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Boundary Encounters: Modern Art Oxford's Architecture of the Present
Utilising light, sculpture and sound, we visit Modern Art Oxford's latest interactive installation...
August 1, 2023
The smell of bouncy castles – or perhaps, swimming goggles – is the first sensation of Boundary Encounters. Only mounting the stairs do we find its source, overlapping PVC curtains in standard industrial colours; an instrumental choice by its creator, Harold Offeh, because of the high cost of making them custom.
Offeh’s ‘Pavilion’ (2023) references the Brazilian modernist architecture of Lina Bo Bardi, first encountered by the artist during a residency in São Paulo fifteen years ago. Her work is increasingly subject to rising international interest, and was referenced in Isaac Julien’s Tate Britain exhibition. Rather than her better-known São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), Offeh draws from her SESC Pompéia, which regenerated the working-class area’s disused factory buildings into a multi-purpose arts and leisure centre. ‘The closest thing you’ll find here is the Barbican,’ Harold tells me.
Bo Bardi’s ‘total’ approach to SESC Pompéia, from its structure to its interior design, is necessarily scaled down in ‘Pavilion’, which features similarly organic forms and flat-pack furniture (a smaller-scale construction in Bo Bardi’s own garden also welcomed many visitors over time). Offeh’s semi-transparent curtains create a permeable space, one which challenges the divisions between culture, work, and play.
Modern Art Oxford (MAO) – itself a renovation, a conversion of the Old Halls Brewery since the 1960s – is a fitting host for Offeh’s tribute, one of four installations challenging the boundaries of the museum space. The artist has long been drawn to smaller, more dynamic, contemporary arts institutions, taking seats at Van Gogh House London, and MK Gallery. Inward-looking at the position and function of museums today, Boundary Encounters explores museums as moving, living spaces. And it is, fundamentally, an exhibition about tables and chairs.
Another artist, Deborah Pill, uses absorptive media like MDF and cork to suggest how furniture facilitates conversation. A former hairdresser, she highlights how ‘there no hierarchy around a table,’ the flat surface levelling the field for participation.
Offeh’s interest in the politics of play, and the importance of learning through experience, is also evident in his participatory practice. Part of ‘Pavilion’ is a week-long residency with young people, who will make chairs to pull up to the roundtable at its core. As education (and society) becomes more transactional and economic, this evolving installation invites us to consider the difference between what is productive and generative work – and whether this is a boundary that matters.
Museums are not static, but constantly under construction; MAO takes this literally, with cardboard captions and two further rooms with a wealth of archive materials, documenting the institution’s own evolution. First conceived as a temporary space, MAO has remained on Pembroke Street since its inception; it continues to eschew a permanent collection.
Photographs (laid on more tables) catalogue its long history of collaboration, and offsite projects, in prisons, schools, and community centres. ‘No Parking! Youth work in progress’, says one road sign in front of Bicester Courtyard Youth Arts Centre, a coffee bar and alcohol-free alternative to the typical social space. Leafing through a box file of reproductions, we find a letter from Bryan, a schoolchild, in 2006. He feeds back that ‘I have learnt that Art is not just painting or pictures. I have discovered how to think.’
The final room, Activate our Archives, highlights MAO’s engagement with six different community centres in Oxford. There are hints of the global in the hyper-local; at Florence Park Community Centre, we find Day of the Dead celebrations organised by the city’s residents from Mexico, and older people participating in Zumba classes. ‘My mum’s in that photo!’, overheard once here, and no doubt many times again.
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MAO boasts its efforts to archive as ‘an active process both dynamic and historical’. But this vision is best realised in the side rooms, where a Kodak Carousel S-AV 2050 projector shunts through slides, soundtracked by contemporary audio responses, and the basement Creative Space, where archive photographs get cut out and layered; interventions which collapse the binary between past and present.
It’s granular and, when indulging in 2000s exhibition posters, perhaps a little too specific for a non-Oxford crowd. But there’s less focus on the individual, exclusively men Directors; curators Sara Lowe and Holly Broughton instead championing the people and collectives who make up any museum. MAO itself dropped the ‘Museum of’ from its original name after Tracey Emin was photographed standing in front of the M, evidence of how the institution continues to be shaped by its contemporary artists.
