What We Inherit

INTRODUCTION

What We Inherit is an online programme across five sessions that will reevaluate the Constitution of Transmission Gallery.

WHAT IS THE CONSTITUTION PROGRAMME?

Transmission has been involved in a deep interrogation of its role as an Artist-Run-Initiative and art institution. Over the last few years, committee members have experienced the consequences of over-extended voluntary labour, where the current formation of Transmission leaves gaps for suitable care and effective organising. What We Inherit, or the constitution programme, will investigate alternative structures of governance that will protect the committee from personal legal liabilities, allow them remuneration; and open the space to different forms of organising. However, in order to do this, we will need an overhaul that involves a constitution rewrite.

Transmission has been trying to work outside of default institutional practices, but a paradox arises when it also needs to be legitimised by potentially bureaucratic and colonial guidelines. In order to find the most suitable governance structure, we have decided to weave this search into our programming. A constitution is a document that defines the actions of an institution or organisation, and with that in mind, we want to open the discourse of what our constitution can be, and should be. We want to reimagine sustainable ways of existing for Artist-Run-Initiatives and volunteer spaces in a way that is community-led and driven.

The constitution is inextricably tied into Transmission’s status as a ‘charitable organisation’, a governance model that has served us for the last thirty-nine years. It’s far from perfect, but it has allowed Transmission to evolve fluidly, supporting the intentions and commitments of every new committee. The question of how suitable the constitution of Transmission is for the current day and age has been an ongoing debate passed through various committees. Due to the heavy legacy of the organisation and its history within the contemporary art scene, it is understandable that such a decision to revisit the constitution has been met with a multiplicity of responses - excitement, elation, alarm or resistance.

Transmission’s constitution is no longer functioning like it once did. In the context of the changing socio-political and economic climate that individuals are forced to endure, the constitution does not allow Transmission to survive or thrive. Neither does it protect the committee members while they volunteer their time to keep the organisation afloat. The situation becomes an ethical and a theoretical dilemma, one where we need to question what institutional requirements must be met for Transmission to remain legitimate, and to survive within the structures it is ambivalent about. As an organisation that tries to counter and avoid reinforcing these very frameworks, how can this line be walked?

THE PROGRAMME

‘What We Inherit’ consists of five public, online sessions with a focus on Transmission’s constitution: a deliberately vague set of principles that set in motion the formation of Transmission as an organisation in 1983, and a document that is about to turn forty years old in 2023.

This is an invitation for you to join us in considering how Transmission’s constitution can be reconstructed. The sessions will set out what Transmission’s values are and question whether its current constitution and governance model are in alignment with those values. Through a community-led and decolonial approach, the aim of this programme is to have an open and transparent discussion about the values of Transmission. What we gain and learn from these sessions will act as the foundation for Transmission’s constitutional rewrite.

What We Inherit is about reworking Transmission’s constitution into something that will not remove the fluidity and the vision of Transmission’s existence, but rather extend and protect what it has been. Transmission aims to continue being relevant, beneficial, experimental, and accessible. The programme is structured to think through the nature, nuances and existences of ARIs in Scotland and beyond, and discuss what the values of Transmission are and should be, before tying it back to the formation of our future constitution and governance. With love and care weaved through these five online sessions, anyone who is invested or interested in these concerns is welcome to join.

SESSIONS SCHEDULE

Please note: All sessions will be recorded.

Unfortunately, there will be no BSL, Live Captioning or Audio Description for some of these sessions; however all videos will be made available later with captions and transcription.

1. If you are unable to make the session but are still invested in the programme, we would love for you to watch it back in your own time and submit your comments to us at info@transmissiongallery.org with the subject line: WHAT WE INHERIT.

2. This will be fed into reevaluating the Constitution over the next months. We will request participant/speaker's consent before making the recordings public.

3. All sessions will be archived on the website - we will share the link to access this in our next newsletter. Each session will have a separate Eventbrite page to register for free tickets.

