The Exchange 2

THE EXCHANGE  2 is the second iteration of a project connecting artists and creative practitioners across the UK. Bridging the gap created by limited movement and opportunity to network The Exchange aims to create new exchanges and friendships between artists that wouldn’t otherwise be able to connect. This open-ended process has no limits or boundaries but is simply framed by the invitation to begin a conversation. 

The Exchange 2 builds upon the 2021 iteration of the project where 60 artists across the UK were paired together with the simple invitation to begin a conversation. The artist pairs valued the connection to another peer to think alongside and support one another. Although there was no anticipation of a formal outcome artists did make together resulting in video collages, animation, sacred knotting installations and performances. The variety of responses, levels of connection, outcomes and conversations was vast and far-reaching with some artists connecting for a short time and others who will continue to talk and collaborate long into the future. 

Eastside Projects (EOP), CAMP, Castlefield Gallery (Associates), The NewBridge Project, Primary, Spike Island (Spike Island Associates), and Turf Projects have each selected 8 artists from their networks to take part in the project through an open call. In total 56 artists will participate.

Participating Artists
EOP Members:
Jennifer Brough, Soohyun Choi, Sherrie Edgar, Rebecca Farkas, Yva Jung, Marcus Keating, Eleanor Morgan, SOP

CAMP: Chloe Bonfield, Ruth Brown, Erika Cann, Karen Howse, Tina Kutter, Lucie Smith, Frances Staniforth, Sarah Trotter

Castlefield Associates: Hatitze Achmet, Bryony Dawson, Candice Dehnavi, Klaire Doyle, Clara Glyn, Katie McGuire, Babs Smith, Sylvia Waltering

Primary: Louisa Chambers, Belén Cerezo, Pete Ellis, Alison Lloyd, Nathanial Mann, Sam Metz, Roger Suckling

Spike Associates: Helen Acklam, Simone Hesselberg, Garry Loughlin, Maisie Moon, Sammy Paloma, Tina Salvidge, John Steed, Veronica Vickery

The NewBridge Project: Charlie-Mae Bloom, BJ Choudre, Georgia Holman, Margaret Jennings, Georgia McGrath, Roberto Picciau, Meitao Qu, Beth Ross

Turf Projects: Julia Chwascinska, Theresa Dodzro, Salina Jane, Desilver Johnson, Emma McAndrew D’Souza, Yolanda Shields, Claire Undy, Amy Wilson

Paired Members
EOP members have been paired with the following matches:

Jennifer Brough matched with Candice Dehnavi from Castlefield Associates
Soohyun Choi matched with Erika Cann from CAMP
Sherrie Edgar matched with Lucie Smith from CAMP
Rebecca Farkas matched with Belén Cerezo from Primary
Yva Jung matched with Claire Undy from Turf Projets
Marcus Keating matched with Charlie-Mae Bloom from The NewBridge Project
Eleanor Morgan matched with Veronica Vickery from Spike Island
SOP matched with Sam Metz from Primary

The Programme Dates
Over the nine months, a series of networking events and artist-led activities for The Exchange artists will be hosted online by the partner organisations, with the aim of supporting artists, building networks and making further connections. 

Most events will be online and all are responsive to COVID guidance.

Details of artists leading events will be announced shortly. 

10 February, 2–4pm: A big welcome to the project through an informal and fun ‘getting to know you’ event, hosted by Eastside Projects
3 March, 7–8.30pm: Social networking event hosted by The NewBridge Project
1 April, 7–8.30pm: Quiet Crits with Sam Metz, hosted by Turf Projects. Quiet crits take particular care to value sensory modes of understanding as equal to verbal and written forms of interpretation
29 April, 2–4pm: “Dance Like A Firebrat” with Eleanor Morgan hosted by Castlefield Gallery. Eleanor will lead a workshop inviting attendees to explore the creatures in our immediate surroundings, using their behaviours as prompts and provocations to generate ideas, actions, and different ways of making. Inspired by some awkward experiences of collaboration, it focuses on the question: how do you start a conversation?
10 June, 7–8.30pm: An Exchange artist led event, hosted by CAMP
5 August, 7–8.30pm: An Exchange artist led event, hosted by Spike Island
15 September, 2–5pm: The Exchange Summit, a public sharing event held online, co-hosted by Eastside Projects and the project partners.

