FTHo

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

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Flat Time House (FTHo) is working with Wayi Wayi Art Studio and Gallery, founded by artist couple Agness Buya and Lawrence Yombwe, in Livingstone, Zambia, as part of a British Council funded research project to support direct exchange between artists in the UK and Zambia. FTHo and Wayi Wayi support artists with socially engaged practices, and have a focus on engendering inter-generational exchange. Both organisations are currently building residency programmes with the aim of fostering international dialogue. Over the next six months, Wayi Wayi and FTHo will be learning more about each other’s unique context: looking at how artists in both countries work with sustainable materials; and also how artists in both countries work with non-art organisations to effect social change.

Join us for the first event as part of Constellations ° Assemblies, a series of free online events curated and delivered by UP Projects in partnership with Flat Time House and Liverpool Biennial. The events are open to all artists, curators and practitioners active and/or interested in the expanded field of public art.

Taking place between March and November 2022, Constellations ° Assemblies are series of free online events curated and delivered by UP Projects in partnership with Flat Time House and Liverpool Biennial. The events are open to all artists, curators and practitioners active and/or interested in the expanded field of public art.

This Thing We Call Art is a project by trans-disciplinary artist Kelly Lloyd. Lloyd has been interviewing people in the arts about their livelihoods since 2017 – interviewing 85 people thus far. This archive is now available online at thisthingwecallart.com, and, in addition, Lloyd is sharing excerpts from a series of interviews via a new podcast with contributors including Gregory Bae, Gordon Hall, Nicole Morris, Leah Capaldi, Hilary Powell and Bella Milroy.

Art360 have made a short film introducing the John Latham Archive. This film marks the completion of an ambitious five year project making photographic material from the archive fully accessible for the first time.

These materials were digitised, catalogued and re-housed by Flat Time House archives assistant Sarah Millet, with funding by Art360 and additional support from the John Latham Foundation.

Flat Time House is pleased to announce the open call for Constellations, a free, nine-month learning and development programme for artists, curators, producers, and practitioners active and/or interested in the expanded field of public art. Constellations is curated and delivered by UP Projects, working in partnership with Flat Time House and Liverpool Biennial. By ‘the expanded field of public art’, we mean the work that happens at the intersection of contemporary art and culture, social practice, and the public realm.

In addition to the John Latham archive, Flat Time House is home to a collection of John Latham artwork which until now has never been the subject of sustained investigation. A new research space for these items is currently being developed by AHRC funded researcher Sean Ketteringham to allow greater access to the materials by both education groups and artists. The cataloguing of the collection will build upon the experimental structure of the John Latham Archive. The creative archival methodologies we employ explore how cataloguing and storage processes relate to Latham’s ideas of knowledge and confusion, destruction, authority, community, and landscape.

Taking inspiration from British artist John Latham’s unique approach to the role of time and event, students from BA (Hons) Design for Art Direction at London College of Communication will organise an activity-based discursion around the themes embodied by Flat Time House, Latham’s former home.

Through this ’incidental event’ - lasting for an undefined period of time - visitors to the space are invited to search for prompts and questions; ‘chits’ hidden across the gallery. These chits, when uncovered, can be exchanged for a printout relating to John Latham’s lectures. The task engages Latham’s reflective and intuitive approaches to interrogating space and will continue until all chits have been found.

A publication to accompany the exhibition includes: Ants and Grasshoppers: reflections on the anxious object by the curator David Thorp; ‘Incidental Person’: John Latham and Flat Time House by cultural historian Robert Hewison, talking distinctly about John Latham’s ideas and the Bellenden Road Renewal Scheme from his forthcoming book, Passport to Peckham: Culture and Creativity in a London Village; a text In the Body of a Fish Without Water by artist Eva Kot’átková; an essay on Pavel Büchler by Nick Thurston; and lastly an essay on Sarah Lucas, A Woman’s World Is Never Done by Deborah Orr.

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William Evans and Julia Crabtree in collaboration with Alice Hattrick are developing a major new project for Flat Time House’s garden. Over the next 6 months the group will ‘excavate’ the John Latham archive, as well as the garden itself, to consider the conceptual and material aspects of the site. In his younger days Latham was a market gardener and his lifelong passion for gardening is demonstrated at Flat Time House by the integration of a conservatory for planting into the studio he built for himself in 1985. Alongside research into Latham and the site, their research will consider permaculture, care, community, collective action, deep time, and issues of classification. They will use Latham's thinking on making and living, and his inquiry into time and ecology, to investigate the relationship of the garden and botany to authority and power. A public event in October 2021 will share their research.

Artist Kelly Lloyd is currently undertaking a research residency at Flat Time House focusing on John Latham’s collection of books. Latham’s library, which includes books intended for the making of artwork as well as for research purposes, has never been catalogued or the subject of sustained investigation. In addition to being interested in Latham's ideas concerning the intersection between time and value, Kelly Lloyd will explore the library with particular interest in Latham's personal books vs. books for work, marginalia and other physical interventions, and personal collections as forms of portraiture. Kelly Lloyd will present her research through a public outcome in September 2021.