Forum: Bread And Games

Open Space presents Forum: Bread and games, a three-day sequence of interpretations of an exhibition, exploring fiction and trust. The project involves six consecutive acts that interpret the installation each time in a different way, questioning the possibility of neutral spectatorship on the one hand, and the precariousness of the original idea and authorship on the other.

Bread and games derives from the Latin phrase panem et circenses, which in some languages is a popular idiom for distraction, appeasement and mass manipulation. Drawing on themes of living in our society, the phrase illustrates the format of the project, as it repeatedly manipulates and deconstructs the viewer’s experience. In this way, it resonates with Open Space’s 2020 programme Manufacturing Memory, which examines the dichotomy between memory and technology. The project allows even the most personal memories to become compromised by a fictional, unpredictable narrative.

The sequence is initiated by individual projects that explore different modes of storytelling in relation to the real and the intended, the remembered and the known – in public, political and private life. In coming together, the artworks bring forth the reality of fiction itself as they become part of someone else’s narrative. The six artists fictionalise the exhibition, so that the audience experiences their new interpretations, rather than the original voice of the curator. Therefore, all control over the mediated is given up as a concept within the original idea, allowing the audience to create memories dependent on chance and choice, rather than the structures of a fixed exhibition.

Artists : Louise Ashcroft, Lea Collet, Caz Egelie, Radek Brousil, Rosa Doornenbal, Teal Griffin

Curator : Natalija Pauni?

Pictures credit :

Lea Collet and Marios Stamatis – Soft Anonymity, Part II, Assembly Point, London, 2018

Louise Ashcroft, ‘Props 3 – photoshoot proposals for performances’, 2019

Teal Griffin, ‘untitled series’, 2019