Zabludowicz Collection Curatorial Open: Troubling Space: The Summer Sessions

Troubling Space: The Summer Sessions is a project about space. We usually think of space as something that is just there, all around us, given. Socio-urban and architectural theory has argued that space is not self-evident, rather that it is socially produced; we produce the city, the digital landscape, office waiting rooms, the postal system, the nation and its territory by the way we live in and occupy it, use it, by what we wait for in it, send through it, and the violence we use to try to control it.

Troubling Space includes works by eleven artists from the Zabludowicz Collection in addition to a new site-specific commission by London based artist Helene Kazan. The Copenhagen-based designer Emil Krøyer has also been commissioned to realize a furniture system for the Summer Sessions, intended to contextualize the events program spatially and to facilitate its social engagement.

The Summer Sessions programme is integral to the project: it takes recent events in the public space and the shifting (shrinking) space of education as an imperative to put the space of the collection to use, to leave no space un-touched by pedagogy and resistance.

Each weekend's events are centered around a spatial question, with presentations by several of the exhibiting artists as well as a number of invited speakers. The open events include artists' performances on Saturday afternoons and guest lectures or conversations between academics and artists on Sunday afternoon. For those who wish to engage more deeply, the general public is invited to RSVP to take part in a series of small discussions on Friday and Saturday evenings.

Friday 6 – Sunday 8 July
SPACES OF DISTRIBUTION AND PRODUCTION
Considers in what spaces commodities, images, truth claims and architectures are produced and distributed.
Participants include Ethan Breckenridge, Helene Kazan and Caragh Thuring

Friday 13 – Sunday 15 July
THE BODY IN SPACE
Looks at how the body is produced by the space it moves through, and how it in turn produces that space.
Participants include Trisha Baga, Cliff Borress, Yelena Popova, Miri Segal, Debra Benita Shaw.

Friday 20 – Sunday 22 July
SPACES OF UTOPIA / DYSTOPIA
Aims to flesh out society's persistent, even relentless production of non-places and spaces of imagination.
Participants include Thomas Keenan, Avi Mograbi and Brad Samuels.

To RSVP for the Friday and Saturday night discussions with dinner, please send an email with your contact information and the Session that interests you to rsvp@zabludowiczcollection.com.

Curated by Helga Just Christoffersen and Natasha Marie Llorens

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Troubling Space: The Summer Sessions was selected from over 100 entries to the Zabludowicz Collection Curatorial Open by a panel comprised of Chris Dercon, Martin Herbert, Maria Lind and Anita Zabludowicz. Christoffersen and Llorens have been granted unlimited access to the Zabludowicz Collection and a budget of £40,000 to realise the exhibition, its accompanying publication and public programme.