Output details

Does your contemplation of the situation fuck with the flow of circulation?

Thomas O'Sullivan and Joanne Tatham and are each submitting 2 distinct outputs, 4 in total. The collaborate on all aspects of conception, development and application of their research.

This commissioned solo exhibition was funded by Arts Council England and Elephant Trust (£25,000). Led by artist-curator Gavin Wade, Eastside Projects draws on strategies of conceptual art and institutional critique to consider the role of the public art gallery. The commission was an opportunity for Tatham and O'Sullivan to engage, in partnership, with this enquiry. Wade has established systems within Eastside to further his investigations, including a series of architectural interventions and semi-permanent artworks. Working with and against these curatorial strategies created an opportunity to question the orthodoxies of participatory art practice and institutional critique that inform such approaches. 'Does your contemplation of the situation…' confronted Wade’s physical and conceptual restructuring of Eastside by establishing its own choreography of objects and situations, designing and positioning a series of constructed artefacts as a strategy for enquiry.

The work proposed a theatrical mode as an alternative means to generate intellectual engagement with viewers. Central to this approach was an architectural intervention - a tunnel that could be walked through, painted with a pattern that rendered it an explicitly theatrical device. A poetic refrain was created by repeated images and texts functioning as motif-like devices across the exhibition. Elements of the project were designed to be re-incorporated, with painted patterns, in a subsequent Liam Gillick performance at Eastside. A newspaper with a collaborative text with Wade was produced.

In 2010, after only a year of programming, Eastside received a £360K Paul Hamlyn Award which recognised the founding collective (which included Wade) as 'exceptional cultural entrepreneurs', an acknowledgement of the impact Tatham and O'Sullivan's output had made on the rapid development of this new public exhibition space.

A publication, co-funded with CCA, Glasgow, uses the project to examine the role(s) of contemporary art in the public sphere.