Itinerant Objects welcomes you to bring, place and move objects upon a journey and to reflect upon where those journeys might lead. Objects come to places and go to places. In their transformations and exchange they become new things, take on new meanings, and create new situations. Historically we have traded objects upon the Silk Road, which moved goods en masse, but also gave rise to many individual stories across the world. These routes and stories are today re-envisaged on a large scale with China’s One Belt One Road initiative, but also re-considered and re-ordered through countless micro-exchanges and through creative practices.
Drawing on the experience of a range of arts-based research, Winchester School of Art invites you join in with a series of activities led by artists, academics, and students. Working collaboratively with digital and manual crafting and drawing, with fashion and textiles, and with a radically open form of curation, participants are encouraged to test, manipulate and assemble constellations of objects across the whole of the Tate Exchange floor. In this way we can share ideas about the stuff that make up our lives. Each day includes workshops from 12pm, and a tea ceremony and guest talks from 3.30pm onwards.
Guest Artists
Liang Mingyu, a notable fashion designer based in Chongqing, China, will present textile workshops based upon ‘Masi Mara’, a life-size elephant crafted from recycled material, helping to open up debate about environmental aesthetics and our place in a global world of things and beliefs.
Neja Tomšič, Slovenian-based artist and poet, will perform a daily tea ceremony, telling stories based upon the historic Silk Road that help established today’s global infrastructure for movement and exchange.
The project is devised and presented by Reem Alasadi, Jane Birkin, Daniel Cid, Ian Dawson and Sunil Manghani at Winchester School of Art and Paul Reilly in Archaeology, along with Alistair Eales at Trinity Winchester, in collaboration with postgraduate researchers Ana Čavić (with Renée O'Drobinak, aka Ladies of the Press), Panagiotis Ferentinos, Eria Nsubuga, Noriko Suzuki-Bosco, and Lucy Woollett, and fellow academics Feng Jie at Southwest University, China and Zhang Rui, College of Culture of Art, Chengdu University of Information Technology, China.
Itinerant Objects is supported by Southwest University, China, and University of Southampton Confucius Institute. It is a research-led project of the Critical Practice Research Group at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton.
About Winchester School of Art
Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton) is one of the UK’s leading art and design institutions. With history going back almost 150 years, the School is an international centre for ideas and innovation, committed to offering high quality education and engaging with broader social projects.