Daybreak

29 June 2017 to 2 July 2017

Aslyum / AMP / Safehouses

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Daybreak is an exciting project initiated by the RCA’s School of Fine Art to provide a forum for the practice-based researchers engaged in the School’s MPhil and PhD programme.  This is the first time the School’s student researchers have come together to work on an off-site project, working closely with each other, staff from the School with curatorial expertise and outside professionals.  The result; an exhibition, live event and research symposium, will happen over four days at the end of June and include contributions by over 40 research students.  

 

The events will take place at three different sites in Peckham. On preview night, Thursday 29 June, the audience is invited to attend live performances and screenings at Asylum, a chapel on Asylum Road before promenading through Peckham to AMP, a gallery space, to see artworks and performances and then continuing on to the larger exhibition at Safehouses, near the well-known Bussey Building.  The different venues and spaces will draw out the range of individual student’s projects and the walk between them takes around 15 mins. 

 

On Friday 30 June  from 4.30–7.30pm the students will host The Theatre of Reading and Speaking, a discursive event designed to be bring their research to a wider audience.  Another reading event, The Blue Hour, led by students Isobel Wohl and Marita Fraser will happen at Safehouses on Saturday between 4-6pm. They write, 'The Blue Hour is a series of readings and other encounters with fictions and text-based artworks, migrating from room to room in two heavily dilapidated Victorian houses that also serve as exhibition space. The event draws its name from a time during dawn and twilight each day when the sky takes on an intense blue colour that might be either night or day yet seems distinct from both, otherworldly. During this time there are no shadows. The Blue Hour similarly proposes uncertain, transient, and poetic relationships to writing.'

 

The project will make public the vast range of ideas, approaches and practices that represent current contemporary fine art research.  This year the research programme has been exploring what the notions of commitment and resistance mean for the contemporary artist. It has also been thinking about how fine art methods might provide useful models for research.  One group of students have been exploring the idea of magic as a method of investigation and they suggest,

 

‘To invoke magic, as a contemporary artist, is, in part, a means to subdue the rational impulse in favour of the irrational. In a post-industrial information age, that which opposes or seeks to short-circuit an over-determined, mechanistic message seems desirable. Yet, seeking out unknowing is not, in itself, a denial of Enlightenment thinking. In its appeal to possibility, process and ritual, magic becomes a strategy to rethink anew one’s connectedness to material, technology, language and change.’

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Programme of Events

Thursday 29 June, 5–7pm: LIVE at Asylum

Caroline Garden’s Chapel, Asylum Road, London SE15 2SQ

 

Friday 30 June–Sunday 2 July: REHEARSAL at AMP

1 Acorn Parade, Meeting House Lane, London SE15 2TZ

Open 11am – 6pm

Preview 29 June 6.30–8.30pm

 

Friday 30 June – Sunday 2 July: SHOW at Safehouses 

Safehouses 139–137 Copeland Road, London SE15 3SN

Open 11am – 6pm 

Preview 29 June 7.30–9.30 pm

 

Friday 30 June, 4.30–7.30pm: Theatre of Reading and Speaking

Asylum, Caroline Garden’s Chapel, Asylum Road, London SE15 2SQ

 

Saturday 1 July, 4–6pm: The Blue Hour

Safehouses 139–137 Copeland Road, London SE15 3SN

 

Artists

Anna Ådahl | Steven Aishman | Cradeaux Alexander | Manca Bajec | Desmond Brett | Sharon Boothroyd  | Anja Borowicz | Flora Bowden | Nicola Chamberlain | Annabelle Craven-Jones | Jeroen van Dooren | Marita Fraser  | Maria Gafarova | Vivienne Griffin  | Yifei He | Åsa Johannesson | Sarah Eliza Kelly | Vicky Kim | Melanie King  | Robin Kirsten | Giorgos Kontis | Nayan Kulkarni | Soon-hak Kwon | Julian Lass | Lola Lasurt | Clair Le Couteur  | Christina Mamakos | Carol Mancke | Brigid McLeer | Nicholas Middleton | Liz Murray | Ruidi Mu | Tom Palin | Grant Petrey | Fred Robeson | Freya Pocklington | Mark Selby | Charan Singh | Armelle Skatulski | Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrom | Rowan Whybrew | Isobel Wohl | Despina Zacharopoulou

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source: https://www.rca.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/daybreak/