STUDY WEEK LED BY CALLY SPOONER
14-17 MARCH 2016

As her contribution to the exhibition, The Practice of Theories, Cally Spooner will lead a four-day Study Week.

The participants selected from an Open Call to join Cally are Jamie Atherton, Gabriella Beckhurst, Antonia Blocker, Judith Browning, Rosa Farber and Isabella Martin.

'Please remember when you get inside the gates you are part of the show.'[1]

"In tough times we are often told, "keep your head". If you're a good Manager, you may find you have become all head, less body. You’d think making art would put the brain back in the body, and the brain-body firmly on earth but not necessarily. In private enterprise we control what comes in and out extremely carefully. I have only recently learned the intimate is very different to the private. We use the same tools to have a good conversation as we do to make money; the micro is hosted in the macro, the intimate in the corporate, the body in the institution.  This study week considers how a 'poetically processed subject' might never be produced from a mind-only rupture. Topics of study and activity include new management strategy, post-enlightenment doubt, embodied body-training, eating, institutional internalisation, complicity and walking. The four days will be structured with reading groups, film screenings and group practicalities, punctuated with invited speakers and walkers."

[1] An instruction from a 'Short Sermon to Sightseers' at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, NY

Cally Spooner has developed a distinctive body of work consisting of media installations, essays, novels and live performances such as radio broadcasts, plays and a musical.  Fluctuating between the intuitive and the bureaucratic, the unplanned and heavily managed, her work grapples with how indeterminacy, instincts, conviviality and less cogent time can be organised and arranged within the linguistic architectures of corporate, mediatised and institutional production.

Recent solo exhibitions include And You Were Wonderful, On Stage, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2015 & 2013); THE ANTI CLIMAX CLIMAX (2015), Bielefelder Kunstverein, Bielefeld), Post-production, Spike Island, Bristol (2015);  On False Tears and Outsourcing (2015, Vleeshal, Middelburg) and Regardless, it’s still her voice..., gb agency, Paris (2014); He's in a Great Place!, BMW Live Performance Room, Tate Modern, London (2014); Performa 13, The National Academy, New York (2013) and Seven Thirty Till Eight, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2013). In 2013 Spooner received the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award. Her novel Collapsing in Parts was published by Mousse in the same year. In April 2016, Spooner’s first large-scale US solo exhibition will take place at the New Museum, New York.