Monday 18 February

This studio is about painting and sculpture. The painter Ad Reinhardt once famously quipped that “sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting”. Those were the days when medium-specificity counted. These days, another art medium isn’t really a nuisance like this anymore. So what is painting, now exactly? And what is sculpture now, too? We shall question new tendencies in painting and sculpture and discover and research what we mean by these categories.

This studio explores the archive – the means by which historical knowledge and forms of remembrance are accumulated, stored and recovered – through the ways that it has been explored, subverted and deconstructed by artists from the early 20th century to the present.

Unstable Assembly is a studio that looks at art and the world around us – how art fits in among the important stuff that increasingly impacts on the way we live – the environment, other animals, science and the great outdoors. If you are interested in learning how to push your art practice into the open, into wide public space, this is the studio for you.

Increasingly, progressive commercial photography agents work with photographers and artists whose practice is at home in the gallery as it is in the applied sector. This studio aims directly at that growing elision, too – building on the ideas of affect and the encountered sign.

Presenting the photographer’s role as both artist, storyteller and witness of our times, this studio explores the construction of photographic narratives that reflect changes in and challenges to our society. In this studio, photography can be a tool to protest stereotypes, a method of testimony to events, a practice to construct fantasies or a way to engage with media trends.