May 2014

CRG at Whitstable Biennale 2014

31 May - 15 June 2014

For Whitstable Biennale 2014, Collaborative Research Group (CRG) created a social space within Kieren Reed’s From the Ground up, (A) Social Building, which also doubled as the Biennale’s HQ. CRG provided a context for interpreting the Biennale through participatory activity, talks, tours and other events. 

Projects:

The Public Zine Library
Date/time: Throughout WB
Where: Whitstable Biennale HQ
CRG public zine library logo

CRG are inviting visitors to contribute to an ongoing public zine that will be published on the last day of the Biennale. A library of donated zines, artist books, and comics will be available for visitors to browse through. Visitors are encouraged to add their own contribution to the public zine and be part of a unique engagement about Whitstable Biennale and the vibrant seaside town it is hosted by. Visitors are welcome to get an insight into the world of zine making via workshops by Jessica Maybury, Parade Zines and Wolfzines. They will include bookbinding, collage art, and playful photographic techniques. A variety of materials will be available in the Hub to allow visitors to make their page in the public zine.

Commission; Fiona James
Date/time: Sat 31 May 13:00-13:45
Where: The beach by the HQ
Title: The Incident, A Diagram for Whitstable
Fiona James a Diagram for Whitstable, 2014. Photo Bernard G Mills

Fiona James works predominantly as a choreographer using performance to address how explicit social structuring might allow and support alternative methods of knowledge production. She works across gallery, theatre and education.

This event will take as its starting point the enacted simulations of disaster situations that beach lifeguards use as training exercises. It will examine how attention plays out in heightened conditions where individuals are expected to think for themselves and, at the same time, to respond to the situation as a team. Functioning somewhere between a live experiment and an embodied diagram, the work will approach the performative space as a piece of active research. The presence of the audience will subtly feed into the piece, affecting how it’s read and what’s learnt from its presentation. Using exercises influenced by theatre, dance and educational training, The Incident will also look at how liveness relates to the function of memory, intentionally courting humour and happenstance along the way.

The Incident, A Diagram for Whitstable, is a co-commission by Whitstable Biennale and Collaborative Research Group.

Artist talk: The ARKA Group
Date/time: Sunday 1 June 1-2:30pm
Where: HQ (outside if weather good)

Arca Group
Ben Jeans Houghton & Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau from the ARKA Group discuss their commission for the Whitstable Biennale and their collaborative practice.

The ARKA Group is a collaboration between Ben Jeans Houghton & Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau, producing films, sculptures and sound works about the stranger fringes of scientific and philosophical thought. The ARKA Group collaborates with emphatic individuals from various disciplines and institutions relevant to the subject of each new work. ARKA films often subsume and manipulate the subject specific language of the ideas they investigate through the use of fictive protagonists and narrative voiceover. Recently, The ARKA Group have been making interactive installations that dismantle cinematic ideas and methodologies; replacing moving image with audio narratives that play out in darkness, employing the viewer’s imagination as the producer of the visual element of the work.

Visit: Mental Furniture Industry
Date/time: Thursday 5 June, all day
Where: HQ


Mental Furniture Industry from Flat Time House in London visit the HQ to programme a series of small events at Whitstable Biennale.

Tour Biennale
Date/time: Saturday 7 June 1:30-4pm
Where: meet outside HQ on the beach.

CRG invite visitors on a one-off curated journey around the Whitstable Biennale via a series of commissioned walks. Participants will join artist Anna Hart for a silent walk, gather food with professional forager Michael White, speculate on property with surveyor Mike Lilford and accompany artist Trish Scott as she “reads” a street.

Providing four distinct encounters with Whitstable, Tour Biennale is a choreographed exploration of the town that seeks to navigate the spaces between the Biennale's official programme of works. Winding through the town and taking in a number of Biennale artworks the tour will start and finish at the The HQ. Participants are invited to join CRG at the end of the tour for a BBQ and drinks on the beach.

Tour Biennale will last about two and a half hours. The event is free (BBQ included) 

Zine Workshop: Jessica Maybury​
Date/time: Sat 7 June 14:00-18:00
Where: HQ

A drop-in zine workshop by Jessica Maybury allowing insight into bookbinding techniques.

