The Avant-Garde in Britain?

Sunday 19 March

Round table with Peter Berry, Jon Bird, Rachel Garfield, Lucy Reynolds, Paul Wood and Kevin Wright, chaired by Antony Hudek and Alex Sainsbury. Borrowing from the title of Rosetta Brooks' exhibition at Gallery House, this panel will consider the idea of the avant-garde in Britain in the early 1970s, particularly in relation to conceptual art and film.

Please see our website for more information: www.ravenrow.org

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Presented as part of the exhibition 'This Way Out of England: Gallery House in Retrospect' at Raven Row

Gallery House was one of London’s most influential and extraordinary art spaces in the 1970s, directed by Sigi Krauss with assistant director Rosetta Brooks. For only sixteen months in 1972-73, in a vacant mansion provided by the German government next to the German Institute in South Kensington, Gallery House hosted exhibitions, residencies, performances and events as well as pioneering ‘expanded cinema’ and much new film and video work. For many of the featured artists Gallery House would prove a formative experience.

Gallery House favoured heterogeneity, colliding the multiplicity of forms and styles co-existing at the time, from performance and experimental cinema to cybernetic, social and conceptual practices. Ultimately, the radical nature of Gallery House’s programme led to its abrupt and contested closure by the German Institute.

'This Way Out of England' seeks to emulate the spirit of Gallery House by inviting a number of artists to rethink their original interventions in the space. The episodic nature of this project acknowledges the impossibility of framing what was an ephemeral experiment. The project is curated by Antony Hudek and Alex Sainsbury.

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Image: Susan Hiller, 'Transformer', Gallery House, April 1973