EXHIBITIONS

Wandsworth Arts Festival
May 2010

On Sunday 23 May Encounters created a series of outdoor participatory events along a mile long route as part of the Wandsworth Arts Festival’s one day Shimmy event by the River Thames in Putney.

Over 500 people were enticed into the four ‘Look Again’ - themed scenarios we created for the event. In Church Square, passers-by stepped up to four different experiential platforms to See With New Eyes and decorated the square with their responses on fabric eyes. Tucked away below the branches of a row of trees, our Micro-Worlds drew responses from people invited to imagine the joys and challenges of life for human and non human natural life-forms; what they would like their great, great, great, great grandchildren to thank them for, and what they planned to do with their one wild and precious life. Our contemplative River Theatre invited a secluded and framed 10 minute gaze onto the Thames and on Deodar Road, pedestrians were led through an imaginary narrative of dancers, animals, lost musicians, and offered - by the road’s residents - a mix of unexpected and welcoming scenarios in their front gardens.

Click on above links for images and further information.

Commissioned by HomeLiveArt

Four Corners at the Bluecoat
Liverpool 2009

Ruth Ben-Tovim, Creative Director of Encounters, was the Artistic Director for Four Corners in 2009 with the theme of The Environment. As a city-wide regeneration programme, Four Corners brings together residents, cultural organisations and neighbourhood services to ask the question 'what makes a neighbourhood'. Each year five arts organisations (Everyman & Playhouse, Arts in Regeneration, Encounters, Bluecoat and ICDC) deliver the four corners programme in different areas of the city and this year each organisation produced high quality participatory arts projects with the theme of the environment.

Using a range of different mediums and spaces Ruth worked with artists Jo Salter and Anne Marie Culhane, to curate an interactive exhibition at The Bluecoat that displayed and told the stories of the 2009 Four Corners projects. They also programmed a series of interactive events including Practical living workshops, swap shop, awareness raising films about climate change, intimate exchanges with Eco Fools and DR Carbon who gave individual prescriptions to support people to reduce their carbon footprints. A world café event was held in collaboration with the city council to look at Liverpool’s response to climate change following a screening of the groundbreaking docu drama The Age of Stupid. The exhibition, performances and programme of events generated dialogue, ideas and new skills to support change and re-connection with the planet at this crucial point in time.

View images of the Four Corners Exhibition

What’s Your Wybourn Way?
June – November 2008

Wybourn Exhibition

What’s Your Wybourn Way was a six month creative community involvement project in Wybourn and Richmond Park in Sheffield, commissioned by Parkway Housing. The project culminated in an interactive installation in a disused house in the heart of Wybourn that attracted hundreds of local residents. We invited a group of final year architect students from the University of Sheffield to take part in this phase of the project as part of the annual Live projects that the university is involved in. They set up a series of house and street-based creative consultation and engagement activities that enabled local people to have an input into ideas and physical developments happening on the estate.

The architect students created a book of ideas from their work called on Up on the Hill, which can be downloaded or purchased from www.lulu.com (search for Up on the Hill), and Encounters put together a report that is available from us
(email info@encounters-arts.org.uk)

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Batley Family Encounters Exhibition
Kirklees Media Centre, Huddersfield
October – November 2008

The project involved Encounters working on the streets of Batley earlier this year, collecting memories and stories about growing up, stories about family inheritance and family journeys. We were commissioned by Loca on behalf of Batley Locality Children’s Centre to work in Batley and the project made links with hundreds of people in the area. The result was a beautiful co authored book designed by Ded and an exhibition of the collections.

Read more about Batley Family Encounters

Batley Family Encounters - Exhibition    Batley Family Encounters - Exhibition

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Be My Guest - Liverpool 08, Capital of Culture
Bluecoat Art Gallery, July 2008

Be my Guest logo

Be My Guest exhibition formed part of the Four Corners Exhibition, a citywide creative neighbourhoods project supported by Liverpool Capital of Culture at the Bluecoat Art Gallery in Liverpool. The exhibition told the story of groups of residents from across South Liverpool who volunteered to become Be My Guest Hosts, organising unique community events in their homes, social clubs, or community centres. Hosts gathered friends, family and neighbours together to witness an intimate multi – media performance of stories and imagery collected from and inspired by the people of South Liverpool. The performance directed by Ruth Ben-Tovim featured actor Paul Duckworth and audio visuals by artist Sam Meech was divided into six sections each based on a different universal theme of everyday life; place, hurt, love, home, how it used to be, celebration.

View images of the Be My Guest performance
View images of the Be My Guest exhibition

Be My Guest – Meet the Hosts

Small groups of residents from the six different areas that make up south Liverpool volunteered to become Be My Guest hosts in January 2008. This inter-generational new network of people met monthly exchanging personal stories that appear in the show, feeding ideas into the performance and supporting each other to prepare for their own unique Be My Guest events. Hosts organised all aspects of the events, deciding where they took place in their areas and who should be invited. Buffets, local dance troupes, singalongs, fancy dress, bingo, DJ sets and Karaoke were all part of the extra entertainment hosts organised to follow the performance.

View images of the Be My Guest hosts

Be My Guest image
 Be My Guest image

Click here for more photos

Be My Guest has been created by Encounters, who develop pioneering art projects that involve participation and urban histories.

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ECHO CITY, 10th BIENNALE OF ARCHITECTURE, VENICE
 September - November 2006
British Pavilion, giardini di castello

Encounters were part of Echo City, the showcase exhibit at the British Pavilion at the tenth Biennale of Architecture, Venice. The exhibit was conceived and designed by Architect Jeremy Till along with Ian Anderson, Jim Prevett , Tim Etchells, Hugo Glendinning, Martyn Ware and Sarah Wigglesworth.

There were four side rooms in the pavilion and each room reflected urban experience at a particular architectural and social scale; either 1:1, 1:100, 1:10,000 or 1: 10,000,000. Encounters were responsible for designing the 1:1 room, reflecting the intimate scale that we have been working on.

We’re very excited to have been part of this event, exploring how the three shop projects could be represented within the exhibition. We didn’t want to literally recreate the shops or create an exhibition that was too far away from them either. Our exhibition therefore contained traces, echoes of the Sharrow shops; the stories, objects, journeys, toy animals that we had collected in Sheffield, as well as a new invitation to visitors in Venice to participate to leave their own trace. It was important for us that this invitation was at the heart of the exhibition.

 

 

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PERSISTENCE WORKS, SHEFFIELD

The residency at the empty Pops Minimarket on Sharrow Lane culminated in an exhibition at Persistence Works, Yorkshire Artspace. Below are some images from the exhibition:

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