Artists: Fay Ballard, Adam Dant, Karen Densham, Tim Ellis, Hayley Lock, Ged Quinn, Jason Thompson, Richard Wathen, Rieko Whitfield
22 October 2021 to 2 February 2022
Open weekdays 10am to 5pm
Inaugural exhibition at new Confer Karnac Education Centre, Strype Street, London E1 7LQ.
Confer is an independent organisation established by psychotherapists in 1998 to provide continuing educational events for psychotherapists, psychologists and other mental health workers through seminars and more. The new centre has been designed by Chris Dyson Architects.
Borrowing its title from the book titled Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts by scholar and author Giuliana Bruno (2007), the exhibition focuses The exhibition is curated by Hayley Lock who writes:
As one moves through space, a constant double movement connects interior and exterior topographies. The exterior landscape is transformed into an interior map – the landscape within us – as conversely, we project outward, onto the space we traverse, the motion of our own emotions. Space is, totally, a matter of feeling. It is a practice that engages psychic change in relation to movement.
Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts, 2007
It is important to consider in the first instance, this place. Recently reconfigured from a bicycle repair shop and next to an old sequin factory, the new Confer Karnac centre in Spitalfields offers a newly designed space by Chris Dyson Architects, dedicated to a bookshop and talks programme on psychoanalytic, relational and emotional processes.
Whilst retaining the historic fabric of the building, its philosophy is to connect to the existing sense of community, to innovation and creativity. Located in an area known for its 17th century Huguenot history and extended East End creative quarter, Confer Karnac brings into the neighbourhood a contemporary space for relational, creative thinking. Its inaugural exhibition invites on the sense of place, space, encounter, networks, relations and touch. It explores the surface of things through the Deleuzian philosophy of the fold, where matter is seen as porous, spongy, a fluid multiplicity and a boundaryless continuum connecting the outside to the inside.
Approaching surface as a threshold, a connective tissue or interface between art forms, we see more clearly where subjects, space and place connect. The works develop relations across art, architecture, and psychoanalytical thinking, looking at what passes between a surface, insisting that the object itself extends well beyond the image and bringing internalised sensations and thinking to the forefront in a cryptic, other worldly and seemingly abstract way.
www.confer.uk.com