Institute of Contemporary Arts

Artists' Cycling Club, Inaugural Meeting, 2008, poster

Andrew Hunt's weekend event with Erik Blinderman and Michael Eddy, Jonty Lees + Alastair MacKinven will be in the Upper Gallery on Saturday 12 and Sunday 13 July.

Artist, curator, organiser, publisher, critic, collaborator, facilitator, commissioner. Andrew Hunt (born Luton, 1969, lives in London) has embraced these and many other roles within the contemporary art scene over the past ten years. Reflecting the growing diversity of positions available within contemporary art, Hunt's wide-ranging activities traverse and connect distinct disciplines to bring about new possibilities.

Although initially training in fine art, Hunt has taken up curatorial roles at institutions such as Norwich Gallery – where he worked on the annual EAST event – and he is currently the curator of International Project Space (IPS) in Bournville, Birmingham. A significant addition to art in the Midlands, IPS at Birmingham City University stages solo exhibitions and group shows, while also publishing artists' editions and catalogues. In 2000 Hunt initiated Slimvolume Poster Publication, a non-profit annual publication that invites selected artists to produce editioned posters and prints that are compiled into a single 'volume'. Hunt and the contributors distribute copies to a carefully recruited audience – a grouping of friends, musicians, artists, curators and others, which he terms an "extended family tree". By strategically targeting artists and audiences according to the nature of each publication, Hunt constructs new communities united by receivership, although the methodology of the groupings and the social relations that unite them are not necessarily apparent. The individual volumes can be unbound or preserved in their original formats, and the printed matter generated by the project has been exhibited widely.

Slimvolume was founded to allow contributors to expand their practice within a collaborative context, and to date it has involved commissions by over 150 artists. Although Hunt is the strategist, publisher and distributor of the project, it is because of his multifarious roles – rather than in spite of them – that he can be considered an artist of the most contemporary kind. Echoing Boris Groys' description of the role of the contemporary artist – as simultaneously the analyst, critic and receiver of artwork – Hunt's mutable positions refl ect the heterogeneous production and presentation of art today.

For Nought to Sixty Hunt is creating a weekend event (on 12 and 13 July) that includes the work of Jonty Lees, Alastair MacKinven, and Erik Blinderman and Michael Eddy, amalgamating these artists' diverse concerns into an investigation into the nature of performance. The event takes place both inside and outside the ICA, placing an emphasis not only on action but on the deferral of action via photographic and video documentation, installation and text. Hunt and Lees are holding the inaugural meeting of the Artists' Cycling Club, while MacKinven, Eddy and Blinderman are staging a series of displaced performance activites, built up over the 48-hour period. Together, the activities question a number of issues related to performance – including its live/unique attributes, its sites of occurrence and its modes of reception – as well as the role of live events within projects such as Nought to Sixty.

Isla Leaver-Yap

Watch footage of the Artists' Cycling Club in action.

Nought to Sixty in pictures: Artists' Cycling Club