Conversations Series II: Other Transmissions

‘Other Transmissions’ was a touring project that launched at Tate Liverpool as a Tate Exchange event in March 2019, coalescing around a programme of drop-in workshops and talks informed by Conversations Series II artist residencies led by Venture Arts with programme partners Castlefield Gallery and the Whitworth.

Following the launch in Liverpool, Other Transmissions travelled to Artlink Hull, where works developed through Conversations Series II were shown alongside key works from the Whitworth’s Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection, one of the most significant public collections of Outsider Art in the UK. Works on loan from the collection included pieces by Henry Darger and Judith Scott.

There was a film screening of the Other Transmissions group film and an exclusive live immersive intervention by Joe Beedles at Paradise Works . Other Transmissions concluded at The University of Salford, New Adelphi Gallery, where several works produced by the Conversations Series II residency artists featured alongside documentary material of the Conversations Series II process, captured by the university’s BA Graphic Design students. Visual responses in the form of zines, riso-prints and film were shown with the touring programme.

Conversations Series II supported six artists living and working in the North West of England to undertake a five-month residency at Venture Arts Studios in Hulme, Manchester. The artists were a diverse group of Venture Arts artists and other contemporary artists selected via open call. This iteration of the series delved into feelings and thoughts of how artists feel about the labels placed upon them by society and the art world more broadly.

The participating artists spent time with The Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection at the Whitworth, researching collection pieces, this process stimulating conversation on how artists are labelled, and how this can sometimes define their work and themselves as ‘different’.

New work produced by the Conversations Series I artists evidenced a sense of play, something that featured heavily throughout the residency process. Experimentation was key and the artists explored new materials and techniques including latex, clay, sound and video sampling. The resulting works included audio-visual pieces, a group film consisting of low-fi surreal episodes developed by the group, making use of green screen footage as well as 3D scanned imagery. Other visual dialogues were communicated in the form of brightly coloured works and drawings embodying a strong sense of the surreal, stemming from dark humour featuring heavily in YouTube clips viewed, and opening credits from 90s game shows.

Castlefield Gallery supported the residency with artist recruitment and selection processes, as a critical friend, and provided the artists with mentoring to encourage reflection at key stages throughout the project.

Conversations Series is a multi-year programme conceived by Venture Arts, working in partnership with Castlefield Gallery and a wider network of national organisations. The programme extends across multiple years, curated as a discursive and art making journey designed to enable and empower the voices of learning disabled artists, focused on the power of their work as opposed to ideas of ‘art world status’. Through a series of dialogues, residencies and artistic collaborations, Venture Arts seeks to enable new and challenging work to be created, whilst exploring the place of learning disabled artists work within the context of the national and international contemporary visual art scene, and contexts such as the Outsider Art Movement and the Disability Arts Movement.

Conversations Series began in 2015/16 with OutsiderXchanges, a partnership between Venture Arts, Castlefield Gallery and the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art.