John REARDON
(S) I’m interested in where things start and stop. My work takes the form of objects, installations, performances, events and publications. I’ve collaborated with museums and other institutions, organisations, galleries, artists, curators, groups, communities and local authorities.
(T) I’m interested in how ideas devolve to form. As artist in residence in the Politics Department at Goldsmiths, I co-founded an MA Art & Politics with Professor of Politics Michael Dutton.
I recently left Goldsmiths to take up a post at ArtEZ, Arnhem.
Collaborators:
BRUSSA IS BOAT
Michael Dutton
Michal Huss
Julian Mährlein
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Sally O’Reilly
SeMA
Divya Osbon
Sarona Bedwan
Seren Thomas
Salena Barry
Ella Grace McPherson-Newton
Martha Brant
Hannah Davisson
Christos Kotzias
Kelley Silverman
Agar Arias
Antonio Torres Rodríguez
Daniel Da Silva Teixeira
Jacob v Joyce
Margarita Rebolledo Hernández
Ariel Lien
Barry Spencer
Seungha Lee
Eef Veldkamp
Å+ gallery
Deborah Mills
YoonSuk Choi
Amado Art Space
Rachel Reid
Alice-Anne Psaltis
Ariane Kupferman-Sutthavong
Arturo Guzmán Pérez
Hannah Jung
Hannah Wroe
Deptford Lounge
museo en residencia
Bojana Popadić
Murat Hassan
Paul Stewart
Xianyan Chen
The London Eye
Millwall FC
Liberal Jewish Synagogue
Vlada Maria Tcharyeva
Tatiana Bashkikova
Mark Teh
Charlotte Nordgren Sewell Hannah Reeves
The Argyle Centre
Cristina Assunção
Terri Froud
Museum Bronbeek
Betina Buck
Martin Eberle
Triskel Arts Centre
VISUAL
Declan Kennedy
Divya Osbon
Sarona Bedwan
Seren Thomas
Salena Barry
Ella Grace McPherson-Newton
Lewisham Virtual School
Viviana Chamorro-Urbieta
Sarona Bedwan
Agar Arias
Antonio Torres Rodríguez
Daniel Da Silva Teixeira
Jacob v Joyce
Dr. Tobias Heinrich
Christos Kotzias
Kelley Silverman
Fabio Altamura
Abbie Clark
Iben la Cour
Fuyuka Sato
Rachel Martin
Marla Heid
Connor Newson
Constantinos Orphanos
Shoreditch Park Primary School
Caroline von Eichorn
Portcullis House
Rand Jarallah
Xiaohui Guo
Korean Cultural Centre (KCC)
(EXCO) Daegu Art Fair
Agathe Barre
Malou den Dekker
Nima Esmailpour
Chie Konichi
Viviana Chamorro
The Blue Cowboys
Berber Meindertsma
Theo Price
Erica Capecchi
Fiona Allison
Caroline Wesselman van Helmond
Frise Hamburg
Zil Palladino Peters
Michael Palin Centre for Stammering
Cell Project space
Whitechapel project space
Seungha Lee
Carpenters Estate
Lowri Kearney
Daniela Castelli
Maelenn Le Bret
Dalia Kranauskaite
Aliasghar Torkaliaskari
Sonja Roach
Vicky Kluzik
Craig Clark
Robert Davies
Tegan Joyce
Sarah Peace
Clara Verdier
Marijam Didžgalvytė
Chris Lacy
Maria-Ioli Tzanetaki
Sofia Casarin
Sofia Gallarate
Soukeina El Isbihani
Julian Roeckert
Allesandro Sansottera
Anjali Prashar-Savoie
Setouchi Triennale
Hyemin Son
Johannes Maier
Martha Brant
Hannah Davisson
contact
Companion animals
Intervention/ Publication
The project is in two parts. Part one on Shankill Road, Belfast and part two in Shankill, Dublin. It begins with a ’call to participate’ to the local community to send us pictures of their companion animals following a simple set of instructions
- Companion animal at home
- Companion animal looking at camera
- Short description of companion animal
- Name of human companion
Large format posters are created from a selection of the pictures we receive and these are installed on walls, shops and businesses in the local community. A publication documenting the project will include essays by Sally O’Reilly and Professor Heather Fraser and Professor Nik Taylor.
