FTHo

The Reader includes conversations, texts, photos, statements, reflections and a graphic story on the necessary destruction of artworks; vulnerability and death; catharsis and joy; restorative practice; ghosts of our youth, and archives of neglect.

Contributions by / with artists, curators, academics and writers: Pilar Quinteros, Tschabalala Self, Joseph Constable, Jaime Gili, Alice Channer, Anne Hardy, Jes Fernie, Rosie Ram, Ben Cranfield, Josephine Meckseper, David Hammons, 3Nós3, Olu Oguibe, Jacob Epstein, Henry VIII’s Wives and Candice Purwin.

Edited by Jes Fernie

Graphic design by Daly & Lyon

Published by Flat Time House

£8 

All proceeds go towards contributors’ fees for Reader III

36 pages, 289 × 380 mm, printed web-fed offset in full colour onto 55gsm improved newsprint

Flat Time House are pleased to announce that Elisabeth Del Prete will be undertaking an AHRC-funded PhD at Birmingham City University, working in partnership with Eastside Projects and FTHo to examine how the ideas and models developed by Artist Placement Group (APG) (1966-89) are both relevant today, and to future possibilities for the role of artists in society. 

Elisabeth’s research will evaluate contemporary experimental art projects, exploring how principles of regenerative design can generate new understandings of the impact of APG’s approach. Drawing on regenerative design as a method that acknowledges the interconnectedness and co-evolving nature of living systems (social, political, economic and natural), the research will ask how APG's motto “context is half the work” can be expanded upon to evaluate contemporary reworkings and inform future modes of creative practice.

Flat Time House is currently in-between temporary exhibitions but we are open by appointmen, Wednesday–Friday, to view the house and the permanent display of John Latham works in the front 'Mind' gallery which give an introduction to Flat Time.

Please email [email protected] or call 02072074845 to arrange a visit.

Flat Time House is pleased to announce that artist Eloise Hawser will be undertaking a studio residency at Flat Time House in partnership with Knotenpunkt. The residency will culminate in a solo exhibition at FTHo in 2025, in addition to a new commission to be presented as part of I Find Myself, a Barbara Steveni retrospective upcoming at Modern Art Oxford. Drawing from her longstanding interest in the materiality of modern life, Eloise has been invited to undertake original research into Barbara Steveni's collection of studio materials – specifically over a decade's worth of newspapers – with a focus on Barbara's home-studio in Anstey Road Peckham as a site of artistic production, conversation, and reflection on past endeavours.

Working in partnership with UP Projects and Deveron Projects, the Constellations ° Cohort 2023 will be taking part in a paid week-long group residency in Huntly, Aberdeenshire. The residency will be an opportunity for the cohort to extend the collaborative work and peer to peer learning undertaken during the Constellations programme.

The residency will delve further into the questions, challenges and learnings that have been uncovered over the past months and connect with this through the unique context and organisational practice at Deveron Projects. Through a programme of walks, workshops, meetings and events, the cohort will explore the conditions that both impact the work we do as creative practitioners, and the conditions that we can create, through the process of making artworks collaboratively with communities. From self-actualising communities to thinking like forests, disrupting systems of exchange to care and maintenance, each day of the residency will question what is the role of creative practitioners and artworks in creating social justice and how do we do this work well?

Isabel English’s recent work has developed from an interest in material culture and its relationship to clothing and garment construction, with a particular awareness to the confluence between the architectural body of the home and the concealing/protective nature of clothing. Her research whilst on residency at Flat Time House will consider the legacy of Artist Placement Group (APG) in engaging with industrial processes – in particular how instinctual needs are manifested within production techniques. This will be investigated within the context of the house as a conceptual tool, as well as Latham’s idea of the Body Event.

De-production – First Trimester Mourning Sickness is a limited edition zine crafted as part of Lyónn Wolf’s 2024 residency with Flat Time House. As a way of sharing work in progress, Wolf invited Iarlaith Ní Fheorais, Linda Stupart and Raju Rage to respond to auto theoretical writing that brings states of transformation, popular science fiction and family abolition into weird communion. The zine also includes a contribution from artist, academic, activist, and curator Promona Sengupta. A very limited number of copies are available to purchase online.

The residency, a partnership with Askeaton Contemporary Arts in County Limerick, Ireland, will continue with Wolf’s first UK solo exhibition, taking place at Flat Time House in 2025.

Lyónn Wolf’s current residency with Flat Time House focuses on questions of time and trans temporality, thinking upon how the collapse of ecosystems brought about by colonial extractive logics shapes our understandings of reproduction, ageing and work.

As a way of sharing work in progress, Wolf has invited Iarlaith Ní Fheorais, Linda Stupart and Raju Rage with Nad MA (Mexico) to respond to auto theoretical writing that brings states of transformation, popular science fiction and family abolition into weird communion. The presentation will also include an artist-made zine featuring a contribution from artist, academic, activist, and curator Promona Sengupta. A limited number of copies of the zine will be available by donation to a Palestinian solidarity relief fund.

The residency, a partnership with Askeaton Contemporary Arts in County Limerick, Ireland, brings about this public programme and Wolf’s first UK solo exhibition in 2025.

In 2024–5 Flat Time House are partnering with Askeaton Contemporary Arts in County Limerick, Ireland, to present the work of Lyónn Wolf, with an artist residency, public programme and first UK solo exhibition.

Over the past decade Wolf has developed an interdisciplinary practice, oscillating between installation, performance, and experimental workshop formats. Key to their approach has been an ongoing practice of DIY publishing, often done collectively, to traverse queer economies and spatial politics, the lived present and imagined futures. Incorporating auto-fiction and anecdote, Wolf engages a tradition of queer-transfeminist working class vernacular and ethics, finding forms of recycling, thrift and ephemera to pose questions about value, accumulation, and authorship that, in their own words, “posits the imagination as a political tool with radical potential that can exist and erupt anywhere and at any time.”

