With Institutions Like These…

“With Institutions Like These…” is a shared space of liminality, an occupation of both flux and transformation for the ways in which we prescribe and intervene into the apparatuses that exhibitions, artworks, audiences and commerce are embedded in. Simultaneously constructing and deconstructing with each artwork, the exhibition utilises in-between moments of institutional display while retaining elements of its suspended provisional character.

Built in the nineteenth century and empty for almost ten years, The Averard Hotel is the exhibition’s site of investigation and play. The exhibition is staged over two floors, unveiling the complexities of commercial development, cultural planning, exhibition-making, and artistic practice as interrelated phenomena. Engaging with the biography of the building, artists and artworks have been commissioned, site-specific works created and other pieces contributed in an attempt to reactivate the space. Linking previously unconnected spheres of public experience in unexpected rooms and arrangements, the exhibition exists in mid-transformation, mediating between capital development and creative potential.

Like hotels, many cultural institutions and sites of production have become temporary spaces of occupation. The format of this exhibition evokes but one of the many unexpected variations of trajectories that oscillate between institutional erasure, ideal presentation, the conditions of artistic production, re-zoning and development and the status quo.