John Reardon and collaborators
OUR TEAM OUR BOARD
Proposal/ PublicationOUR TEAM OUR BOARD was made to sit alongside a selection of my older archival work in the exhibition Dreamtime Ireland and Artworks 2025 at VISUAL, Carlow Ireland. All information contained in this work was freely available on VISUAL’s website and in the public domain. After careful consideration, VISUAL’s Team refused to allow OUR TEAM OUR BOARD to be installed in VISUAL and, or in the form of documentation in the exhibition Dreamtime Ireland and Artworks 2025. This work will be continued in the forthcoming catalogue ‘Interrupted’.
John Reardon
Above all their myths
Film/ InstallationA 10:40 minute film first shown on the televisual information systems across Goldsmiths University campus over several weeks. Set on repeat and visible between Covid 19 health messaging, this work attempts to both acknowledge and interrupt these health messages, and in doing so, imagine a world beyond them.
Ella Khafaji
Action to produce a high degree of engagement
Mobile sculpture
Action to produce a high degree of engagement is an invited contribution to the museo en residencia, currently showing in Southwark Cathedral, London. Like all the work in the museo en residencia, Action to produce a high degree of engagement conforms to 15 cm x 13 cm dimensions.
It consists of three rolls of cloth tape, placed one on top of the other. On top of these is a cutting
knife, blade open. Action to produce a high degree of engagement is a performative work that
invites handling and application. It operates somewhere between the world of art and the material
world of familiar, useful and functioning things.
John Reardon
Adventures of Little Bole
Event/ Booklet
An interactive reading and lecture event curated by Bojana Popadić about place, identity and memory. Using a booklet and PowerPoint presentation about growing up in former Yugoslavia, the event was about the adult Bojana, but also any number of adults, looking back at their childhood. From there it slowly moved to a more focused and specific lament for her childhood, growing up in an idyllic world now lost. Bojana grew up in former Yugoslavia. A country in Southeast and Central Europe that existed from 1918 to 1992. It came into existence following World War I under the name of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.
Bojana Popadić
Aftercare
Maintenance work
Aftercare is an ongoing project that involves repairing and maintaining Overlooked pieces of public sculpture. These have often fallen into disrepair. My work includes trimming grass, repairing or replacing signage, removing graffiti, cleaning and, or repainting (in consultation with the artist if they are still alive), etc.
John Reardon
A Guide to Memorials for Soldiers in Israel
Publication
A Guide to Memorials for Soldiers in Israel (2014-2016) is a pocket size book of images and descriptive text of memorials for Israeli soldiers in Israel. The book explores the relationship between places and memory and the way in which memorials have become part of the physical and social landscape in Israel. The shape, colour, location and size of memorials are analysed, along with the quality of the images of memorials revealing micro-narratives and meanings that might otherwise go unnoticed. The book also reve thals the tensions between personal and official commemoration, and personal and collective mourning. Ultimatelye book is a memorial in itself and a form of resistance to the repetition of death and violence motivated by all types of nationalism.
Michal Huss
Aliasghar Torkaliaskari
Durational performance/ Exhibition
72-hour durational performanceA durational performance in which the artist, using felt pens and paint, writes across the surface – window, facia and adjoining pavement - of the gallery over the course of 3 days. The writing is semi-autobiographical, describing the physical and emotional journey he made from Iran to the UK. He also writes in response to the moment, to being there, to not having slept for 24 hours, 48 hours, 72 hours.Aliasghar Torkaliaskari
A Life’s Work
Sculpture/ Event
This explores developments in technology that have normalised precarious working conditions and led to a collapse of work and leisure time that leaves little time for quiet, singular withdrawal and a space to just do nothing. A Life’s Work unfolds in the exhibition space, online, and on the streets of East London. The wooden pods are constructed to appear as individual resting spaces for you to stop, sit, stare, sleep, or do nothing. Once inside, however, you are prompted to retreat onto your smart-devices, to access our 24-hour work cycle, and to tune into the dispersed intellectual, emotional, and physical labour put into creating a project about the refusal to work.
Alice-Anne Psaltis | Ariane Kupferman-Sutthavong | Arturo Guzmán Pérez | Hannah Jung | Hannah Wroe
ALTER
Process/ Archive
Alter began in response to the pressure, isolation and rising numbers of mental health issues as a result of the Covid pandemic and the loss of Queer space in London (Queer is used as an umbrella term for the LGBTQIA+ community)and through gentrification and community displacement. The project raises questions about what Queer space means and how we can create this for ourselves and our communities. ALTER is a traveling ‘container and instruction-led process‘. It circulates among Queer communities in London and aims to connect the wider Queer community through stories and intentions that are shared in order to support one another. Through this journey, each person who sits with the work will co-curate and add to this growing archive.