Anticipating MAO’s upcoming architectural redevelopment – with a new community gallery, and nightclub-cum-café – it ends with prototype designs by David Kohn Architects, and even more striking chairs, by Emma Hart. By this point, Boundary Encounters is less an exhibition and more a town hall (and free meeting space, or place to work, should you accept the invitation).
Whilst particular to Oxford, MAO also presents a more general model for how we might open the museum space, and allow people to shape their own local institutions so that they might better serve them. Take architecture; here discussed in a socially relevant, accessible way, and shaped by the responses and needs of the community. Boundary Encounters will also include a live studio space – soon to be populated by new Creatives-in-Residence, co-selected by the MAO’s own volunteers – and an extensive events programme.
The Wacky Warehouse smell gets stronger downstairs in the Creative Space, where more work will be made for display. For Offeh, this continuous creation is what makes art contemporary (it’s not radical, grounded in the ‘Communities of Practice’ theory, formalised in 1991 and based on many previous generations and cultures’ traditions). It’s almost impossible to write definitively about such an exhibition, where everything might change so soon – and everything’s up for grabs.
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Implicit is the need for more intergenerational connections too. Valerie Asiimwe Amani is one of the exhibition’s artists to have recently graduated from Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art; here Offeh, currently based in Cambridge, teaches too (even more might be said of the link between Asiimwe Amani’s interest in the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD), and its co-founder Olive Morris, the subject of some of Offeh’s more compelling works in audio).
For the Tanzanian artist, an encounter is something that dissolves a border. ‘Mkutano’, meaning meeting in Swahili, starts with window-spanning pastel fabrics, filtering the light of – and our perspectives within – the open gallery space. There are tiny videos trapped in boxes and a giant guest book for small hands to scribble in.
Her works are lined with words from journals published by OWAAD in the 1970s and 1980s, a watershed moment in activism for British Black and Asian women, and WhatsApp group chat messages, more contemporary feminist communities of care. ‘How have you survived for this long?’, the artist adds to the painted curve of a Black woman’s body, who lies with her back to us, confined beneath a bench.
Artist Julie Freeman goes bodily too with wooden sculptures modelled on the outline of her own figure. The reward for contorting ourselves into her different positions is hearing audio clips of women artists who have previously exhibited at MAO, questioning how we physically occupy the museum space. (All of these contemporary artists can be heard in their own words by following QR codes, offering layers of participation, and preventing the light space being bogged down with captions.
Indeed, beyond the artworks themselves, it’s more interesting to observe how people engage with them. With its focus on small-scale encounters, Boundary Encounters encourages touching, talking, and participation, all behaviours banned in the conventional white cube. People start tentatively, and then inhabit the space, occupying it as their own.
Sure, the Boundaries bit is less clear than the Encounters, and it’s all a little culture-eating-itself. But, much unlike their recent Gates and Portals, it’s a truly open door towards making museums more accessible, participatory places.
Boundary Encounters is on view at Modern Art Oxford until 29 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
The smell of bouncy castles – or perhaps, swimming goggles – is the first sensation of Boundary Encounters. Only mounting the stairs do we find its source, overlapping PVC curtains in standard industrial colours; an instrumental choice by its creator, Harold Offeh, because of the high cost of making them custom.
Offeh’s ‘Pavilion’ (2023) references the Brazilian modernist architecture of Lina Bo Bardi, first encountered by the artist during a residency in São Paulo fifteen years ago. Her work is increasingly subject to rising international interest, and was referenced in Isaac Julien’s Tate Britain exhibition. Rather than her better-known São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), Offeh draws from her SESC Pompéia, which regenerated the working-class area’s disused factory buildings into a multi-purpose arts and leisure centre. ‘The closest thing you’ll find here is the Barbican,’ Harold tells me.