CRG are inviting visitors to contribute to an ongoing public zine that will be published on the last day of the Biennale. A library of donated zines, artist books, and comics will be available for visitors to browse through. Visitors are encouraged to add their own contribution to the public zine and be part of a unique engagement about Whitstable Biennale and the vibrant seaside town it is hosted by. Visitors are welcome to get an insight into the world of zine making via workshops by Jessica Maybury, Parade Zines and Wolfzines. They will include bookbinding, collage art, and playful photographic techniques. A variety of materials will be available in the Hub to allow visitors to make their page in the public zine.

Artist talk: Bronwen Buckeridge
Date/time: Sun 8 June 12:00-13:30
Where: HQ (inside with visuals)

Artist Bronwen Buckeridge discusses her practice and commission for the Whitstable Biennale.

Bronwen Buckeridge’s audio installations are studies in how sound and memory shape our experience of place. Made for one person at a time, her work experiments with the complex dynamic of live and recorded sound in a chosen location. The acoustic environments she creates are deliberately unstable – both right now and already past, moored and itinerant, referring at once to the site where they are installed and to elsewhere.

Buckeridge originally studied Modern Languages at Manchester University and worked as a producer in digital media for a number of years before completing her MA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art in 2007. She is based in London and has exhibited at a number of venues across the UK including Studio Voltaire, FACT, Project Space Leeds and Dilston Grove and has been awarded residencies in the UK, China and the USA.

Artwork: N+1, 3’33’

Date/time: Thu 12 June 20:00-00:00
Where: outside the HQ
Title: N+1

French artist and educator Stéphane Trois Carres presents an immersive performative project where participants perform to a camera for a designated period of 3 minutes and 33 seconds. This footage is projected back into the same space while a new performance happens. This process continues, forming a layered narrative of events that have just taken place whilst there is always live performance taking place. N+1 investigates a time-based perspective of physical space and sets up a scenario whereby one can collaborate across time.

Artist talk: Kieren Reed
Date/time: Sat 14 June 13:00-14:30
Where: HQ (outside if weather good)

Kieren Reed is interested in functionality, the concepts of collaboration and the possibilities of de-authoring an artwork.

From the Ground up, (A) Social Building is a new social artwork for Whitstable Biennale 2014, creating a unique space for audiences to explore, and a point from which to pick up information about the whole festival.

Through this functional sculpture Reed is exploring the legitimacy of participatory practice and the possibilities of creating innovative learning environments within the act of building a public space. Designed and built by artist Kieren Reed with input from students at UCA Canterbury and Collaborative Research Group, the work continues Reed’s critique of craftsmanship and labour, through shared working ideals and the situation of participation.

Commission: S Mark Gubb
​Date/time: Sun 15 June 12:00-14:30 (meet 11:45 at The HQ)
Where: Bus tour, meet at HQ
Title: It all began with Richard Burton...


S Mark Gubb works across a range of media incorporating sculpture, video, sound, installation and performance. The subjects for his work are drawn from the social and political culture he grew up in; an equal fascination with things he finds so great and so terrible about the world. This often takes the form of a re-evaluation and re-interpretation of contemporary culture and history, provoking us to consider our contribution to the world we live in.

It all began with Richard Burton… is a performance lecture taking place on a coach. Artist S Mark Gubb leads a tour through the coastal towns of east Kent, revealing a peculiarly personal relationship with the place he grew up in. Setting off from Whitstable, the tour starts in Herne Bay and gradually makes its way east through a landscape of strange connections and events,  littered with hearsay, C-list celebrities and coincidences. It’s the kind of history that exists anywhere, but one that can only be gathered over a lifetime of being somewhere.

Booking is essential and places are limited. Details of how to book can be found via .

The tour will leave from, and return to Whitstable, and will last for approx 2 and a half hours.

It all began with Richard Burton… is a co-commission by Whitstable Biennale and Collaborative Research Group.

Zine workshop: Wolfzines and Parade Zines
Date/time: Sun 15 June 14:00-18:00
Where: HQ

A drop-in zine workshop demonstrating collage art and photographic methods of zine content production.

CRG are inviting visitors to contribute to an ongoing public zine that will be published on the last day of the Biennale. A library of donated zines, artist books, and comics will be available for visitors to browse through. Visitors are encouraged to add their own contribution to the public zine and be part of a unique engagement about Whitstable Biennale and the vibrant seaside town it is hosted by. Visitors are welcome to get an insight into the world of zine making via workshops by Jessica Maybury, Parade Zines and Wolfzines. They will include bookbinding, collage art, and playful photographic techniques. A variety of materials will be available in the Hub to allow visitors to make their page in the public zine.