Artist Biographies

Soohyun Choi focuses on the moments of awkwardness, failures, and confusion that trigger her to question the customary concept of normality and ethics. Her writing, which is a foundational material of her videos, investigates female subjectivity and entertains the postmodern concept of ‘I’, where she playfully multiplies herself as an attempt to escape from a concrete singular identity. She is interested in de-mystifying ideological thinking and raises doubts about her own concepts and ideological position. Instead of using the didactic voice of an artist, her writings are rooted in self-reflection and dry humour, while blurring the boundaries between memoir, fiction, and essay.

Jennifer Brough is a writer from Birmingham. Her work includes fiction and personal essays exploring the body, gender, pain and disability, art and literature. She is slowly writing her first essay collection. Jennifer is also involved in projects centred in disability and feminism, and is a member of resting up collective, an interdisciplinary sick group of artists.

Sherrie Edgar is a multidisciplinary artist who creates digital films and installations informed by understanding issues from first person perspectives by interviewing, filming, documenting, researching, volunteering and committing to project outcomes. This enriches consistency, building upon understanding matters of modern discourse, such as loneliness, social politics of isolation, feminism, youth culture and mixed heritage. ‘Imagine Equality, Create Change’ was recent series of works for Coventry Creates 2021. Considering future practice being committed to UK City of Culture projects, Walking Forest, Radford Bubbles and Creative Europe Programme Sherrie seeks research or practice collaboratively; commenting “I truly believe in having equal representation and working with others”.

Rebecca Farkas is an interdisciplinary artist who transforms spaces with projection installations, digital animations, video & photos. Her work responds to places, people, stories & memories and aims to create a sense of wonder and a shared experience with others. Rebecca grew up moving around with the circus, which inspires a fascination with transformation, memory, objects & a passion for inclusion. She lives in rural Herefordshire and is exploring ideas about objects & memories, evolving from research into the 17th C. Memento Mori/Vanitas ‘still life’ tradition. In lockdown, she made her first animations with soundtracks; a challenging and rewarding process. 

Yva Jung is a visual artist based in Hertfordshire, UK. Jung studied Fine Art in Seoul and New York before receiving her practice-led PhD from Slade School of Fine Art, London in 2016. Her art is an ongoing, reflective process formed through dialogue with daily experiences and everyday objects that she subverts to add stories to. Her visual art practice is temporal, site-specific, performative and interdisciplinary, working across moving images, digital prints, drawings, installations and improvised encounters.

Marcus Keating runs a small artist-run initiative in Birmingham called The New Happiness, which is mainly focused on developing projects with womxn, non-binary and queer-identifying artists. The New Happiness began online in 2008 and has produced a combination of curated online events and IRL gallery-based exhibitions. Marcus is particularly interested in working with artists in an intuitive and democratic way to build exhibitions collaboratively and to allow the work to manifest organically, rather than imposing predetermined outcomes.

Eleanor Morgan is an artist and writer working with video, printmaking and drawing to explore our entanglement with other species. This has included serenading a spider, making a diamond from the dead creatures of the River Thames and embracing a giant green sea anemone. Her book Gossamer Days: Spiders, Humans and Their Threads (Strange Attractor/MIT press, 2016) examines the human uses of spider silk, from gun sights to sticky tunics and royal underwear. Her work has been funded by the Arts Council England, the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese foundation, and the Leverhulme Trust. She has exhibited and performed her work with the Venice Architecture Biennale, RIBA London, Jerwood space, the ICA and DOCUMENTA 13. She was awarded a PhD from the Slade School of Art in 2013.

Sop is a queer, crip, neurodiverse artist and musician working with sound, performance, writing, film and objects, frequently in collaboration with others who have experienced chronic illness. They tend to centre modes of sociality and explore the use of voice as gesture alongside narrative. They have a particular interest in alternative healing, especially through nature, sound, breathwork and group writing. They are one half of Rita Munus, they sing in Child’s Pose, drum in Woolf and their solo music is called dmf. They are anti-clock, pro-informal-networks-of-care; anti-normality; pro-interpersonal-dedication. They live and work in South East London.