Host, SHU Graduates
Bloc hosts six emerging Sheffield-based artists, who in turn host a series of activities, dialogues, processes and services, in a collaboratively curated group exhibition aiming to explore and contest traditional relationships between gallery and artist, artist and audience.
In response to their roles as guests, hosted by Bloc, the artists explore social and hierarchical positions, cultural networks, hospitality, responsibility, intrusion and occupation. Elements of performance, sound art, video, and other media feature alongside live, durational work that seeks to be hosted and to host.
Visitors to the exhibition will be met with an unconventional greeting by Linda Bevan. Throughout the exhibition there will be a mini festival of performances and interventions by art students who will be gatecrashing the gallery space, hosted by Penny Whitehead. Upon leaving the gallery, visitors will be guided by Daniel Simpkins through the changing cultural and architectural environment surrounding Bloc to Sheffield’s peripheral creative venues. Tom Newell and Venya Krutikov will transmit a series of haikus to public phone boxes in Sheffield city centre from various cities in the USA, and the unexpected acoustics of Walkers’ Ring, an architectural phenomenon (highlighted previously be Exposed) at the foot of Ecclesall Road will be explored by Terry Slater.
Click here for the image archive: Exhibition, artist talk, Art in the Pub/Gallery
MORE ABOUT THE ARTISTS
The artists have been selected on the dynamic of their previous collaboration in the 2006 Sheffield Hallam graduating artists show, The End, in which the gallery space was used as a base for the continual documentation, representation and dissemination of a number of interactive, off-site or roaming works. Since graduating, Linda Bevan performed at BLOCassembly#3, Venya Krutikov has curated and exhibited in a series of live/video art events in Oxford, and Tom Newell performed at the recent live art event Just For Fun alongside artists including Juneau Projects and WebsterGotts. Terry Slater has been working collaboratively with Horatio Eastwood as NoFixed Abode, and Daniel Simpkins and Penny Whitehead have exhibited as part of the Liverpool Independents Biennial.