Murat Hassan
Alternative Art College
Event/ Workshop
A one-day, curated event by the Alternative Art College (AAC). “Located inside the walls of the education factory that is Goldsmiths College.Education As Experiment explores an alternative to consumer culture”. Paul Stewart is currently Principal Lecturer: Art Programmes at Teesside University as part of the MIMA School of Art and Design. Co-Course leader for BA (Hons) Fine Art and Co-Course Leader for the first Degree Apprentice MA Curating in England. Stewart completed his PhD in 2018; titled the Alternative Art School and completed the MA Art and Politics Programme at Goldsmiths (2012). He was the co-founder of the Middlesbrough Art Weekender in 2017, and previously the Learning Research Co-ordinator at TATE. He founded the Alternative Art College, a nomadic art school (2011-2014).
Paul Stewart
Anger-20 Dashboard
Website/ Workshops
The project, in the form of a now defunct website and series of online swearing workshops (in different languages) is represented here through screen shots of the website and workshops. The project was developed during Covid-19 in response to the disruptions and chaos this created in people’s lives and in the case of students already struggling with an educational system unable to provide what it promised students, how these challenges were met, in this particular instance, by Goldsmiths, University of London.
Xianyan Chen
Anything for any price
Performance
Trading her phone number for a pig’s head to take pride of place on a marble slab. A slab on a slab. ‘Anything for any price!’, ‘Anything for any price – a special price for you!’ Everything in the trolley is for sale. A gentleman wants to make a purchase but she’s not sure she can part with it – she’ll let him know later, and make him a special price. ‘Are you scared? Do you need anything?’ Anything for any price. She has eve-rything in the trolley. Everything? Everything. Would you like to buy something – a flower for your girlfriend or mother? Only £1. What’s she got? Everything. A pig’s head. Eve-rything – nothing is really free.
Tatiana Bashkikova
A Study on London Youth
Publication
A book of photographs taken on a housing estate in Deptford, South East London where Julian Mährlein lived while studying on the MA Art & Politics programme at Goldsmiths College. The resulting limited edition book was distributed, only to people living on the estate.
A Study on London Youth led to London Youth, published by Hoxton Mini Press.
Julian Mährlein
AS/UK
Event/ Workshop/ Lecture/ Guided Tour
Art School UK was a collaborative project with Johannes Maier, Sabine Hagmann, Cell Project Space, and the Whitechapel Gallery, London. It was divided into two phases:
Phase I: The Art School Phase - An international group of artists, curators, designers and critics contributed to three weeks of presentations, excursions, workshops and discussions at Cell Project Space.
Phase II: The Reflection and Publication Phase Artschool/UK 2010 met again after an interval of some 6 months at the Whitechapel Gallery during Frieze Art Fair to look at, think about and generate further work in a three-day public event entitled Artschool/UK and its Observers. During this time the public were invited to observe and/or participate in the workings of the project.
John Reardon / Johannes Maier / Sabine Hagmann
Bad Ideas
Performance
A slow moving event that unfolds over seven hours during the Venice Biennale as a boat carrying over seventy filled refuse bags printed with the words Bad Ideas, winds its way through the city. The event was recorded and distributed across social media platforms through the near constant ad hoc encounters with the public on passing vaporettos and gondolas, on bridges overlooking the canals of Venice as well as in canal facing streets, piazzas and campos where everything is a potential image to be taken and posted.
John Reardon
Baling Talks
Performance/Writing
The ongoing project I have embarked on is centred on the act of copying and writing out the entire 39-page transcript of the historic 1955 Baling Talks, which took place two years before Malaya (subsequently Malaysia) achieved its independence from the British in 1957. This action ‘of writing in the margins’ is located in several libraries in London which have large collections of books and reference materials related to Malayan, Malaysian, Singaporean, and late-colonial British history, and is a parallel project to the 1955 Baling Talks participatory reading event that I convened at the Singapore Arts Festival.
Mark Teh
Be a happening for each other
Performance/ Video
This project explores the concepts of apathy and engagement in social and civic life leading to a question posed to the inhabitants of a sleepy Portuguese border town: What moves you? The resulting work unfolds in a rural Portuguese municipality where the citizens wrestle with a transitory melancholia between lost pasts and never arriving futures, interviews and archival research represents the raw material for a series of interventions through communicating ideas to an available artist. Somebody responsive to the contributions which were offered. The work reveals a process of structurally managed decline which had been in effect for decades, and by that function, equips the community with a means for better understanding this and other prevailing structures.
