SPACE

Saturday 10 May 12 - 4pm

Galleries Tour for deaf artists and audiences 

Saturday 24 May 11am - 4pm

Seminar, Talking About Art 

Saturday 10 May 12midday - 4pm
Gallery Tour for D/deaf and hard of hearing artists and audiences
A tour of East London contemporary art galleries led by with Jason E. Bowman.
Tour starts with viewing of 40 Stations exhibition and lunch at SPACE, ends with a convivial glass of wine at The Approach, where a representative from the organisation wll join us and outline briefly how The Approach contributes to the visual arts infrastructure at a local, national and international level.
BSL Interpretation.

Saturday 24 May 11am - 4pm
Talking About Art with D/deaf, hard of hearing and hearing artists and audiences
This event will examine what current opportunities exist within the relationships between the deaf arts community and the Visual Arts Sector including those for artists and gallery contexts to be developed for the future. With debates continuing regarding identity, communication, language and cultural linguistics within the deaf arts community and simultaneously the right to art in terms of physical, intellectual and cultural access within the  Visual Arts Sector, the moment is ripe to ask the question:

What are the positive relationships between the visual arts sector and the deaf arts community which provides opportunites for future development?

For the Explore programme, SPACE recognises that the experiences and expertise of those choosing to attend should be incorporated into the event alongside formal presentations by Howard Hardiman, Omeima Mudawi, Damien Robinson and John Walker, who have been invited to address this central question and to advancce the current debates for both these sectors.

SPACE has chosen to question the traditional format of a seminar by incorporating informal, dialogue-based activities throughout the later stages of the day. Recognising that those attending should be valued as co-participants Explore at SPACE seeks to discover, from multiple perspectives and via sharing of opinion, expertise and aspiration, what platform currently exists from which a new future for D/deaf artists and the Visual Arts Sector could be developed. BSL Interpretation and Palantypist.

To book a place at either event please email: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it providing your contact details and any access and dietary requirements. Places are limited and booking is essential.

Both events are free and lunch is provided.

Speakers:

Jason E. Bowman (Chair) is a multi-folio practitioner with a foreground in commissioning contemporary art. Trained as an artist and cultural theorist, he was curator for Scotland at the Venice Biennale and is currently associate curator at the Public Gallery. He understands curatorial practice as managing the potential for collective fantasy and his role as a visual arts consultant to support risk-driven approaches to contemporary art.

Howard Hardiman studied Cultural Studios at Norwich Art School and started working with sign language after graduating. He has since worked for most of the major art galleries in London, interpreting for lectures and gallery tours. In the last two years he has started exhibiting his photographic work and has had two shows in commercial spaces as well as participating in a grup show at the Novas Gallery in Camden. He writes an online comic, When Pigeons Weep.

http://www.howardjameshardiman.co.uk
http://whenpigeonsweep.blogspot.com
http://www.zombiecoterie.com

Omeima Mudawi has recently completed an MA in Arts Policy & Management and is now pursuing a career in teaching, building on her experience as an artist and as a workshop leader. She shares a SPACE studio with three other deaf artists. She is a co-founder of Resonant - the network group that encourages positive role models for future generations of Deaf Women Artists.

Damien Robinson is an artist working with digital media focusing on the interplay between images, sounds and vibrations. From 1998 she has increasingly used digital techniques allowing her to work with media previously inaccessible to her and other deaf people. Her practice focuses on 'feel-sound' (exploring systems for capturing field recordings using vibration as opposed to manipulating pre-recorded sounds). Ongoing work using 'feel-sound inclusddes a percent for Art commission 'Arboreality' for Gloucestshire County Council, and MediaShed project AWSoM, the Ambient Weather Sound Machine.

http://www.mediashed.org/damienrobinson
http://www.steamcontrol.org.uk/exhibition/cw2_carousel.php

John Walker is Convenor of Deaf Studies at Sussex University, overseeing the development of the Deaf Studies programme within the department of Centre for Continuing Education. This programme focuses on the teaching of British Sign Language, Deaf community and culture, BSL and English Interpretaing and related projects.

SPACE is one of eight galleries in the UK working with Shape, the UK's leading disability arts organisation, and engage, the National Association for Gallery Education on the national initiative Explore.  The Explore Programme aims to increase deaf and disabled people’s access to, and enjoyment of, visual arts galleries and involves galleries in London, Wales and the West Midlands. It provides eight galleries in England and Wales the chance to focus on disabled and deaf people as audiences, participants and artists and aims to develop more inclusive approaches facilitating galleries becoming more welcoming to disabled and deaf people.
The programme is intended to be an open, experimental space in which all those involved can explore how to make the work and the assets of galleries more accessible to deaf and disabled people. Explore will use these experiences to produce a short handbook on involving deaf and disabled people in galleries for publication at the end of 2008.

SPACE is working in the London cluster alongside Four Corners and is producing a programme of tours and discussion events with D/deaf and hard of hearing artists, practitioners and audiences led by Fiona Fieber, Head of Collaborations at SPACE

Funded by The Sir Jules Thorn Charitable Trust, through the Ann Rylands Special Project