4. You can find the Eventbrite link on our website and Instagram. We will send you a Zoom link closer to the time of the session.

ABOUT

As part of the programme, while these sessions take place online, Jack Tan whose practice blurs boundaries between art, governance and consultancy, will be gathering knowledge about Transmission - of its history through its archives, and its communities through stories and meetings - to reevaluate, revise and work upon Transmission's Constitution. He will be physically present in Glasgow for a micro-residency as part of his process of a soft and hard review.

Jack Tan

Jack Ky Tan uses law, policy, social norms and customs as a medium of making art. He creates performances, sculpture and participatory projects that highlight the rules that guide human behaviour. In Jack’s social practice, he blurs the boundaries between art, governance and consultancy in order to help organisations reform and revision themselves using artistic thinking. Jack trained as a lawyer and worked in civil rights NGOs before becoming an artist. Jack’s practice-led PhD at Roehampton University explored legal aesthetics and performance art. He has taught sculpture at the Royal College of Art and University of Brighton, and politics at Goldsmiths.

jackkytan.github.io

Thursday, 7th July 2022; 2-4pm GMT

Parallel Contingencies

The first session of the series of online programmes opens with a conversation between Scottish-based Artist-Run-Initiatives - Transmission Gallery, Market Gallery, GENERATOR and Rhubaba - facilitated by Chris Biddlecombe.

After a brief introduction to each ARI, we will move onto discussing the concerns around the committee’s relationship to itself, its board, its membership and its community - that will further bring into discussion intricacies around labour, governance structures and funding within ARIs. The session will open to a brief audience at the end.

This session will take place over a Zoom Webinar.
Please register for free tickets on Eventbrite HERE.

Chris Biddlecombe

Chris is based in Glasgow and works as an independent artist exhibiting mixed media installations and performances in the UK and internationally. His commissioned works are interactive social, historical and geographic responses to specific public sites and communities. He has also developed work supporting the cultural community through the development of creative spaces, networks, artist education and artists' rights. Chris is a co-founder of the Scottish Artists Union, the pre-eminent representative voice for visual and applied artists in Scotland. His collaborative work has involved campaigns for better working conditions for all visual and applied artists. Chris continues the focus of this work through the co-founding of the European Artist Rights project - developing new support projects with European networks. He is currently investigating artist-led spaces and organisations in Scotland as a Scottish Artist Union research project supported by Creative Scotland.

Transmission Gallery

Transmission Gallery was established in 1983 by a group of Glasgow School of Art graduates. Transmission is one of UK and Europe’s oldest artist-run, membership-led organisation with a charitable status. Since its formation, Transmission has consistently played a monumental role in the development of Glasgow as an international centre for the visual arts and as a support network for many practitioners in the field of contemporary art and beyond. Transmission is run by a volunteer committee who are responsible for the management of the gallery and the representation of its membership. We provide support to Glasgow’s art community by offering the space, a library/ archive of shared materials, and equipment and resources to those who wish to make use of them for their practice. Over the course of our history, our committee and those we employ to complete specialised tasks, have been representative of the city’s diverse international artistic community.

GENERATORprojects

GENERATORprojects is a Dundee based artist run initiative founded in 1996 by friends Paul Liam Harrison, Andy Kennedy and Caroline McIntee. As a volunteer organisation, we facilitate a varied cultural programme of exhibitions and events. Our committee strives to highlight the importance of grass roots activity and its imperative role in sustaining and developing the careers of emerging artists. Our aims are to facilitate the demands of contemporary creative talent in the city, to support the artistic community in all its diversity and to provide a varied programme of exhibitions and events featuring the work of emerging and mid-career artists across a National and International spectrum. We aim to generate vibrant culture in Dundee through providing sustained support towards a diverse programme of exhibitions and events. We work with local and national artists to bring new and exciting projects to the city while maintaining a welcoming environment for all those who wish to engage with and support the organisation. Our project and exhibition space is located in the heart of the West end of Dundee. We provide a platform for creative practitioners to develop experimental and contemporarily relevant work and give them the opportunity to exhibit, curate and gain experience in the running of an arts venue. We are a vital stepping stone for arts graduates providing them with paid work and opportunities for networking. Our organisation and venue are facilitated by the GENERATOR committee - a rolling collective of volunteers who dedicate two years of their time to ensure the continuation of the programmed space and the broader aspects of the organisation. We are the primary artist-led space in Dundee, and our committee strives to provide meaningful opportunities for artists, craftspeople, and students, and to involve the local community in a critically engaging programme. Our intention is to maintain a high quality of exhibitions and to develop curatorial ideas with artists, which will act as a pivotal step in their development and allow them the freedom to experiment.

