neil cummings

the enthusiast has the same relationship to capital as the gift to the commodity

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exhibition

From 2003!

Documentation of a presentation of Capital (2001), recalling some of the 'fieldwork' and evolution of the project. Capital was a series of encounters between two iconic institutions - the Tate and the Bank of England - and the economies of debt and gift that they animate.....

Decolonising

This is a written-up version of a more discursive seminar at Chelsea College of Arts on the 28th January 2019, as to why Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum, and Jean Rhy’s Wide Saragasso Sea are forever linked, for me, to processes of decolonisation...

I wrote it up, as part of my participation in Decolonising the Curriculum

Play It Again

Play It Again Use It Together

15 - 24 November 2018

On 14th September I went to see my friends and artists that I've frequenty collaborated with Eileen Simpson and Ben White’s latest Open Music Archive project. Play It Again Use It Together takes as its starting point the University of Liverpool’s Institute of Popular Music (IPM) archive of over 80,000 records, and typical of public resources, much of the material has been gifted over a number of years by collectors and enthusiasts.

#ObjectOfTheWeek

Every Friday, more or less, for the past year I've been posting an image of an object #ObjectOfTheWeek on twitter.

Each object is photographed agains a white or black infinity ground, a classic 'objectifying' format beloved of museums and archives. I like twitter as an exhibitionary stream, and I also like the way that, through tagging, my collection meshes with others: a museum without walls.

Free Trade

FREE TRADE
Manchester Art Gallery
May 2002 - February 2003

Commissioned by Catherine Dickinson

I collaborated with Marysia Lewandowska, on a long term research project that was to coincide with the re-opening of the Manchester Art Gallery (MAG). The research culminated with a project entitled Free Trade, the following text is edited from the final proposal.

Our starting point was the simple observation that as objects enter public museum and gallery collections they are inevitably removed from the wider world of exchange. Our project was to imaginatively reconnect a major collection from the MAG - the Beatson Blair Bequest - to the circuits of trade and exchange from which it originated.

We identified in the Beatson Blair Bequest a beautiful example of Manchester’s particular social, economic and art collecting history, as well as a device with which to explore the history and conventions of the MAG itself.

Detail

During the 1990's I was very interested in the idea of collection for making sense of the world. And to be honest I'm still interested, take a look at #ObjectOfTheWeek on twitter.

Two images of two Details From the Collection are reproduced in the catalogue for Pictura Britannica: Art from Britain Sydney, Australia 1997.

Left: African Artifacts, from the collection of Mr & Mrs Winter Salzberg (1995)
Right: Detail from the Collection: Blue private collection, London (1996)

Parade

I contributed to: Decoder; 3rd Biennial for Video Art curated by Nav Haq
Contour 07 18 August - 21 October 2007 The City of Mechelen, Belgium

The invitation from Nav Haq to participate in the Film and Video Biennial Contour 2007 in Mechelen, enabled me to make several visit the city. And, rather than bring a previously made film for exhibition - which is the convention for Biennials - I began to research what kind of film making practices already existed.

Short Bursts

Surrogate was screened as part of Short Bursts of Concentrated Joy

Curated by David Blamey for Houghton, the new three-day art and music festival taking place on the Houghton estate in Norfolk, UK from 10th to 13th August 2017.

Monaco Art Fair