Bo Bardi’s ‘total’ approach to SESC Pompéia, from its structure to its interior design, is necessarily scaled down in ‘Pavilion’, which features similarly organic forms and flat-pack furniture (a smaller-scale construction in Bo Bardi’s own garden also welcomed many visitors over time). Offeh’s semi-transparent curtains create a permeable space, one which challenges the divisions between culture, work, and play.
Modern Art Oxford (MAO) – itself a renovation, a conversion of the Old Halls Brewery since the 1960s – is a fitting host for Offeh’s tribute, one of four installations challenging the boundaries of the museum space. The artist has long been drawn to smaller, more dynamic, contemporary arts institutions, taking seats at Van Gogh House London, and MK Gallery. Inward-looking at the position and function of museums today, Boundary Encounters explores museums as moving, living spaces. And it is, fundamentally, an exhibition about tables and chairs.
Another artist, Deborah Pill, uses absorptive media like MDF and cork to suggest how furniture facilitates conversation. A former hairdresser, she highlights how ‘there no hierarchy around a table,’ the flat surface levelling the field for participation.
Offeh’s interest in the politics of play, and the importance of learning through experience, is also evident in his participatory practice. Part of ‘Pavilion’ is a week-long residency with young people, who will make chairs to pull up to the roundtable at its core. As education (and society) becomes more transactional and economic, this evolving installation invites us to consider the difference between what is productive and generative work – and whether this is a boundary that matters.
Museums are not static, but constantly under construction; MAO takes this literally, with cardboard captions and two further rooms with a wealth of archive materials, documenting the institution’s own evolution. First conceived as a temporary space, MAO has remained on Pembroke Street since its inception; it continues to eschew a permanent collection.
Photographs (laid on more tables) catalogue its long history of collaboration, and offsite projects, in prisons, schools, and community centres. ‘No Parking! Youth work in progress’, says one road sign in front of Bicester Courtyard Youth Arts Centre, a coffee bar and alcohol-free alternative to the typical social space. Leafing through a box file of reproductions, we find a letter from Bryan, a schoolchild, in 2006. He feeds back that ‘I have learnt that Art is not just painting or pictures. I have discovered how to think.’
The final room, Activate our Archives, highlights MAO’s engagement with six different community centres in Oxford. There are hints of the global in the hyper-local; at Florence Park Community Centre, we find Day of the Dead celebrations organised by the city’s residents from Mexico, and older people participating in Zumba classes. ‘My mum’s in that photo!’, overheard once here, and no doubt many times again.
MAO boasts its efforts to archive as ‘an active process both dynamic and historical’. But this vision is best realised in the side rooms, where a Kodak Carousel S-AV 2050 projector shunts through slides, soundtracked by contemporary audio responses, and the basement Creative Space, where archive photographs get cut out and layered; interventions which collapse the binary between past and present.
It’s granular and, when indulging in 2000s exhibition posters, perhaps a little too specific for a non-Oxford crowd. But there’s less focus on the individual, exclusively men Directors; curators Sara Lowe and Holly Broughton instead championing the people and collectives who make up any museum. MAO itself dropped the ‘Museum of’ from its original name after Tracey Emin was photographed standing in front of the M, evidence of how the institution continues to be shaped by its contemporary artists.
Anticipating MAO’s upcoming architectural redevelopment – with a new community gallery, and nightclub-cum-café – it ends with prototype designs by David Kohn Architects, and even more striking chairs, by Emma Hart. By this point, Boundary Encounters is less an exhibition and more a town hall (and free meeting space, or place to work, should you accept the invitation).
Whilst particular to Oxford, MAO also presents a more general model for how we might open the museum space, and allow people to shape their own local institutions so that they might better serve them. Take architecture; here discussed in a socially relevant, accessible way, and shaped by the responses and needs of the community. Boundary Encounters will also include a live studio space – soon to be populated by new Creatives-in-Residence, co-selected by the MAO’s own volunteers – and an extensive events programme.
The Wacky Warehouse smell gets stronger downstairs in the Creative Space, where more work will be made for display. For Offeh, this continuous creation is what makes art contemporary (it’s not radical, grounded in the ‘Communities of Practice’ theory, formalised in 1991 and based on many previous generations and cultures’ traditions). It’s almost impossible to write definitively about such an exhibition, where everything might change so soon – and everything’s up for grabs.