Market Gallery

Market Gallery is a charitable artist-run organisation facilitated by a rolling committee of artist programmes a programme facilitator and a board based in Glasgow’s East End. It was established in 2000 and presents a varied programme of contemporary exhibitions, projects and events. We have currently moved to Many Studios and will those be practising nomadic programming for the foreseeable future. We are committed to engaging and presenting artists’ work in collaborative projects and digital formats. We aim to offer an open and accessible platform for the discussion and experience of contemporary art in Glasgow and internationally. The committee programs collaboratively on a consensus model which aims to support the local and wider art community. The programming is driven by the research interests of the current committee and is developed through a combination of open calls and approaching artists we are interested in working with.

www.marketgallery.org

Rhubaba

Rhubaba is an artist-run organisation in Edinburgh with an annual programme of events, publications and commissions . Established in 2009 in response to a gap in appropriate studio provision for recent graduates and through the desire to create a space dedicated to both the production and presentation of contemporary art, Rhubaba initially housed ten recent graduates from Edinburgh College of Art. Credit Learnin’ Broke My .

Drawing Jennie Temple.

ID Drawing with coloured felt tip pen of an outdoor landscape with blue skies and green fields. In the field there is a stone circle and three people gathered in the right hand corner having a conversation. Below the drawing there is white space and handwritten text in blue that reads “if you need to leave it’s totally fine.” Rhubaba Gallery and Studios.

www.rhubaba.org

Saturday, 9th July 2022; 2-4pm GMT

Together, we propose…
Panel Discussion between Meenakshi Thirukode, Rahee Punyashloka, Aman Sandhu, Priyanka Paul and Bobby Sayers.

Together, we propose.. brings together Priyanka, Rahee, Bobby, Aman and Meenakshi in conversation about what they have been collectively/individually imagining beyond institutional critique. ‘What We Inherit’ gives us a chance to come together and play a part in restructuring frameworks and ways of functioning and relating to both institutions and each other. Oftentimes this process reveals how we still replicate and/or exclude intersections of oppression. Collectively, therefore, we are far more interested in what it takes to think together, work together and actualise what's often just penned down on paper. As a working group, we will present what each of us would like the ‘constitution’ to include, stemming from a few discussions we have had over the last months.

This session will take place over a Zoom Webinar.

We will share the Eventbrite link on the website and Instagram.

Aman Sandhu

Aman Sandhu is an artist working between Glasgow and Montréal. His installations encompass drawing, moving image, and text. He considers them as ensembles of objects that refuse to come into view through institutions’ unrelenting calculations. He engages in a critique of whiteness and seeks to destabilise the centre-margin rubric evoked in encounters between racialised artists and institutions—engagements that often reify whiteness even by refusal. Through improvisation, Aman rethinks the place of refusal in critique to produce other ways of coming to knowledge.

Sandhu studied at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 2013-15 (Klasse Rita McBride) and graduated from The Glasgow School of Art’s Master of Fine Art program in 2017. Sandhu was awarded the 2020 Emerging Visual Artist Residency at Cove Park, Helensburgh. He was included in Glasgow International 2021 and has been engaged in a long-term pedagogical research project with SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre), Toronto since 2020. Recent solo exhibitions include So Glad (Market Gallery, Glasgow, 2020), NO MORE ARTISTS (CCA/Intermedia Gallery, Glasgow, 2019). He has exhibited at Celine Gallery, Glasgow; Gardiner Museum, Toronto; Younger than Beyoncé Gallery, Toronto; FOCUS Photography Festival, Mumbai; and presentations of his pedagogical project, ELEFANT at Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach.