Cristina Assunção
Belanda
Sculpture
Belanda originally Blanda is a contraction of three words. (Blond - lang - Holland). (This etymology has been provided by a very old Dutch family from the East Indies that was living in Java).” In an Unabridged Malay-English Dictionary by R.O. Winstedt, the entry for Belanda reads “Hollander, Dutch; European.” The addition of European might suggest a more general description of White people than just the Dutch. The entry gives two examples of usage that reinforces the possibility that
Belanda is closer to white / pale / bland than Hollander: “Batu Belanda - artificial or paste diamonds.
Beras Belanda - pearl barley (that has been processed to remove its fibrous outer hull and polished
to remove some or all of the bran layer).”
John Reardon
Beneath the Walnut Tree
Publication/ Film/ Text
It is said that if one sleeps beneath a walnut tree he or she will see the future in their dreams. The walnut tree is also symbolic of strength and protection, as the shell keeps the soft inner part of the nut safe from damage. Because walnut trees bear such strong and useful fruits, Celtic people believed that planting a walnut tree in their garden would bring fertility and new life to the house. On the 28th of March 2012 James William Murray slept beneath a walnut tree in New Cross, London. The book, BENEATH THE WALNUT TREE is produced in response to Murray’s live action. The project was exhibited at Utophia Project Space, Deptford as film and text.
Fiona Allison
Best of Luck selection
Event/ Poster
A giveaway poster with Art Monthly (edition of 4000 / dimensions 329mm x 483mm) magazine. The poster was developed in collaboration with residents of a care home for the elderly in Lewisham, South East London. It was distributed in the September issue of Art Monthly to coincide with the latter stages of Documenta 12 and the 52nd Venice Biennale. The poster marked these two major cultural events taking place in the same year as well as a way of attaching ourselves to these events. The poster was later archived by the Documenta 12 team.
John Reardon
Be the best Become a better you
Publication/ ActivismArmed Forces magazine explores the world of the armed forces through the eyes and voices of people who served and lived to tell their story. From the role of soldiers who have given their lives for their country to what happens to them once they retire or leave, due to illness, injury or just wanting a different way of life. Do we do enough to ensure they can adapt to civilian life or is this left to charities and veterans organisations? Armed Forces is an anti-recruitment statement as well as a reminder of our duty to look after these people.
Terri Froud
Boombeesten
Social engagementBoombeesten (loosely translated: ‘tree-animals’) is a social-impact project in the form of online tutorials to introduce children to upcycling by getting them to make winged fantasy animals from old packaging materials for garden exhibitions in different care homes for the elderly across the Netherlands.
Caroline Wesselman van Helmond
Boot ins Haus kann nicht gehen
ExhibitionResidency and exhibition at the Frise Künstlerhaus Hamburg. One of the oldest artist studios in Germany. The exhibition consisted of a purpose-built living environment, water station and audiovisual entertainment for 28 rabbits who were invited to take up residence in the gallery space for . The exhibition brought the community of artists in the Frise Künstlerhaus into a more tangible, audible and visible relationship with me as a visiting artist as well as with one another as the rabbits and their ongoing needs made themselves felt throughout the community.
John Reardon
Burning building
InstallationBurning building was part of EVA International, Ireland’s Biennial of Contemporary Art. “EVA leads in the commissioning and curating of contemporary art by Irish and international artists, EVA’s vision is ‘To lead in creating experiences and encounters of world-class contemporary art that activate Limerick as a place of creative endeavour and cultural destination”. The proposal was to attach ‘wooden’ flames and smoke to the upper floors of Sarsfield House, home to the Irish Revenue Commissioners. The flames and smoke would be cut from wood before being painted sealed and attached to the external surface of the building making them highly visible in the city and on the approach to the city. The work was rejected following a meeting with the Revenue Commissioners.
John Reardon
Burnout
Publication/ Activism
A downloadable magazine and series of interviews with activists from across various forms of activism that engages with the complex range of issues and challenges that lead to burnout and what has become a highly critical issue for activists today in how we prepare, support and sustain people to do this work. The magazine also provides practical information to support someone currently dealing with burnout and also about preventative measures they take on a day-to-day basis to avert burnout. It also provide research-based information on the topic. It is also for this reason that Also included a list of mental health organizations that can provide more comprehensive support to anyone impacted by burnout.