Implicit is the need for more intergenerational connections too. Valerie Asiimwe Amani is one of the exhibition’s artists to have recently graduated from Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art; here Offeh, currently based in Cambridge, teaches too (even more might be said of the link between Asiimwe Amani’s interest in the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD), and its co-founder Olive Morris, the subject of some of Offeh’s more compelling works in audio).
For the Tanzanian artist, an encounter is something that dissolves a border. ‘Mkutano’, meaning meeting in Swahili, starts with window-spanning pastel fabrics, filtering the light of – and our perspectives within – the open gallery space. There are tiny videos trapped in boxes and a giant guest book for small hands to scribble in.
Her works are lined with words from journals published by OWAAD in the 1970s and 1980s, a watershed moment in activism for British Black and Asian women, and WhatsApp group chat messages, more contemporary feminist communities of care. ‘How have you survived for this long?’, the artist adds to the painted curve of a Black woman’s body, who lies with her back to us, confined beneath a bench.
Artist Julie Freeman goes bodily too with wooden sculptures modelled on the outline of her own figure. The reward for contorting ourselves into her different positions is hearing audio clips of women artists who have previously exhibited at MAO, questioning how we physically occupy the museum space. (All of these contemporary artists can be heard in their own words by following QR codes, offering layers of participation, and preventing the light space being bogged down with captions.
Indeed, beyond the artworks themselves, it’s more interesting to observe how people engage with them. With its focus on small-scale encounters, Boundary Encounters encourages touching, talking, and participation, all behaviours banned in the conventional white cube. People start tentatively, and then inhabit the space, occupying it as their own.
Sure, the Boundaries bit is less clear than the Encounters, and it’s all a little culture-eating-itself. But, much unlike their recent Gates and Portals, it’s a truly open door towards making museums more accessible, participatory places.
Boundary Encounters is on view at Modern Art Oxford until 29 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
The smell of bouncy castles – or perhaps, swimming goggles – is the first sensation of Boundary Encounters. Only mounting the stairs do we find its source, overlapping PVC curtains in standard industrial colours; an instrumental choice by its creator, Harold Offeh, because of the high cost of making them custom.
Offeh’s ‘Pavilion’ (2023) references the Brazilian modernist architecture of Lina Bo Bardi, first encountered by the artist during a residency in São Paulo fifteen years ago. Her work is increasingly subject to rising international interest, and was referenced in Isaac Julien’s Tate Britain exhibition. Rather than her better-known São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), Offeh draws from her SESC Pompéia, which regenerated the working-class area’s disused factory buildings into a multi-purpose arts and leisure centre. ‘The closest thing you’ll find here is the Barbican,’ Harold tells me.
Bo Bardi’s ‘total’ approach to SESC Pompéia, from its structure to its interior design, is necessarily scaled down in ‘Pavilion’, which features similarly organic forms and flat-pack furniture (a smaller-scale construction in Bo Bardi’s own garden also welcomed many visitors over time). Offeh’s semi-transparent curtains create a permeable space, one which challenges the divisions between culture, work, and play.
Modern Art Oxford (MAO) – itself a renovation, a conversion of the Old Halls Brewery since the 1960s – is a fitting host for Offeh’s tribute, one of four installations challenging the boundaries of the museum space. The artist has long been drawn to smaller, more dynamic, contemporary arts institutions, taking seats at Van Gogh House London, and MK Gallery. Inward-looking at the position and function of museums today, Boundary Encounters explores museums as moving, living spaces. And it is, fundamentally, an exhibition about tables and chairs.
Another artist, Deborah Pill, uses absorptive media like MDF and cork to suggest how furniture facilitates conversation. A former hairdresser, she highlights how ‘there no hierarchy around a table,’ the flat surface levelling the field for participation.