Bobby Sayers

Bobby Sayers (Essex, UK), is a socially engaged artist, poet, and producer based in Rotterdam (NL). He uses performance, video and sculpture that extends beyond the gallery - with focus on class, belonging and masculinity. Often drawing from hidden stories and histories, depicting struggles and transformations that show another present is possible.

Sayers studied an MFA from the Piet Zwart Institute, has exhibited internationally and established residencies/public art projects across Scotland. In 2014 he worked for a major political campaigns organisation as a web designer and developer in London, 2016 he was commissioned to develop a digital education scheme across 7 Libraries in Scotland, 2019 he joined Studio Jeanneworks as Arts Producer, working on ‘Training(s) for the Not-Yet’ exhibition and program at BAK, Utrecht and is now also currently an Associate Lecturer in Fine Art at Derby University and Lecturer of Social Practice at Willem de Kooning Academy.

Meenakshi Thirukode

Meenakshi Thirukode’s long-term project, Instituting Otherwise is many things; a dream, a vision and an imaginary of a better (art) world; a labor of love shaped out of the experiences of those contributing; a manifestation of years attempting to navigate intersections of oppression while maintaining a radical practice that cannot be co-opted.It is a making visible as well as making opaque; an ebb and a flow of strategies; and many moments of feminist snap. Thirukode attempts to build eco-systems and new allyships from the grass roots across interconnected contexts.

Meenakshi Thirukode is a writer, researcher, educator and feminist killjoy based in Delhi. Her areas of research include the role of culture and collectivity from the POV of a queer femme subjectivity, that’s located within the realm of a trans-nomadic, transient network of individuals and institutions. She runs ‘School of IO’, which is a space of unlearning, dedicated to navigating ‘study’, as a radical tool of political agency. Her recent projects include a reading residency at Stroom den Hague (Hague), organizing the ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ conference at MAC Birmingham, UK as part of the India-UK 70 years celebration (March 2018) and ‘Out of Turn, Being Together Otherwise’, exploring performance art histories in collaboration with Asia Art Archive (AAA) at Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa, India (December 15th-22nd 2018) . Her chapter ‘Towards a Public of the Otherwise’, has been published in the Routledge Companion Series for Art in the Public Realm in 2020.

Rahee Punyashloka

Rahee Punyashloka is a Dalit conceptual artist, writer, researcher, and experimental filmmaker based out of Bhubaneswar and New Delhi. He creates anti-caste art under the moniker 'artedkar'. His work has been exhibited at TENT (Kolkata), ARKIPEL (Jakarta), Athens Digital Arts Festival, Video Vortex (Kochi), Ishara Art Foundation (Dubai), International Film Festival Rotterdam, Tribeca Film Festival (New York), among others. His first solo show, Séances, Featuring my Kin with Fantastically Large Shadows was exhibited at The Method Gallery, Mumbai in August 2021.

Priyanka Paul

Priyanka Paul is a 23 year old self taught illustrator and writer from Bombay, India. Their work revolves around the themes of social justice, marginalisation and self exploration. Their work has been featured in galleries and publications around the world. When they’re not drawing or writing, you can find them fighting on the internet, reading about niche internet cultures and jamming to some hiphop music.

Saturday, 16th July 2022; 5-7pm GMT

The WIG Feel-Tank: how to ask for better conditions for independent artists of colour
Panel discussion between Fannie Sosa, Navild Acosta and Neema Gethere

Black folks and people of color are out making culture, like we always have been since times immemorial. But white supremacist patriarchal capitalism has upgraded itself and once again our cultural production is capitalised on, while our bodies, well-being and communities are still expendable. Consumerism from the other side of the barbed wired fence is extractivism. Extractivism -bottling the knowledge, without caring for the people, leaving holes in existence- is what white institutions are almost irredeemably built to perpetrate, unless they have a strong will, purposeful practice and vigilant understanding of redistribution, reparation and rest.