Zil Palladino Peters
C
Town Unextraordinary
Exhibition
The location and focus of this curatorial project is Daerim-dong, Seoul’s largest immigrant residential
area in the heart of Seoul where the sense of marginalization has become normal in this city. Eight
artists were invited to explore this transnational space and the reasons that the neighbourhood has
become the subject of a toxic urban legend when Daerim-dong was depicted as a hotbed of crime in
the movie Midnight Runner The artists in this site-specific project explore how Chinatown leads as
ordinary a life as any other neighbourhood in Seoul. The work of these artists is installed across
Daerim-dong in, among other places, karaoke rooms, billiard halls and restaurants, and on the street
so that the everyday public in and beyond Chinatown are encouraged to engage with it
Seungha Lee
Canary Island Commons Historical Guide
Writing
A site-specific intervention at the Canary Wharf shopping mall in which a giveaway Historical Guide to the ‘future’ of this location in which the artist imagined it as an island - resulting from climate change that raises the level of the Thames - with a community of squatters inhabiting the now abandoned complex. This new community are called the Canary Island Commons. Copies of the guide were distributed across the complex among the official maps, art guides, and newspapers available in the Canary Wharf shopping complex. The guide includes a link to a that offers more information about the world of the Canary Island Commons, along with an explanation of the project
Olivia Rosane
Celebrate Social Housing
Exhibition
A pop-up Museum of Social Housing was established in Columbia Point, tower block, Canada Water,London. The museum hosted numerous events during its short life. Housing activists gathered in the museum to share information and as an act of solidarity. an exhibition on social housing was curated and banners and Christmas cards were designed and distributed from the museum. Long term connections were also made and future projects developed out of the museum continue to grow and flourish
Lowri Kearney | Rachel Reid | Daniela Castelli
Centre for the Arts, Port-au-Prince
Exhibition
A project in collaboration with Nadia Todres and the Centre for the Arts , Port-au-Prince. A group of young people from the Centre for the Arts were invited to think about a vision of Port-au-Prince, post-earthquake as architects and developers had been doing. A crucial part of the project was to set in motion a real and sustained engagement between the young people, and city architects and how this meeting of difference might find real and tangible form in a future Port-au-Prince.
Maelenn Le Bret | Dalia Kranauskaite | Aliasghar Torkaliaskari | Sonja Roach | Vicky Kluzik
Ceramics
Sculpture
Shallow End wall mural. Paint on 15cm x 15cm glazed bathroom tiles.
Dimensions 2250mm x 1200mm
Icebergs Anuses floor mosaic.
Dimensions 1200 x 1200mm x 4mm
Frost-resistant ceramic tile for indoor and outdoor use that works with a traditional form, material and pattern to frame a plurality of relationships, complex ecologies.
Holes ceramic plate series
Domestic plates, dimensions variable
John Reardon
CHANGE
Installation
This is a site specific, temporary work. Located in Deptford Creek, South East London, it works with and disappears with the ebb and flow of the tide which rises in the creek to an extraordinary six metres. The work is fully visible at ebb tide twice a day. Official permission was not sought to do this work, nor was there any attempt to explain or assign authorship to the work. CHANGE functions in the space been legal and illegal interventions in the public domain through the temporary removal of algae from the wooden surface of the creek wall. Letters cut from sheet wood were used to trace each letter onto the creek wall after which the algae within each traced letter was scraped from the surface of the wall.
Craig Clark | Robert Davies | Tegan Joyce | Sarah Peace | Clara Verdier | Marijam Didžgalvytė
ch-ch-ch-changes
Publication
ch-ch-ch-changes is a collection of conversations with artists who teach. I began this project when first asked to teach at Goldsmiths, London. Artists include, among others, John Armleder, Guillaume Bijl, Phyllida Barlow, Pavel Büchler, Michael Craig-Martin, Thomas Bayrle, Liam Gillick, Tobias Rehberger, Karin Sander, Christoph Schlingensief, Jon Thompson, Erwin Wurm, Walter Dahn. Published by Ridinghouse, London
John Reardon
Chthonic Machine
Public art
Chthonic Machine - a technology for symbiotic fertilization. An ‘official looking’ plaque installed on a bridge in Deptford, South London, within sight of the Lawes factory (The first modern fertiliser factory constructed by Sir John Bennet Lawes). The engraved text on the plaque reads of a buried Chthonic Machine "We can see its tubes emerging from the creek" and leads many who read the text to move to the adjacent railing overlooking Deptford creek to hopefully see the emerging tubes and machine parts. The plaque re-telling the history of the area, shows a detailed drawing of the Chthonic Machine installed underground. The plaque, designed to resemble the ‘History trail’ series of plaques in Deptford, includes the logo of an imaginary Deptford Council as well as a phantom Research Lab.
