Women only, mosque, Yazd, Iran 2003. Photograph: Celine Condorelli
A cumulative lists of all artists and projects involved in Nought to Sixty.
Nought to Sixty presents sixty projects by emerging artists based in Britain and Ireland over six months from 5 May to 2 November 2008.
Most of the artists in Nought to Sixty are under thirty-five, few of them have had significant commercial exposure, and in most cases this is their first opportunity to mount a solo project in a major public space.
The season is not intended to announce any new generation or style, but to build up a multifaceted portrait of the emerging art scene in the two countries, and to provide a space for exchange.
The Nought to Sixty programme consists of:
Events happen at the ICA every Monday night:
Sign up for regular updates about the Nought to Sixty and the rest of the ICA's programme, special events and offers. It's free.
Nought to Sixty is supported by:
Other partners:
Developing relationships with people and organisations, engaging with spatial experimentation and research.
Support Structure is a collaborative project initiated in 2003 by architect Celine Condorelli and artist-curator Gavin Wade, a project conceived as an "architectural interface." Support Structure develops relationships with people and organisations, and is engaged with the spatial experimentation and research that underlie the processes of art and architecture, while also resisting accepted definitions of production within each field.
The situational and responsive nature of this practice is inherent in the use of the term 'support'. Avoiding a conventional sense of production, the act of support directs attention away from Condorelli and Wade and towards individual projects and their users. It is an act of generosity that, in the words of art historian Andrea Phillips, stakes a "[direct] political claim: let us help you make something new occur: we will support you. Our role is not to make the new, it is to support the new being made by you." Support Structure takes on board an existing set of relations within an organisational or spatial context, and enhances or reframes these relations, in order to allow a form of "political imagination" to take place.
Support Structure's various projects have investigated how 'support' can read across power structures, social realities and institutional forms. For the project What is Multicultural? (2004), which occurred under the auspices of the Portsmouth Multicultural Group, Wade and Condorelli proposed the formation of a library of resources devoted to expanding and defining the eponymous term. This process addressed the Portsmouth community, encouraging an ongoing archive of books and responses, yet reflected back onto the Multicultural Group by addressing the core tenets of the organisation and its function within the community.
Tensions can occur between 'supporting' an organisation's activities and navigating its bureaucracy, and in this case the project exposed rifts between the mission and reality of the Portsmouth Multicultural Group, leading two of its members to resign. Nought to Sixty – as a feature of the ICA's 60th anniversary year and as an articulation of the institution's relationship to emerging practice – is the most recent context within which Wade and Condorelli have applied Support Structure. Their proposal, Curtain as declaration of desire for change of function (2008), asks the institution to make a list of both artists and employees who have been part of the ICA during its 60 years, and to maintain this list in the future. One intention of the list is to draw attention to differing roles and differing levels of influence within the institution, and the metaphor of the curtain is pertinent here: at once a continuous surface and a form of divide.
However, another intention is that the list might function as an equalising system, drawing on a huge legacy of individual experiences and interpretations of the institution, and acting as a pool of participants for dialogues that would address the past and future policies of the organisation. Curtain as declaration of desire for change of function might be hampered by the past, including the vagaries of record-keeping and archiving; while its future might be subject to institutional developments, and to shifts in commitment. However, Support Structure's proposal exists as an invitation to consider the ICA as an accumulation of potential, and to provide a collective form of re-imagining that would access this potential.
Richard Birkett
Read more about the Support Structure project Curtain as declaration of desire for change of function.
Why an institution of contemporary art(s) like this, and not any other?
Artist-led organisations that support networks of emerging art in England outside London.
Photos of the projects, artists and audiences taking part in Nought to Sixty.
Nought to Sixty includes a series of monthly discussions that address the networks that form and contribute to an emerging scene.