Offeh’s interest in the politics of play, and the importance of learning through experience, is also evident in his participatory practice. Part of ‘Pavilion’ is a week-long residency with young people, who will make chairs to pull up to the roundtable at its core. As education (and society) becomes more transactional and economic, this evolving installation invites us to consider the difference between what is productive and generative work – and whether this is a boundary that matters.
Museums are not static, but constantly under construction; MAO takes this literally, with cardboard captions and two further rooms with a wealth of archive materials, documenting the institution’s own evolution. First conceived as a temporary space, MAO has remained on Pembroke Street since its inception; it continues to eschew a permanent collection.
Photographs (laid on more tables) catalogue its long history of collaboration, and offsite projects, in prisons, schools, and community centres. ‘No Parking! Youth work in progress’, says one road sign in front of Bicester Courtyard Youth Arts Centre, a coffee bar and alcohol-free alternative to the typical social space. Leafing through a box file of reproductions, we find a letter from Bryan, a schoolchild, in 2006. He feeds back that ‘I have learnt that Art is not just painting or pictures. I have discovered how to think.’
The final room, Activate our Archives, highlights MAO’s engagement with six different community centres in Oxford. There are hints of the global in the hyper-local; at Florence Park Community Centre, we find Day of the Dead celebrations organised by the city’s residents from Mexico, and older people participating in Zumba classes. ‘My mum’s in that photo!’, overheard once here, and no doubt many times again.
MAO boasts its efforts to archive as ‘an active process both dynamic and historical’. But this vision is best realised in the side rooms, where a Kodak Carousel S-AV 2050 projector shunts through slides, soundtracked by contemporary audio responses, and the basement Creative Space, where archive photographs get cut out and layered; interventions which collapse the binary between past and present.
It’s granular and, when indulging in 2000s exhibition posters, perhaps a little too specific for a non-Oxford crowd. But there’s less focus on the individual, exclusively men Directors; curators Sara Lowe and Holly Broughton instead championing the people and collectives who make up any museum. MAO itself dropped the ‘Museum of’ from its original name after Tracey Emin was photographed standing in front of the M, evidence of how the institution continues to be shaped by its contemporary artists.
Anticipating MAO’s upcoming architectural redevelopment – with a new community gallery, and nightclub-cum-café – it ends with prototype designs by David Kohn Architects, and even more striking chairs, by Emma Hart. By this point, Boundary Encounters is less an exhibition and more a town hall (and free meeting space, or place to work, should you accept the invitation).
Whilst particular to Oxford, MAO also presents a more general model for how we might open the museum space, and allow people to shape their own local institutions so that they might better serve them. Take architecture; here discussed in a socially relevant, accessible way, and shaped by the responses and needs of the community. Boundary Encounters will also include a live studio space – soon to be populated by new Creatives-in-Residence, co-selected by the MAO’s own volunteers – and an extensive events programme.
The Wacky Warehouse smell gets stronger downstairs in the Creative Space, where more work will be made for display. For Offeh, this continuous creation is what makes art contemporary (it’s not radical, grounded in the ‘Communities of Practice’ theory, formalised in 1991 and based on many previous generations and cultures’ traditions). It’s almost impossible to write definitively about such an exhibition, where everything might change so soon – and everything’s up for grabs.
Implicit is the need for more intergenerational connections too. Valerie Asiimwe Amani is one of the exhibition’s artists to have recently graduated from Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art; here Offeh, currently based in Cambridge, teaches too (even more might be said of the link between Asiimwe Amani’s interest in the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD), and its co-founder Olive Morris, the subject of some of Offeh’s more compelling works in audio).
For the Tanzanian artist, an encounter is something that dissolves a border. ‘Mkutano’, meaning meeting in Swahili, starts with window-spanning pastel fabrics, filtering the light of – and our perspectives within – the open gallery space. There are tiny videos trapped in boxes and a giant guest book for small hands to scribble in.
Her works are lined with words from journals published by OWAAD in the 1970s and 1980s, a watershed moment in activism for British Black and Asian women, and WhatsApp group chat messages, more contemporary feminist communities of care. ‘How have you survived for this long?’, the artist adds to the painted curve of a Black woman’s body, who lies with her back to us, confined beneath a bench.
