Symposium Background
Two Rivers is a substantive practice-based research project being developed collaboratively between Difference Exchange, a new UK based agency that places internationally based artists in a variety of hosting contexts, Chelsea College of Art and Design, and TrAIN, the transnational arts research centre at Chelsea and Camberwell Colleges of Art, London
The new partnership recently organised a highly successful, exploratory symposium, entitled Two Rivers, held at Chelsea College of Art on 7 November
2008 attended by a diverse range of pre-eminent specialists, including, artists, academics, researchers and representatives from the Tate Gallery, Arups, Arts Council England, Chelsea, Camberwell and Central St Martin’s Art Colleges, Kings College, Open University, Cambridge University, Universities of Essex and Warwick and the Thames Festival. Presentations were made by Mriganka Madhukaillya from the Desire Machine Collective@ Khoj Guwahati and co-founder of Periferry, an artist-led project based on a decommissioned ferry boat on the Brahmaputra River in Guwahati, Assam, with UK-based artist Bruce Allan, also Gen Ide from the Tokyo Boat People’s Association and David Cross, artist and TrAIN fellow.
The Two Rivers symposium used rivers as a backdrop to an exploration of how artists work across platforms in search of conceptual innovations, and collaborate in situations that link art education, industry and academia. It discussed the values of difference, examining how knowledge and ideas are exchanged, and how artists are observing the global and the local in a new climate of anxiety and rapidly changing economic, political and cultural contexts.
Background
EVENTS