This panel featuring Wolfgang Tillmans, Anna Minton, Charlie Dark and Dan Hancox, considers the global disappearance of social spaces where subcultures or behaviours considered outside the norm are able to thrive. We question why their histories are being ignored and communities allowed to be forgotten. Exploring what pockets of freedom still exist for people to express themselves, unregulated by policy or urban planning, our speakers consider the ways we can celebrate physical and cultural originality.
A short video provocation from artists Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings will open the discussion.
Biographies
Wolfgang Tillmans (born 1968) is a German fine-art photographer. His diverse body of work is distinguished by observation of his surroundings and an ongoing investigation of the photographic medium’s foundations.
Tillmans was the first photographer – and also the first non-British person – to be awarded the Tate annual Turner Prize. He has also been awarded the Hasselblad Award and is a member of the Royal Academy of Arts. Tillmans lives in Berlin and London. His most recent exhibition at Tate Modern, Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017 opens on 15 February until 11 June.
Dan Hancox is from London and writes about music, radical politics, gentrification and youth culture for The Guardian, Vice, LRB and others. He has written ebooks about the 2010 student protests and Dizzee Rascal and the birth of grime, and his book The Village Against the World, about a self-declared ‘communist utopia’ in southern Spain, was published in 2013 by Verso.
Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings, are an artist duo living and working in South East London. Their practice includes @Gaybar, a series of events that both create a container for queer discourse and seek to re-materialise preconceived notions of what the gay bar means for queer histories. The duo also work with CGI animation, drawing, video installation, archival and audio work. Recent solo shows include: Fuck Me on the Middle Walk, Truth and Consequences, Geneva (2017) If these Fossils Could Talk They Would Tell You Who Got Fucked and Who Didn’t Room, E10-27, Paris (2015). Recent group shows include: Utopian Voices Here and Now, Somerset House, London, UK (2016), No! I Am No Singular Instrument, Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, US (2016) and Ways of Living by Arcadia Missa, David Roberts Art Foundation, London, UK.
Anna Minton is a writer, journalist and academic. She is the author of Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the 21st Century City, published by Penguin in 2009 and Big Capital: Who is London For?, which will be published by Penguin in June 2017. She is Reader in Architecture at the University of East London where she is Programme Leader of the MRes Architecture: Reading the neoliberal city. Between 2011-2013 she was the 1851 Royal Commission for the Great Exhibition Fellow in the Built Environment. She is a regular contributor to The Guardian and Architectural Review and appears regularly on television and radio.
Charlie Dark is a DJ, poet, and writer and teacher from London. He was a member of the trip-hop band Attica Blues whose debut album was released by Mo’Wax in 1997. He created the groundbreaking London night Blacktronica at the ICA, featuring poets, painters, musicians and filmmakers. In 2007 Dark was a founding member of Run Dem Crew, a running club offering opportunities to explore the city in new, fun, and educational ways through community exercise, gathering, and reinvigoration.
This event has been provided by Tate Gallery on behalf of Tate Enterprises LTD.