The Middlesbrough Art Weekender 2018 is now accepting applications from North based Artists.
© 2018 Middlesbrough Art Weekender All rights reserved.
Designed by Solar Bear Design
© 2018 Middlesbrough Art Weekender All rights reserved.
Designed by Solar Bear Design
“Introducing … Benjamin Busch”
“Benjamin Busch is one of our ten invited artists who will be taking part in the #maw weekender. Currently based in Berlin Busch is a trained architect, artist and writer. His work is exciting and full of different ways of questioning spatial qualities. He shares with us what he sees as the importance of the festival and what to expect from his work. See what Busch considers his biggest influences are and get yourself ready for what will be Middlesbrough’s inaugural international art weekender.”
What is important about Middlesbrough Art weekender?
This project is a rehearsal of utopia. We need projects like this to remind us that alternatives to the status quo are not only possible but attainable.
What are the ideas behind your practice?
My art practice is driven by a desire to first understand and then intervene in spatial production, leaving behind established disciplinary constraints.
What has influenced you?
My training in architecture profoundly influenced how I see the world around me. Moreover, my interests in emerging technology, political philosophy and aesthetic theory, which estranged me from the very conservative profession of architecture, led me to study and experiment with other forms of practice, including art and writing.
What to expect with your work.
My work Card House results from a research residency in Dhaka. Bangladesh’s biggest export is ready made garments, and its “biggest” imports are the worlds disused ships, which get taken apart by hand in Chittagong’s flourishing shipbreaking industry. My work sort of fuses those two iconic, heavily mediated production–consumption vectors into one object.
“Introducing … Oran O’Reilly”
“Oran O’Reilly is an artist and Lecturer based in Manchester. He has an extensive practice across different forms of print making and his work also questions ideas of Icon and Iconography. Find at more of what his influenced O’Reilly and what he considers you will expect to see with the work.”
What is important about Middlesbrough Art weekender?
There has always been a lot of creativity and energy in the North and it is important that Middlesbrough celebrates its own uniqueness in bringing together creatives from the region and beyond. Events such as the Middlesbrough Art Weekender bring art to unexpected places beyond the gallery and can provide a spring board for future creative events.
What are the ideas behind your practice?
There is a long history of objects being wrapped for protective, symbolic, sinister or practical reasons and I am interested in how these contexts can be playfully merged. This body of work attempts to set up a balance between the temporary and permanent, mixing visual and historical references to create new icons that relate to ideas of iconoclasm and through a visual wrapping distort our understanding of what is being represented.
What has influenced you?
I would call myself a channel flicker and am influenced by a wealth of visual and political references. This work in particular is influenced by cartoon graphic language, religious iconography, museum artefacts, advertising and the temporary nature of the modern image.
What hat to expect with your work.
I would say that this work fits into a lineage of Pop, celebrating the image, but an image that has been chewed up and recycled creating something that may be visually arresting but infected by a virus.
“Introducing … Milo Trakilovic”
What is important about Middlesbrough Art weekender?
The way in which this project engages with the city of Middlesbrough by encompassing the city’s various venues is quite exciting. It showcases a variety of artist, local as well as international with both established and emerging practices. This diversity is something worthy of praise.
What are the ideas behind your practice?
My work often hinges on an intersection between theory and practice. As someone who is trained in New Media Art I have been working with moving images from quite an early age.
I became more interested in the codified structures that shape and form todays digital images. Dealing with code is essentially dealing with language. This paradigmatic shift between text and image, how they overlap and inform one another in our digital age is something I’m very interested in. Language has somehow become quite an obsession of mine in both my theoretical and artistic efforts. I’m interested in exploring the limitations of language as a communication tool, how it can be used not as a static and theoretically immovable construct but as a vibrant technology that models human perception and shapes our understanding of the world. At the same time, human language as well as code is something that’s fundamentally invisible yet it informs so many aspects of our visual experience too – this is something I find quite fascinating. With my work I’m looking for ways to twist and bend such logics in a rather playful and poetic way in attempt to try and expose the socio-technological conditions behind todays digital and visual culture.
What has influenced you?
I have recently been quite influenced by game theory. I was never a particularly avid gamer myself, but if you consider the ways in which our reality is being more and more informed by the logics of games through a never-ending ubiquity of screens, interfaces, dashboards and other forms of capture that surround us, it becomes a highly political domain to consider and understand.
I’m interested in the ways in which such logics manifest in everyday life and bleed into our present day information economy of attention and surveillance. I think it’s important to try and understand the kinds of realities that our present day technologies create, in order to think of ways in which these could potentially be subverted, challenged or otherwise disputed. I think that game theory can offer us valuable clues in this respect.
Poetry is another big friend of mine, it moves mountains.
What hat to expect with your work.
Confusion, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
“Introducing … Fiona Kelly”
WHAT IS IMPORTANT ABOUT MIDDLESBROUGH ART WEEKENDER AND HOW DO YOU FEEL YOUr WORK WILL RESONATE WITH THE PEOPLE OF MIDDLESBROUGH?
Artist led events in off kilter spaces are undeniably productive. We have being invited to create, and be a part of, a tangible, cultural and visual hotchpotch, for the better.
What are the ideas behind your practice?
Disposability, waste, man’s detritus posturing as the contemporary geological cake. The unwavering action of replacing the natural with relics of economic hubris or, as I like to call them, monuments to bad ideas! The consequence of overproduction, stagnation, but dually the possibility to make good –considering the fact that, Nature, does truly, abhor a vacuum.
What has influenced you?
There is a framework where Art seeks to address the inherent wrongness of things. To pose questions, to utilize the overlooked, the mundane and attempt to make sense of the world in which we reside.
What hat to expect with your work.
I reappropriate materials in a state of rejection; cardboard, ply, roofing bitumen, dust. I endeavour to alter my collected remnants, the by-products of the urban landscape, to form some sort of fable often with organic elements as central characters.