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Radical education project, commissioning the artists Barbara Steveni and Barby Asante to meaningfully address the erosion of arts in education today.
Exhibitions at Tate Exchange and Flat Time House will draw on significant archives of the original 1989 – 1995 SERP project, alongside new work created through collaboration between the two artists and Southwark school children.
Between 1989 and 1995 SERP engaged over 1,500 children and teachers by placing artists in fifteen schools across the London borough of Southwark. SERP created new ways for young people to encounter the arts, and provided a model for replication across the country by involving the local authority (Southwark education department), the inspectorate, teachers and pupils – thereby gaining recognition nationally and internationally.
In 2018 Peckham Platform revisits SERP’s significance, at a time when the arts in education are increasingly under threat from shifts in policy and the contraction of opportunity for young people to engage with art and culture in-school. Peckham Platform’s project has two main strands – securing and reactivating the archive of the original SERP; and two public exhibitions that present highlights from the archive alongside new material created through collaboration between artists Barbara Steveni and Barby Asante.
Artist:
Barbara Steveni
Born in Iran, Barbara Steveni is a London based Artist. Steveni conceived and co-founded the ‘Artist Placement Group’ (APG) in the UK in 1966, described as “one of the most radical social experiments of the 1960s”. The original concept was to expand the reach of art and artists into organisations of all kinds (commercial, industrial, and governmental), and at all levels, including decision-making, and on a basis equivalent to any other engaged specialist.
Continuing on its methodology, in 1989 APG morphed into ‘Organisation and Imagination’ (O+I), and between 1989–95, Steveni negotiated O+I’s Southwark Education Research Project (SERP) with Southwark Education Department. Operating across all sectors responsible for delivering education – from the children, teachers, heads, and governing bodies, in fourteen local schools.
Current interest in the relevance of APG and O+I’s methodology and legacy has led to the first APG retrospective – The Individual and the Organisation: Artist Placement Group 1966-79 at Raven Row Gallery, London, 2012, followed by Context is Half the Work – A Partial History of the Artist Placement Group at Kunstraum Kreuzberg / Bethanien, Berlin in 2015, touring to Summerhall, Edinburgh in 2016.
Barby Asante
Barby Asante is a London based artist, curator and educator who’s work explores place and identity through creating situations and spaces for dialogue, collective thinking, ritual and reenactment. Using archival material in the broadest sense, she is interested in breaking down the language of archive, not to insert or present alternatives to dominant narratives but to interrupt, interrogate and explore the effects and possibilities of the unheard and the missing.
Asante’s recent projects include; The South London Black Music Archive (2012) Peckham Platform/ Tate Morden, Baldwin’s Nigger RELOADED (2014-) Iniva, Nottingham Contemporary, Framer Framed (Art Rotterdam), International James Baldwin Conference (American University of Paris) with the London based collective sorryyoufeeluncomfortable and As Always A Painful Declaration of Independence: For Ama. For Aba. For Charlotte and Adjoa. (2017-) Diaspora Pavilion, Venice. She is also Associate Curator at 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning in Brixton and PhD Candidate at CREAM at the University of Westminster.
Flat Time House 15/03 - 08/04 (PV 15 March 6-9pm)
Flat Time House, 210 Bellenden Rd, London SE15 4BW
Tate Exchange 17/04 - 22/04
Tate Exchange Blavatnik Building, Level 5, Tate Modern, London, SE1 9TG.
For list of events see website.
