About

Over the summer the project; ‘I will talk with anyone who will talk with me’, will host an exhibition, performances and a series of conversations in the new Pedestrian Arts Gallery at LCB Depot.

The project addresses the nature of conversations, the creativity that can come from the gaps, stutters or breakdowns in speaking and the spontaneous production of new ideas that can occur when people meet for conversation and collaboration.

We have been working with artist Graham Hudson to create a new installation work. Graham creates installations that act as spaces for activity; at a gallery in Austin, Texas he created a space that was used as a rehearsal space by local bands, in Milton Keynes Gallery the space he created was used to host young peoples workshops. For our project he is creating a space for conversation. The installation will host an exhibition of other artists work, the City Gallery’s summer office space and a space to hold discussions, talks, meetings and performances.

Other works in the exhibition include David Blandy’s ‘Duels and Dualities, Battle of the Soul’, an arcade game based on Street Fighter II where all the characters have been replaced by Blandy’s own. Featuring characters from Blandy’s films, that in turn were alter egos of Blandy himself, the game allows you to fight out which alter ego will triumph. Two early film works by Blandy are also being shown, ‘What is Soul’ and ‘Emotional Content’.

Rebecca Birch has re-cut a film originally shot in 2007 of a meeting with Canadian artist Robert Sinclair in a cafe on the top of Sulphur Mountain, Alberta. Over a cup of orange pekoe tea they discussed making drawings of the mountain, and the benefits of concertina-folding notebooks. In 2010 Rebecca Birch described her conversation with Robert Sinclair at a talk at Five Years Gallery, London. The video exhibited in the show is a conflation of both of these occurrences and the third version of the conversation with Robert Sinclair.

Imogen Stidworthy’s film Barrabackslarrabang was shot in two Liverpool pubs (The Vines and The Lion Tavern) – locations strongly associated with informal chat and the birth of the railway, respectively – with speakers of a local underground slang, Backslang. The film draws upon the history of adaptation in language and pronunciation with berth of the railways, consumer capitalism and Standard Pronunciation on one hand and the secretive Backslang designed to protect risky speech from being overheard on the other.

This project is part of the contemporary visual arts programme by Leicester Arts and Museums Service.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

The title, ‘I will talk with anyone who will talk with me’, comes in part from this news footage from 1968 of the Anti-University that was briefly in existence in London. See 1min 15sec in…

More information on the Anti-University can be found on this blog: http://greatwenlondon.wordpress.com/2010/12/15/the-london-anti-university/

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –