Cell Project Space

Cellular is a new experimental Live Art and Media-based programme initiated by Associate Curator Eliel Jones, comprising a multi-purpose ground floor event space at Cell Project Space and an online platform on Cell’s website. Originally conceived to run alongside the exhibitions programme at the gallery, Cellular will launch six pilot commissions of on-site and digital works to be delivered with and without physical audiences between June - December 2020. 

 

Departing from Cell Project Space’s origins as an artist-led organization and continuing its 20-year engagement of supporting emergent artistic practices, particularly those by underrepresented artists, Cellular will provide a platform to develop new research, test ideas and present preliminary studies of work. By focusing on ephemeral and time-based practices, Cellular aims to test new ground in performance, moving image and expanded live work in response to an ever shifting social and political context. It simultaneously increases our range of commissioning opportunities for artists that span various disciplines and geographies, and widens our reach to audiences at a moment accentuated by physical distance.

 

Nurturing the strangeness provoked by the conditions of a global pandemic, the artists in the programme have been initially invited to produce live and media-based works from their own physical spaces. In this way, Cellular launches with an open-ended exploration into liveness and performativity as they are being re-framed by shifts to our experience of togetherness, touch, affect and the body. At the same time, and with an awareness of its surfacing in the midst of a grassroots movement for equality and radical reparation, Cellular will seek to acknowledge and address how other physical, social and financial constraints –of mobility, access, resources and engagement– restrict participation in, and the experience of, live and ephemeral work in the visual arts.

 

Cellular begins in mid-June with Parallels (2020), a new video work by artist Sanna Helena Berger and dancer and choreographer Shade Théret. Originally commissioned as a performance to be realised in physical and conceptual proximity to the exhibition X6 Dance Space (1976-80): Liberation Notes, the work was necessarily cancelled in mid-March and instead performed and recorded at the gallery without an audience.