Our project is documented fully on the CIRCA Projects website.
Taking place within the North East of England, Giles Bailey & CIRCA Projects was a co-produced programme examining the possibilities and positions of an independent curatorial organisation.
Through collaboration and a focus on performance, we critically examined the relationship we hold with our locale and our approach to working with artists. Within this programme, various platforms from the canon of arts programming and exhibition making were considered. This included the interlaps of the artists’ medium and place of presentation, such as ‘publication as site’. CIRCA Projects worked in multiple towns and cities – drawing on both art and ‘non-art’ expertise.
From our early years, CIRCA Projects have ‘learned through doing’, examining the possibilities of arts programming in a wider and continually updated sense – engaging within regional contexts while contributing to an international discourse of both short term and abiding issues in arts and socio-politics.
These are the guiding objectives behind CIRCA Projects. Giles Bailey & CIRCA Projects will focus for an extended period on one artist and CIRCA Projects’ three members: Adam Phillips, Dawn Bothwell and Sam Watson. Each bringing their individual interests and relationships into a conversation, to collectively produce a number of art projects shown for North East England in 2016-18.
Celebrating three milestones – the completion of Giles Bailey & CIRCA Projects collaboration, ‘Art’s Birthday’ (artist Robert Filliou proclaimed this fell on 17th January each year), and CIRCA Projects’ own 10th anniversary – Festival of the Not at Star and Shadow Cinema, presented four days of sound, performance and visual experiments for audiences to view, participate in, discuss and share together with us.
As Robert Filliou put it:
“In order to make artists, first, realize they are part of a network and, therefore, may as well refrain from their tiresome spirit of competition, we intend, when we do perform, to advertise other artists’ performances together with our own. But this is not enough. The artist must realize also that this part of the wider network, ‘la Fête Permanente’ going on around [them] all the time in all parts of the world.”