Fluid Foundations / Wharf Road Project

Given the inescapable statement of the building’s function, Richard Ducker has curated around the idea of the architectural and flights of fancy that respond to the strong office sensibility of the space.

The built environment is the landscape which we all occupy, and although architecture has the illusion of permanence, our relationship to it is fluid and often uneasy. It can inspire awe through its spectacle, or be the backdrop to real or cinematic narratives: crime, romance, consumerism, work, recreation. With these sites we experience complex psychological responses, sometimes extreme and often contradictory. There is an accumulation of history, re-animated for the present, while the present lacks stability, slipping back into the historical narrative from which it emerged. Within this, like a soap opera, lie individual stories, human exchanges.

Each of the artists in this exhibition explores in different ways the notion of our relationship to the architectural. Some make a direct reference through their material language, while others explore the more human or domestic. The human presence here tends to be inferred rather than portrayed, and we are left with a landscape of absence and boredom, while fascination is found in the banal and insignificant, and intimations of a longing for a somewhere else beyond the office desk.

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The Wharf Road Project brings more than 20 innovative contemporary art initiatives together for the first time in a central location, creating a seminal showcase for the more unusual and innovative. The Wharf Road Project is not an art fair, but a large-scale exhibition featuring the best of London’s specialist and experimental art spaces, complemented by a programme of performances, screenings, music and guided tours.

Participants have each been allocated one of the 5-storey venue’s rooms to curate exhibitions which reflect their artistic endeavours and curatorial ethos. This mash-up of different organisations will create an opportunity to engage with established art spaces as well as some of the newest and most exciting art initiatives in London.

The Wenlock building is owned by Workspace Group plc who have long been supporters of the arts and London’s creative industries. V22 is the first cooperatively run art collection, owned by artists themselves as well as external investor-patrons. Our ethos is to make the best new art accessible to more people in more ways. The Wharf Road Project is a celebration of artists, their supporters and the wider industry. V22 will feature new works for its collection selected by Martin Westwood and Martin Creed.

Fluid Foundations
Kurator: Richard Ducker

FIELDGATE GALLERY London at The Wharf Road Project

mit Monica Biagioli, John Clayman, Ben Cove, Richard Ducker, Stewart Gough, Kathleen Herbert, Lee Maelzer