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7/7/2014

Communal Knowledge

The Showroom, London

The Showroom’s ongoing programme Communal Knowledge has developed a unique approach to forging long-term relationships with a wide range of local residents and groups through collaborations with artists and designers. Every year three new commissions aim to generate playful and experimental avenues for critical reflection on issues at stake in The Showroom’s neighbourhood.

During July and August the gallery space will be used to present two of the projects alongside each other: Werker’s Community Darkroom and Christian Nyampeta’s How to Live Together: Prototypes. The third commission, Scaffold see Scaffold, a series of performances by Patrick Staff, will take place in the gallery in September.

This year’s commissions, although distinct, operate on common ground: they all ask how art can develop methods of collective working, and how it can inform and support social movements relating to labour and visibility.

For How to Live Together: Prototypes Nyampeta has been working with local residents, school children and education services to rethink the design of everyday objects to produce new tools, settings and structures. These new Prototypes could be a community notice board, a teapot, toys, sandals, notebooks, or a musical instrument. Their reconfiguration, through collaborative processes of discussion, experimentation and making, not only act as a way of developing new relationships between artists, communities and surrounding resources, the adapted usages of these objects also prompt new behaviours with those who interact with them. The project will be in process as a temporary workshop in the gallery space throughout the summer.

Alongside Nyampeta’s workshop, for their tenth issue Werker magazine will present photographs and information stored and displayed for use in the gallery space. The title of the project takes its name from the North Paddington Community Darkroom (NPCD), local to The Showroom, which played a key role in the community photography movement of the 1970s. Acting not in the interests of nostalgia, but in order to explore the possibilities of social photography within a contemporary context, Werker have been collaborating with local groups to explore how photography can portray and analyse issues of invisible labour. Domestic, unpaid and volunteer work are just some of the forms of labour recorded or depicted by the subjects themselves. The act of self-representation not only empowers the subject, it makes the invisible visible, and serves as a resistance to dominant representations in the media. The project will continue to evolve throughout the summer as visitors are invited to select photographs, as part of an editing process, to be assembled for different outputs such as campaign t-shirts and fanzines.

Communal Knowledge is generously supported by Paul Hamlyn Foundation, City Bridge Trust, the City of London Corporation’s Charity, John Lyon’s Charity, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, Arts Council England and The Showroom Supporters. Werker 10 — Community Darkroom has been additionally supported by Mondriaan Foundation Scheme

Communal Knowledge Events Summer 2014:

Werker 10 - Community Darkroom - Independent Workers of Great Britain
Saturday 12 July, 2014 12–5pm

Patrick Staff - Scaffold see Scaffold Public workshop
Thursday 17 July, 6.30–8.30pm

Communal Knowledge | is this working? Public discussion
Monday 21 July 2014 6.30–8.30pm

The Showroom Reading Group
Wednesday 6 August, 6.30-8.30pm

Press contact
Charlotte Nourse 020 77244300 charlotte@theshowroom.org

Preview: 8 July 2014 6.30-8.30pm

The Showroom
63 Penfold Street London NW8 8PQ
Opening Hours:
Wednesday – Saturday, 12 – 6pm

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