Maria-Ioli Tzanetaki | Sofia Casarin | Sofia Gallarate | Soukeina El Isbihani | Julian Roeckert | Allesandro Sansottera | Bojana Popadic
Club Money Is Not A Fuckin Luxury
Event/ Publication
Club Money Is Not A Fuckin Luxury (Lloyd from Irvine Welsh’s Ecstasy). Our experience of politics happens at the level of the everyday. It is at this level we need to question, change and think about how we want to live together in shared spaces. How might hedonism and joy in cities be a site through which we can enact social change? How might gender, race and class shape hierarchies of cultural value? How can we politicise and mobilise informal ways of coming together in our day-to-day lives? Club Money Is Not A Fuckin Luxury explores informal ways of organising, collectivising and creating through DIY printed material, projected images and public space in which to gather.
Anjali Prashar-Savoie
Collective Ferment
Sculpture
At the centre of this work was a fermentation process that corresponded with the timeline of the Triennale.
Part 1: installation, exhibition - containing fruit and plants - of two holding tanks.
Tank 1 contains fruit (80 melons + 11 lemons) fermenting in 200 litres of 35% proof alcohol.
Tank 2 contains plants (variety of plants) fermenting in 350 litres of 25% proof salted water.
The contents of the tanks change colour, position, form and texture as the fermentation process takes place during the Triennale, by the end of which they are ready to be bottled and distributed to the local community as well as to art institutions and curators around the world.
Part 2: Drunken Melon Workshop – bottling and distribution workshop (for consumption and contemplation).
John Reardon
Conversations for Change
Conversation/ Booklet
Instructions
- Invite someone to have a ‘Conversation for Change’
- Ask them to bring their own materials: thoughts, imagination and language
- Find a suitable space, around a Table if possible
- Use the question provided for discussion - or your own question
- Make notes of any great ideas for social and political change
- Make cups of tea - tea is good for conversation
- Make contact with the ‘Conversation for Change’ Network
- And, keep the ‘Conversation’ going…
- Ask the person you invited to have their own “Conversation for Change’ with someone else
Deborah Mills
Crash
Event/ Exhibition
Triskel Arts Centre, Cork
a work in three parts:
Part 1 designed for an audience consisting of gallery director and cleaning staff who witnessed a 550cc
motorcycle drive through the newly built wall of the main gallery into the adjoining office space.
Part 2 designed for gallery staff prior to the exhibition opening who witnessed the motorcycle ramp in
the gallery space (before it was removed), the breached wall in the gallery (before it was covered up) and
the upended motorcycle in the adjoining office space (before it was removed).
Part 3 designed for the general public who, on the opening night of the exhibition found a freshly cleaned
gallery and a large piece of black polyurethane sheet covering the section of the wall which the
motorcycle breached.
John Reardon| Declan Kennedy
CycloGalaxy
Public art
Materials: Styrofoam, water-based paint, coated polyurethane
Dimensions: Potato (110cm x 130cm x 100cm), Durian (110cm x 90cm x 80cm), Rock (120cm x 140cm x 120cm). Three rotating objects in the form of a Potato, Durian and Rock. CycloGalaxy is a site specific work shaped by the architecture of Amado Art Space, Seoul, South Korea. Its external roof space, the busy restaurant area of the city in which it is located, how it competes with other signs, objects and images and how partial views of it are available from surrounding buildings and street level restaurants. CycloGalaxy combines permanently rotating objects – Potato | Durian | Rock with temporarily performed text or ‘absurd homage’ (performed by artist YoonSuk Choi) on the opening night of the exhibition.
John Reardon & Hyemin Son
Delays arranged
Sculpture
Trying harder consists of an electric blower that nosily attempts and fails - blowing non-stop for six
minutes before stopping - to fully inflate a large attached plastic form. The blower attempts to
inflate the large plastic form for six-minutes, at intervals of twenty- five minutes, each time failing in
its attempt.
Action to produce a high degree of uncertainty
This consists of two framed and signed photographs documenting an exchange I had with residents
of the apartment block, opposite Å+ gallery. Residents involved in this exchange were given a
limited edition photograph of Å+ gallery (taken from their apartment block) in exchange for
attaching a single orange coloured plastic bag (from the nearby grocery store), to their balcony for
the duration of the exhibition or until the bag is blown away or removed.