On Saturday 3 August, a special reading and performance event will occur, details to be announced soon.

This book is developed from Aerial Landscapes, a one day event focusing on contemporary artists’ engagement with the Five Sisters’ Bings and specifically Latham's approach to site from above as manifested in his 1975–76 APG placement with the Scottish Development Office. Both event and publication were shaped by dialogues between two artists, Onya McCausland and Nicky Bird, and two art historians, Katherine Jackson and Joy Sleeman, all working in the archive of Flat Time House. Together the texts convey four distinct perspectives on aerial landscapes and combine the historical and first-hand with the archive.

The book contains four chapters: ‘The View from Above’ by Katherine Jackson, ‘Cuthill and the Five Sisters Bing’ by Onya McCausland, ‘Overlay and Overview’ by Joy Sleeman and ‘Layered Over’ by Nicky Bird; with an Introduction by Gareth Bell-Jones and Afterword by Joy Sleeman. Together the texts convey four distinct perspectives on aerial landscapes and combine historical and artistic research and first-hand experience in the landscape and in the archive.

UP Projects is working in partnership with John Hansard Gallery to present Co-Creating Public Space: How can we thrive? a one-day conference taking place at MAST Mayflower Studios, Southampton. 

Co-Creating Public Space: How can we thrive? is part of Constellations 2023, curated by UP Projects in partnership with Flat Time House and in association with Liverpool Biennial.

Informed by notions of care and principles underpinning alternative economies, the conference will look at how creative practice can build collectivity by sharing resources, values and opportunities in equitable ways.

Contributors include: Sepake Angiama, Helen Cammock, Suzanne Lacy, Owen Griffiths, Fatoş Üstek, Raluca Voinea, Torange Khonsari, Jes Fernie, Lady Kitt, Binki Taylor and more tba

Participating artists: Nancy Clayton, Ntiense Eno-Amooquaye, Nick Fenn, Christian Ovonlen, Andre Williams, Dawn Wilson, Clifton Wright

Launched in the summer of 2023 What Time is Love? is an ongoing programme of conversations with artists from the Intoart Studio hosted by Flat Time House. What Time is Love? invites the group of seven artists to use Flat Time House as a space to reflect, talk about their practice and think about where they want to go next.

Flat Time House and Intoart are collaborating on a new residency that invites the development of new writing through research at Flat Time House and in conversation with artists from the Intoart Studio.

We are excited to announce Amber Hahn as Intoart Writer in Residence for 2023/2024. Amber Hahn is an artist and writer based in Peckham, London. She works with people through different methods of dialogue, collaboration and workshops with an interdisciplinary practice that encompasses installation, sound and choreography. As well as working with the artists over the next nine months, she will spend time with the John Latham archive to draw upon the theoretical ideas and reciprocal relevance between Intoart and FTHo as spaces for alternative education, critical thinking and reflective practice.  

In partnership with Flat Time House and Eastside Projects, Birmingham City University are looking for a candidate to undertake an AHRC funded Collaborative Doctoral Award on the subject of The Incidental Artist approach: contemporary reworkings of the methods and legacies of the Artist Placement Group 1966-1989 as part of the Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnerships.

Constellations 2023 supports a group of ten early to mid-career practitioners from across the UK, the Constellations ° Cohort, to develop their practice, collaborate with others, access new networks, and contribute to critical debate surrounding the future of public practice. The programme will explore urgent lines of enquiry and best practice in relation to this field, including questions around the potential of art to help communities reimagine new futures, principles underpinning alternative economies, and notions of care.

Selected through an open call, the Constellations ° Cohort 2023 are Seyi Adelekun, Ian Giles, Holly Graham, Faye Hamblett-Jones, Benjamin Malcolmson, James McColl, Laura Onions, Cherelle Sappleton, Giulia Shah and Becky Warnock.

Artist Christopher Steenson is in residence at Flat Time House to develop a new commission drawing from research into John Latham’s work Big Breather (1972), a structure which simulated the movement of tides using sea water and a bellow system, and which was considered by Latham to present a method of capturing tidal energy. Whilst in residence Steenson has used video and sound recordings to explore how the building connects to its surrounding environment, thinking upon the circulatory action of inhalation and exhalation in relation to Latham's ideas around event structure.

The resulting commission, Breath Variations, will be presented at Flat Time House between 12–14 May 2023. More information to follow.

Curated by: Cindy He, Thomas Cury, Salomé Jacques, Romy Lagesse, Napas Mangklatanakul, Ariana Martin, Liyin Wang and Hyora Yang as part of the MA Curating Contemporary Art Programme Graduate Projects 2023, Royal College of Art in partnership with Flat Time House.

Applications are now open for Constellations 2023, a free, eight-month learning and development programme for artists, curators, producers, and practitioners active and/or interested in the expanded field of public art. 

The programme is curated by UP Projects in partnership with Flat Time House and in association with Liverpool Biennial.  

Constellations 2023 supports a group of ten early to mid-career practitioners from across the UK, the Constellations ° Cohort, to develop their practice, collaborate with others, access new networks, and contribute to critical debate surrounding the future of public practice. 

The programme will explore urgent lines of enquiry and best practice in relation to this field, including questions around the potential of art to help communities reimagine new futures, principles underpinning alternative economies, and notions of care. 

The first Archive of Destruction reader includes conversations, texts, stories, artworks, and pictures by artists, curators and writers, including Joe Namy, Marianne Wagner, Kasper König, Britta Peters, Vanessa Onwuemezi, Marysia Lewandowska, Horacio Zabala, Candice Purwin, and Joanna Rajkowska.

Graphic design by Daly & Lyon

£8