ArtHosting

Interim

Written by Micheale Spessa
Published Sun 29/07/07
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Interim was the title of an exhibition by the artist Mary Kelly, shown between 1984 and 1989 at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Glasgow, the New Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London that proposed an art practice that was corporeal, related to womens’ actual, lived experiences and is time based. The Project radically shifted perspectives on the identity of the artist in relation to gender, age and the visibility of women and provoked debates on difference and identity and the role of art in society that are equally relevant today.

The art you see in this Interim is not finished. It represents the work in progress of students at different moments of study on the M.A. Contemporary Fine Art Practice course in the Leeds School of Contemporary Art and Design - an in-between space of becoming, unfixed and intercultural. This is a meeting place for local and international voices, broadening horizons in the sense of creating a dialogic space for educational, social and art discourses to take place.

Mary Kelly also argued, from a feminist perspective, for the notion of art as a project, a socially engaged, embodied and embedded kind of practice and concept of the project is at the heart of this M.A. programme. Krissie Ireland, one of the artists in the exhibition reflects on the idea of the interim space ‘as a point of no return, a place where we realise that absolutely we cannot stop, and what happens if we do? a space that engenders decision - where do we go from here?’ It is fitting then, that the exhibition is not being shown in a gallery or a studio turned into a gallery, but in the interim space of Old Broadcasting House, as it makes its transitions from Friends’ Meeting House to BBC studios to an Institute for Enterprise in Higher Education within Leeds Metropolitan University.

The curator and designer for Interim, Micheale Spessa, with the assistance of Amanda Burns (who created the catalogue), has tried to animate the technologies and spaces of the building to allow for new conversations and dialogues to take place and have responded sensitively to the memories, whispers and ghosts that hang in the air of this space. This is a place of conversations, communications, plans, plots and strategies, a building that now, in its light-infused fabric offers a metaphor for the inside meeting the outside, of education, innovation and enterprise meeting the social, of art meeting society. A space to debate where we may go from here - at the interim.

Jill Morgan
The Leeds School of Contemporary Art and Graphic Design