NAN

Lead artist and co-curator Pippa Koszerek tells NAN about POST Artists.

POST Artists is a new network for artists who respond to place. It is based around questions of site and context and its ethos is to be peer-led with an emphasis on curatorial collaborations between practitioners. The network has a cross-disciplinary ethos and includes composers, writers, theatre practitioners and architects amongst its members and exhibitors.

Concerned with creating a peer-led platform for exhibition and dialogue, both through seeking out disused spaces and through exploring ideas and critiques around place-making and community, POST Artists are currently in the midst of gearing up for Away Day. This is an ambitious programme of publicly sited interventions, installations and performances taking place across three parks in South London in May. The project is funded by grants from Arts Council England and Merton Council.

This is the second time that POST are returning to Collier Wood, where they are staging a mini-festival of contemporary art by over 20 artists in Wandle Park. Away Day includes new commissioned work by the art-architecture project The Wayward Plant Registry and performance collective Present Attempt who create a performance that considers the networks present in and around the park. Hyun Jin Cho's film 'Meet the artist' is an investigation into what it means to make publicly sited and participatory work through a documentary portrait of the artists exhibiting in Away Day.

As part of Away Day, lead artist and co-curator Pippa Koszerek has teamed up with Anna Pharoah (as the art duo 'Fitness for Artists') to create a real Away Day with a difference, a participatory performance work 'Out of Office' that is a networking day for artists who work in offices. Taking blue-sky thinking literally, this is an outdoor day of activities that playfully subvert the rituals and artefacts of the office world, creating an outdoor mind gym.

These explorations of the functions and notions of networks are pertinent to POST whose history stems from a series of peer-led networking encounters. It was set up in October 2008 around Signs of Life, an exhibition in a derelict house in Liverpool and overlooked suburban spaces in South London. Signs of Life was a spin-off project from Final Intervention, a NAN funded initiative that sought to bring together a network of artists to create work in buildings prior to their demolition. Artists from Liverpool, the Final Intervention network and Wimbledon took part in the project which explored the question of 'What constitutes a derelict site?'. In Liverpool the curators worked with The Art Organisation and studio group Wolstenholme Projects and in Colliers Wood they built up a new network of collaborators through graduates from the MA at Wimbledon College of Art (WCA). POST was constituted out of this new activity that grew up in Wimbledon and its members include WCA graduates as well as artists from Liverpool, the Final Intervention network and a critical mass of London-based artists whose work is non-market driven and concerned with site or context. Away Day is the first funded project by POST Artists network. The group's constitution is based on a rotational idea of members taking turns to initiate and lead projects. Future projects currently being developed include a rural residency and international collaborations.

POST welcomes artists, writers, architects and performers whose work explores site and context to join via their Ning social network site www.postartists.ning.com

POST Artists' website is www.postartists.com and email address is info@postartists.com

Away Day

Contemporary art installations and performances in three South London parks

DATES: 29-31 May bank holiday weekend

TIMES: 12 noon to 6pm daily

VENUE: Wandle Park, London, opposite Colliers Wood tube (Northern line)

www.postartists.com

Further events in Away Day:

15 May: Mostyn Gardens, off Martin Way, SW19.

15 May & 5 June: Ravensbury Park, off Morden Road, SW19.

Over 20 artists present new works as POST returns to Merton in south London with Away Day. Engaging with suburban spaces of leisure, Away Day is a series of site-specific artworks for three public parks: Mostyn Gardens in Morden, Wandle Park in Colliers Wood and Ravensbury Park in Mitcham. Diverse interventions, performances and temporary artworks accost visitors with imagined alternative realities and new mappings of these spaces during weekends in May and June.

POST is the new peer-led network for artists who respond to place www.postartists.com

Pippa Koszerek is lead artist and co-curator of POST Artists

First published: a-n.co.uk May 2010