15 May – 30 August 2010




Over one hundred years the Contemporary Art Society has gifted more than 8,000 works of art to public collections in this country. For 100 years, the Society has acted as a catalytic agent in the contemporary visual arts ecology of this country, developing audiences, artists, curators, collectors and collections alike. Thanks to the close working partnership with the Society's sixty-three member museums, a Centenary Programme will take place in collections across the UK.

Tate Britain's generous offer of exhibition space throughout the centenary year provides the anchor for the programme in London. The Society has invited three artists to use Tate's collection as a starting point to select works that fascinate and inspire them. Establishing a Platform, the title for this series, began at Tate Britain with Elizabeth Price's installation, Perfect Courses and Shimmering Substances, (5 February–3 May). Ponder Pause Process (A Situation) by Yane Calovski opens on 15 May and a third selection of works will be made by the recent Turner Prize winner, Richard Wright in the autumn.

Yane Calovski has treated the Contemporary Art Society's invitation to work with and from Tate's Collection and Archive as an opportunity to start a period of research that has led him, perhaps inevitably, to question a range of preconceptions and assumptions that relate to the collection and conservation of art. Calovski's installation brings together artworks that rely on an active audience engagement to fulfil their conceptual promise. These works anticipate the effect on the viewer, who is invited to experience fresh ways of acting and thinking, which as a result triggers new narratives around the works. One of the selected works is Liam Gillick's, Big Conference Platform Platform (1998), a work that more than any other attempts to create a space as an open frame for free thought and the unscripted 'scenario'. Other works included are those by artists Francis Alys, Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys, Emma Kay, Christopher Wool, Henri Matisse, Jeff Wall and an unpublished manuscript by Sven Berlin. By adding the sound work A Flock of Rotation by French artist Samon Takahashi and Calovski's own multiple U LAY, the installation becomes more then its individual parts – in fact, a meditation on the flexibility of ideas, and fluidity of curatorial and artistic processes.

In addition, on 15 May Calovski has invited the group OuUnPo (A Workshop of Potential Universes), to meet in Gallery 1 for a discussion within the context of his installation. OuUnPo is an itinerant project, whose members meet only rarely, to explore the concept of time, space and the role of subjectivity in contemporary art discourse.

_____________________________
Contemporary Art Society
11—15 Emerald Street
London WC1N 3QL
United Kingdom
T. +44 (0)20 7831 1243
F. +44 (0)20 7831 1214
www.contemporaryartsociety.org

TATE Britain
Millbank
London SW1P 4RG
UK

Exhibition opens: Sat 15 May 2010
Yane Calovski in conversation with Lucy Byatt: Room 1 – 11:00
Discussion in the space with OuUnPo (A Workshop of Potential Universes):
12:30 – 16:00