helwan University in Egypt set in motion the coming together of art practitioners Dia Hamed and Mohamed Allam. Their collective effort was directed towards creating spaces and opportunities to show their work. This led to the founding of their non-profit independent organisation and gallery, Medrar for Contemporary Art aims to develop the art industry in Cairo by encouraging collaborations between artists locally and internationally. This is directed by the idea to build a form of collective intelligence that allows artists to have creative conversations and gain exposure to the art world. When asked about the importance of joint efforts in producing work, Dia explained that the arts scene in Cairo has been “…infused with individualistic approaches to creation, probably due to skill-based education systems. So we always try to organically encourage emerging artists to seek peers or mutual interests among local artists and others from abroad. Our educational programmes are always implying lateral methods of exchange.”

    Still from video titled “Impromptu: HG Masters on SB 13” on Medrar TV

    Expanding on their interest in documenting their own practice and its surroundings, Medrar started producing content for the web, aspiring to construct a full archive of artistic footage accessible online for researchers and educators. In February 2012 they began to broadcast their web-based channel Medrar TV. Reflecting on the role that documentation through video plays in audience engagement and preserving art, Dia explains that “video documentation enables [a] local audience to search back [to] what they might have missed [exhibitions and other events] and even have a closer insight on the artist himself, and reviews by others. In addition, video documentation gives access to a wide range of audiences that are distant from the events. We also perceive it as an act of conversation for the history of contemporary practices in the region that might get lost or badly archived by the practitioners themselves. Medrar TV also helps promote and highlight certain initiatives and movements locally and abroad by having all the content translated to…the English language.”

    Image from video at Marwan Elgamal’s solo show “A Green House”

    Located in the quiet living neighbourhood Garden City, the Medrar gallery is the headquarters for the organisational teams working on various projects.  With networking and exhibiting new artists being at the core of Medrar’s growth objectives, the organisation curates workshops, festivals and events. Most notably the Open Lab Egypt project which aims to promote the exploratory fusion of digital and electronic technologies to creative artwork that is diverse in form. Additionally, Medrar hosts the Cairo Video Festival: Video Art & Experimental films. A ten day festival that brings video-artists, curators and the public together to enjoy the screening of video art productions, artist talks and discussions about new media production.

    Medrar for Contemporary Art facilitates the creation of original and exciting new artwork through collaboration. It encourages experimental and interdisciplinary co-operation in order to push the contemporary art movement in Egypt forward. Making it more accessible to a worldwide audience. To learn more about these events follow Medrar for Contemporary Art on Facebook and watch Medrar TV here.

    Still from video titled “Impromptu: HG Masters on SB 13” on Medrar TV