John Reardon
Dictator(ship)
Event/ Exhibition/ Debate
Dictator(ship) is an exhibition, a debate as well as a floating two hour event of refugee-dictators on Regent’s Canal, London. This offered a variety of opportunities for scripted and unscripted elements of the event to unfold. Dictator(ship) is a carnivalesque Ship of Fools, imaginary dictators forced to flee from their countries, seeking protection as if they were refugees. The event was inspired by research on the history of KANAVAL in Haiti and how it plays such a significant role in political and social protest. Dictator(ship) also happened within the context of President Donald Trump referring to Haiti and other Caribbean and African countries as “shithole countries”.
Erica Capecchi | Ariel Lien | Barry Spencer | Seungha Lee | Eef Veldkamp
Disappearing mural
Process
Commissioned by City Hall, Department of Architecture, Cork City, to create a site-specific work for a
large 1970-built housing estate overlooking the city. This was in very poor repair and was about to
undergo extensive renovation. Following several visits to the site I decided to work with what I
considered to be the most significant feature of the site - the weather (it rained more or less
continuously) - the finished work consisted of repeating a simple 1970s wallpaper pattern (found in
one of the flats before renovation) across the entire surface of the five large brick-built housing
blocks in special ‘wet-look’ transparent varnish. This had the effect of making the work almost
entirely invisible while the surface of the brick was wet which in this location, was most of the time.
John Reardon
DNA/ Double Helix
Campaign‘What makes the concept of World Heritage exceptional is its universal application. World Heritage sites belong to all the peoples of the world, irrespective of the territory on which they are located’ - UNESCO
The departure point of this project is an attempt to secure the human Double Helix/DNA, as a World Heritage site (WHS). The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), is the governing body that overseas selection and de-selection of world heritage sites around the world according to a strict selection criteria. To be selected a site must, among other things, bear a unique or at least exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition or to a civilization which is living or which has disappeared’. All of the criteria could be applied to the Double Helix/DNA.
Theo Price
Elegy
Performance
This work took place over the course of a one-month residency in Newcastle at the invitation of artist group, The Blue Cowboys. Elegy is painted over the surface of six floors of a condemned city centre department store What Everyone Wants, colloquially known as the ‘what shop’. The resulting work, which is looped in its conception - the end of the text returning you to the beginning of the text -is an elegy (developed around a story of love and loss based on Mills & Boon romantic fiction) to the people of Newcastle who shopped in the store as well as a suggestion of the misogyny that hides in plain sight. The finished work remained for approximately one year and was demolished with the building during city centre wide renovation.
John Reardon
Face banner
Intervention
This consists of a large square piece of PVC attached with ropes to the outside wall of an art centre in the suburbs of Seoul. It is created to work with the wind and our willingness to read meaning and expression into the simple face cut from PVC. It plays with a type of pareidolia we are all more or less subject to, where images of faces or objects are perceived in cloud formations or inanimate objects. In other words, the tendency for perception to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, usually visual, so that one detects an object, pattern, or meaning where there is none. Pareidolia is a type of apophenia; the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things.
John Reardon| Hyemin Son
Lammeh
Event / ProtestLammeh Dinner for Palestine
Lammeh or ‘gathering’ was organised and hosted by D, a Palestinian student during a student occupation for Palestine in the Professor Stuart Hall Building at Goldsmiths College, London in March, 2024. It included an introduction to Palestinian flora and fauna and their links to Palestinian culture. Documentation of the Lammeh - not included here - is replaced here by the contents of a small booklet distributed before and during the gathering.
D
Meet an Arab Woman
Event/ Blog
The project involves a series of online conversations over six weeks. At the core of the project Meet an Arab Woman is the possibility of having an open-minded and wide ranging conversation with people arising from questions they want to ask me or issues they want me to address about being an Arab woman, including questions about our identity, our culture, political correctness, to simply who makes the greatest falafel! It challenges the preconceptions of women from the Middle East which are mostly receive through a media that characterises us as weak, oppressed and controlled. This is not to say that some of these characterisations are not true and that some of us of course struggle with these.
Sandy AbdelRahman
Monument for Chelsea Manning
Sculpture
Monument for Chelsea Manning is about the ongoing attempt to install a piece of public art in the town of Haverfordwest, Wales where Chelsea’s mother comes from and where Chelsea attended the town’s Tasker Milward secondary school for several years.
The piece of public art in the form of a bronze head and shoulders of Chelsea is on temporary loan to Conway Hall Ethical Society, London until a permanent site in Haverfordwest can be found for the work.
