Summer / Autumn Programme 2020

True Currency: About Feminist Economics
Podcast series hosted by Amy Feneck & Ruth Beale
July 16–August 27, 2020

True Currency: About Feminist Economics is a six-part podcast hosted by artists Amy Feneck and Ruth Beale (The Alternative School of Economics). The outcome of an eight-month residency, the podcast is produced in collaboration with Lucia Scazzocchio from Social Broadcasts, and presents detailed testimonials from researchers, policy experts, community leaders and activists, while exploring issues of financial inequality, feminism, intersectionality, labour exploitation, unpaid work, care, unionisation and reproductive labour.

Over the six episodes Amy Feneck and Ruth Beale hear from several contributors, including the Director of UK Women’s Budget Group, Director of FLEX (Focus on Labour Exploitation), a campaigner for Sex Workers’ Union, and a parent and NHS community nurse. The podcasts discuss financial inequalities and consider the issues migrant women face when campaigning for fair pay. They also look at unpaid work and care, and consider future re-imaginings for a feminist economy. The final episode focuses on how the Coronavirus pandemic has thrown light upon many of the issues discussed throughout the series. 

Amy Feneck and Ruth Beale are the third artists to undertake the Gasworks Participation Artist in Residence programme, which supports London-based artists to develop work in collaboration with local community groups. The podcast series was developed between September 2019 and April 2020, through conversations with experts and workshops with community groups at the Henry Fawcett Children’s Centre and IRMO (Indoamerican Refugee and Migrant Organisation).

FOTL (Future of the Left), the collaborative artistic and research practice of Andrea Francke and Ross Jardine, have developed an evaluation framework for the project. 

True Currency is commissioned by Gasworks, with support from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and Arts Council England.

Eduardo Navarro: (breathspace)
October 1–December 20, 2020

Gasworks presents the first UK solo exhibition by Buenos Aires-based artist Eduardo Navarro. His work moves away from representation, instead creating sensorial experiences with the potential to induce a radical transformation of the self and others.

In recent years, Navarro has sought to adopt the slow metabolism of a reptile, experimented with ways of embodying the physical properties of light, and invited a large group of people to animate a giant mechanical octopus, in order for them to become part of its decentralised nervous system.

Originally scheduled for April 2020, Navarro’s plans for the exhibition at Gasworks had consisted of transforming the gallery’s architecture into a living, breathing organism: a large-scale artificial lung that would inhale and exhale air from the street. Conceived months before the COVID-19 outbreak, this immersive installation was designed for visitors to sync their body’s most vital functions with one another, offering a space for collective meditation and oceanic breathing.

As the exhibition was postponed indefinitely due to the pandemic, Navarro started drawing daily during the lockdown in Buenos Aires. In his words, this practice enabled him to “relocate the studio to inside my own head,” revealing the act of drawing as a timely medium for speculative thinking. Produced in self-isolation, the hundreds of sketches that result from this experience act as a portal connecting dimensions, past and future visions, unrealised and perhaps unrealisable ideas.

Inspired by the insights of quantum physics, according to which information in the universe cannot be created nor ever destroyed, Navarro’s work resists the prevailing sense of melancholia towards all the possibilities foreclosed by the pandemic. Instead of looking back at what the exhibition could have been, Navarro’s unpretentious drawings metabolise the original breathing installation, enacting its transformative spirit in a more intimate language.

Eduardo Navarro’s exhibition is commissioned and produced by Gasworks.

Gasworks commissions are supported by Catherine Petitgas and Gasworks Exhibitions Supporters.

Residencies Programme
Gasworks’ residencies programme offers studios to international artists for a fully-funded three-month residency to develop new work and research on site. Upcoming residents from September 28 to December 14, 2020: Rameesha Azeem (Pakistan), Campbell Patterson (New Zealand), Bassam Al-Sabah (UK).