When Platitudes Become Form

Opening 4-7pm Sunday 7th October


Tuesday November 6th, 7-9pm : launch of The Allure of Collusion a new publication by Tom Trevatt to accompany the exhibition: When Platitudes Become Form, curator and writer Tom Trevatt will be in conversation with Christopher Kulendran Thomas, all welcome.

Tuesday November 20th, 7-9pm: Conversation with Simon Sheikh, curator, critic and Senior Lecturer in Curating, Goldsmiths University of London.

"In August 1940 Gilbert Renault, more famously known by his pseudonym, Colonel Rémy, returned to occupied France to volunteer as an agent in the French Résistance. During his time working for the British Government and the Free French Government in Exile, headed by Charles de Gaulle, Rémy became the most effective agent amongst almost 2000 volunteers. Working for the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d'Action (BCRA) Rémy organised one of the most active resistance networks (an organisation created specifically for military purposes; intelligence gathering, sabotage, espionage), the Confrérie de Notre Dame (Brotherhood of Our Lady). The express purposes of this network were the gathering of information, maps and photographs that aided the Allied armies in their incursions into both occupied France and German territory. Alongside the high profile resistance fighters as many as 400,000 French adults (by some estimates) partook in some form of resistance, be it producing, distributing or consuming resistance literature, committing acts of sabotage, gathering intelligence, housing spies, engaging in guerilla warfare. These activities, the networks created, the espionage, the clandestine publications, the economic resistance, people, relationships, weapons, forged documents, lies, secrets, loyalties made, loyalties broken, lives lost, loves formed, these things, these objects, these contingent materials of the Résistance are what the liberation movement colluded with." 

-  Excerpt from The Allure Of Collusion by Tom Trevatt

Not dissimilarly, a contingent ecological conception of the work of art is central to When Platitudes Become Form, an ongoing enterprise that exploits both the aesthetic and financial differences between centres of art power and their margins to pursue political affects that are not confined to the relation between artwork and viewer. Itself a target for marketisation, Christopher Kulendran Thomas' work takes as its materials the whole system by which art is distributed, including but not limited to the market, the state and global art imperial power, utilising the tools of distribution in the continual evisceration of the formation of the contemporary.