Anti-Bodies
Relational is curator and co-ordinator of the overall Anti-Bodies programme. Anti-Bodies: beyond the body ideal explores different attitudes to the body, contrasting the particularity of the artist's body-concept against the ideal body-machine of the Olympic athlete, so revealing underlying idealisations of the body as they are reproduced within different everyday social contexts.
Anti-bodies takes the form of a series of contemporary art projects and an engagement programme. Each project is curated and developed for a different cultural context by a south west of England based network partner and produced in collaboration with other national and international organisations.
The network partners curating projects within the framework of Anti-Bodies are Arnolfini, Bristol; Kurator; ProjectBase, Cornwall; Plymouth Arts Centre, Relational, Bristol; and Spacex, Exeter.
Anti-Bodies production partners include: amino, Newcastle upon Tyne (UK); Animate Projects, London; LX 2.0 // Lisboa 20 Arte Contemporanea, Lisbon, Portugal; Picture This, Bristol (UK); Post Museum, Little India, Singapore; Townhouse Gallery, Cairo; and Yorkshire Sculpture Park (UK).
The engagement programme includes the website; an online open submission, presentation and curatorial platform Open Anti-Bodies developed by Kurator, a youth initiative Young Anti- Bodies; events; discussion; and resources.
Anti-Bodies seeks to encourage critical engagement with international contemporary art and extend notions of context-led working and participation in the wider social realm. It is scheduled to run until 2012.
Anti-Bodies is supported by Arts Council England and has been granted the London 2012 Inspire mark as part of the Cultural Olympiad.
International Fauna
Melanie Jackson
International Fauna is a new animation work by Melanie Jackson commissioned by Relational and produced with Animate Projects London and Picture This Bristol (UK) as part of Anti-Bodies.
Also online at Animate Projects; Anti-Bodies; and Vimio
Download from i-Tunes
Saturday 8 May
Picture This, Bristol (UK)
Screening 12-5.30pm
Launch and discussion event 2pm
Melanie Jackson in conversation with writer, architect and artist Stephen Beasley and Gary Thomas, co-director of Animate Projects. Introduced by Zoe Shearman, Relational. Drinks and refreshments provided.
International Fauna is a blast, an anti-anthem, a parade of the animal symbols designated by nation states quick change through a background of digital colour fields. The representations are matched back with their animal call, for the duration of the image - a concrete composition of the absurd. The work delights in these extraordinary attempts to project national values onto an animal form, and in the forms they have taken.
Melanie Jackson is a London-based artist with recent solo exhibitions including Road Angel, Arnolfini, Bristol, and Made in China, Matt's Gallery. She is showing The Ur-pflanze (Part 1) at The Drawing Room, London, 29 April - 20 June 2010. Much of her practice has been concerned with the flow of international capital. She is currently investigating the relationships between nature and technology through a series of experiments with fauna and flora, and the technologies available to her.
Stephen Beasley is an architect, artist and writer based in London. He co-founded the multi-disciplinary practice FlatPack001 in 1999 with his brother Mark Beasley. Recent work includes ‘FLUFFERS II', published as part of Celine Condorelli's Support Structures, the exhibition design of group show ‘Sudden White' at the Royal Academy, and the experimental radio play ‘ADVENTURE: Showdown at the Pig Palace', released by Junior Aspirin Records. He is currently a senior project architect at Manalo & White and a contributor to Frieze magazine.
Gary Thomas is co-director of Animate Projects, a London based agency, developing initiatives that explore the relationship between art and animation, and the place of animation and its concepts in contemporary art prac tice. APL also publishes APEngine, an onlin hemes/advanced/langs/en.js" type="text/javascript"> e space for critical comment on a range of independent moving image work.
International Fauna is commissioned by Relational and produced with Animate Projects and Picture This. It is supported by Arts Council England as part of the Anti-Bodies programme which is granted the 2012 Inspire mark as part of the Cultural Olympiad. With Thanks to Ed Atkins and Katerina Athanaopoulou
-
- Anti-Bodies launch and discussion, Joasia Krysa, Luis Silva, Geoff Cox, Arnolfini, Bristol (UK) 19 Feb 2009.