In 2016, artist Sosa created the WIG, a non exhaustive compilation of ways cultural institutions can, and should, and will, redistribute their material and immaterial resources when welcoming Black folks, people of color and our audiences. Join us for a Feel Tank where artists Navild Acosta, Neema Githere and Sosa will be discussing enhanced ways to ask institutions for better conditions.

This session will take place over a Zoom Webinar.

We will share the Eventbrite link on the website and Instagram.

Fannie Sosa

Fannie Sosa is an award-winning afro-sudaka mover and shaker, artist, and activist. Currently finishing their PhD, titled "Pleasure Against The Machine: Pleasurable Strategies for Anti-Colonial Survival during the Capitalocene", they have been creating and sharing pleasurable anti-colonial strategies and mixed-media knowledge packages for 10 years.

Their work spans video/tutorials, consultations, sexual well-being workshops, movement practices, writing, and knowledge bundles. They muse often about the intersections between pleasure, vibrational technologies, and race, which in turn engender mutant written and visual materials exploring erotic autonomy and politics/policies, such as "Black Power Naps" (2018), "I Need This In My Life" (2016), and "Baby! Love Your Body" (2015), which together have amassed over 2 million views on Youtube. Sosa wrote A White Institutions Guide for Welcoming Artists of Color and their Audiences (WIGWACATA) in 2016. The guide has been utilised by over 200 cultural institutions around the world to better their equity practices. They live and work between Europe and South America.

Neema Githere

Neema Githere (they/she) is a guerrilla theorist and artist whose work explores love and indigeneity in a time of algorithmic debris. Neema’s experimental practice, ‘data:healing,’ seeks to illuminate the links between technology, nature, and spirituality to investigate how working from this intersection can combat data trauma – a term coined by Olivia Ross.

Other projects of Neema’s include Afropresentism, a term they coined in 2017 exploring diasporic embodiment in the age of Big Data; and #DivestFromInstagram, a campaign/budding performance practice responding to Meta Inc.’s moral bankruptcy. In 2018, Neema left Yale University to pursue a path of unschooling, and has since lectured at a wide range of universities + cultural institutions including Afrotectopia, Studio Olafur Eliasson, Toronto Queer Film Festival, and SCI-Arc among others.

Navild Acosta

Navild Acosta is a Multi-award winning and internationally acclaimed multi-medium artist and activist based in Brooklyn, NY. His intersectional identities as a Transgender Non-Binary, queer, and Afro-Latino 1st Generation American Artist have continuously inspired his community based work. Navild’s Artistic works and thought leadership have been featured in many publications including Performance Journal, VICE, Brooklyn Magazine, BOMB Magazine and more.

His performance work has debuted in various Institutions nationally and abroad including Ford Foundation Gallery (NYC), SMU Pollock Gallery (Dallas), New York Live Arts (NYC) and Performance Space New York (NYC). Navild has collaborated with notable artists such as Alicia Keys, Fannie Sosa, Lyle Ashton-Harris, Ralph Lemon, Ishmael Houston-Jones & Deborah Hay.

Navlid’s current projects include Black Power Naps, created in collaboration with Fannie Sosa, is a multi-purpose separatist organizing space with a focus on rest, restoration, rejuvenation, reparation and black joy. Navild works across various media, all devised in collaboration with Black artists, which are propositions for how reparative economies can better hold communities of color. Parallel to his artistic practice through his racial justice work he has provided Racism Professional Development Courses At Performance Space New York, Creative Capital, New York University, Vassar College and Movement Research (USA).

September dates and details TBC

Transmission Shares its Values

A conversation between Transmission Committee members facilitated by Gordon Douglas

September dates and details TBC

What We Inherit - Townhall Session

A session for the members that will be hosted by Sukhy Parhar

Resources / Bibliography / Links

(soon)