John Reardon
On the edge
Guided tour/ Film/ InstallationA project leading up to the 2012 London Olympics that engaged residents on the Carpenters Estate, East London and its transformation through its proximity to the Olympic Park development. The issues residents faced on the Carpenters Estate were repeated on council estates across the country as well as being part of a historic working class struggle around housing and resources. the Museum of London, Docklands to ‘remake’ a number of billboard images from the Docklands Community Poster Project (A billboard and poster project by artists Loraine Leeson and Peter Dunn From 1981), to working on a film And screening with the residents of the Carpenters Estate
Raquel Machtus | Paul Stewart | Kristen Rego |Ayat Alhaji | Ella Ackroyd |Caroline V. Eichhorn
Performing Matter
Process/ Event
A rolling, six-day programme in a street-facing venue on Cambridge Heath Road, London in which people performed their skills in three-hour blocks. The entire programme was streamed live as well as available on a monitor in the space where the person was performing. A zebra crossing immediately outside the venue meant that traffic regularly paused including the many buses that serviced the Tower Hamlets and Hackney areas of East London. The public viewed the performance through a large glass window but were unable to enter the venue. The venue, a former shop, was located next to a mechanics workshop, as well as an electrical shop.
John Reardon
Soft Mischief
Guided walk
What is public space? How is public space utilised politically in the everyday? What’s allowed in public space and what’s forbidden? And why? Those were typical questions whilst living and moving through London. They led me to host Soft Mischief, an hour-long walk through the city of London. Amused perhaps, by the visual amplifiers of power through statues, poppy wreaths and corporate buildings, I spent a few months exploring things before sharing my findings with a little crowd of people on a Sunday afternoon. Activities included the swapping of fake poppy wreaths with real ones in front of the Bank of England, flashing securities with torch lights, using random elevators with transparent windows, as well as halting and looking at big blue walls.
Vlada Maria Tcharyeva
The Growing Manual
Exhibition/ Publication
Established in 2012, the Growing Manual project worked with artist collectives around the world to examine how artists organised and improvised in response to the the particular political, social and economic challenges they were faced with. The Growing Manual project is a micro economy, network of relations, publication and installation. The project was shown in Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) as the Growing Manual exhibition, where various kinds of materials, individually and collectively produced, around three themes: matter, utopia and collectives were installed in the space of the museum. As part of this, the Growing Manual Market sold a wide range of materials produced by the artist collectives including furniture, objects, images, books, clothes, recorded material, local plants and trees, etc,.
John Reardon |Son Hyemin
TWOC
Performance/ Exhibition
TWOC is a police acronym for Taken Without Owners Consent.It is also used as a colloquial or slang term for theft in Middlesbrough The work is in three parts. Part 1: thirty-one snapback baseball caps are taken without owners consent and delivered one-by-one to the guest curator at MIMA. The guest curator attaches the first of the red painted plywood letters, supplied by the artist. Each baseball cap is worn by the curator for one-day before being left on a pre-installed shelf in MIMA. Part 2: a two-month long installation resulting from the performance. Part 3: The finished work - baseball caps and takeaway poster containing image of curator on one side and interview with the artist on the other side - is exhibited in MIMA for two-months
John Reardon
25 towards Ilford
Sculpture/ Installation
Women and girls are the invisible homeless. With streets too precarious for sleep, many find night buses are a place of relative safety. The number 25 from Holborn to Ilford is the longest bus ride in London, and has become the most popular for those who use buses for sleep. This work, “25 Towards Ilford”, pays homage to those who have found safety on London’s night buses. This takes the form of a miniature duvet cover measuring the size of two bus seats and embroidered with the 52 stops (departing from Holborn Circus (K) and ending at Hainault Street (S)) on the 25 route. which covered a pillow and was left for someone’s find on the front seat of the upstairs deck of a 25 night bus
Rachel Reid
310 New Cross Road
Performance/ Drawing
The public facing former shop at 310 New Cross Road led me to making a durational piece of work that would, over time, pull people into the space and the work. People able to look through the window, would be drawn into the space to ask me what I was doing. The conversations that ensued were recorded as art of the work itself. Piles of pencil shavings built up over lengthy discussions, locations on the canvas were marked, becoming jagged, angular mountains of time, each expressing the contours of the conversations they represented. Working through conceptions of dislocation, movement and travel, this exhibition was amongst other things a means of grounding myself in the gravity of an alien environment.
Cristina Assunção