Artist Julie Freeman goes bodily too with wooden sculptures modelled on the outline of her own figure. The reward for contorting ourselves into her different positions is hearing audio clips of women artists who have previously exhibited at MAO, questioning how we physically occupy the museum space. (All of these contemporary artists can be heard in their own words by following QR codes, offering layers of participation, and preventing the light space being bogged down with captions.
Indeed, beyond the artworks themselves, it’s more interesting to observe how people engage with them. With its focus on small-scale encounters, Boundary Encounters encourages touching, talking, and participation, all behaviours banned in the conventional white cube. People start tentatively, and then inhabit the space, occupying it as their own.
Sure, the Boundaries bit is less clear than the Encounters, and it’s all a little culture-eating-itself. But, much unlike their recent Gates and Portals, it’s a truly open door towards making museums more accessible, participatory places.
Boundary Encounters is on view at Modern Art Oxford until 29 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
The smell of bouncy castles – or perhaps, swimming goggles – is the first sensation of Boundary Encounters. Only mounting the stairs do we find its source, overlapping PVC curtains in standard industrial colours; an instrumental choice by its creator, Harold Offeh, because of the high cost of making them custom.
Offeh’s ‘Pavilion’ (2023) references the Brazilian modernist architecture of Lina Bo Bardi, first encountered by the artist during a residency in São Paulo fifteen years ago. Her work is increasingly subject to rising international interest, and was referenced in Isaac Julien’s Tate Britain exhibition. Rather than her better-known São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), Offeh draws from her SESC Pompéia, which regenerated the working-class area’s disused factory buildings into a multi-purpose arts and leisure centre. ‘The closest thing you’ll find here is the Barbican,’ Harold tells me.
Bo Bardi’s ‘total’ approach to SESC Pompéia, from its structure to its interior design, is necessarily scaled down in ‘Pavilion’, which features similarly organic forms and flat-pack furniture (a smaller-scale construction in Bo Bardi’s own garden also welcomed many visitors over time). Offeh’s semi-transparent curtains create a permeable space, one which challenges the divisions between culture, work, and play.
Modern Art Oxford (MAO) – itself a renovation, a conversion of the Old Halls Brewery since the 1960s – is a fitting host for Offeh’s tribute, one of four installations challenging the boundaries of the museum space. The artist has long been drawn to smaller, more dynamic, contemporary arts institutions, taking seats at Van Gogh House London, and MK Gallery. Inward-looking at the position and function of museums today, Boundary Encounters explores museums as moving, living spaces. And it is, fundamentally, an exhibition about tables and chairs.
Another artist, Deborah Pill, uses absorptive media like MDF and cork to suggest how furniture facilitates conversation. A former hairdresser, she highlights how ‘there no hierarchy around a table,’ the flat surface levelling the field for participation.
Offeh’s interest in the politics of play, and the importance of learning through experience, is also evident in his participatory practice. Part of ‘Pavilion’ is a week-long residency with young people, who will make chairs to pull up to the roundtable at its core. As education (and society) becomes more transactional and economic, this evolving installation invites us to consider the difference between what is productive and generative work – and whether this is a boundary that matters.
Museums are not static, but constantly under construction; MAO takes this literally, with cardboard captions and two further rooms with a wealth of archive materials, documenting the institution’s own evolution. First conceived as a temporary space, MAO has remained on Pembroke Street since its inception; it continues to eschew a permanent collection.
Photographs (laid on more tables) catalogue its long history of collaboration, and offsite projects, in prisons, schools, and community centres. ‘No Parking! Youth work in progress’, says one road sign in front of Bicester Courtyard Youth Arts Centre, a coffee bar and alcohol-free alternative to the typical social space. Leafing through a box file of reproductions, we find a letter from Bryan, a schoolchild, in 2006. He feeds back that ‘I have learnt that Art is not just painting or pictures. I have discovered how to think.’
The final room, Activate our Archives, highlights MAO’s engagement with six different community centres in Oxford. There are hints of the global in the hyper-local; at Florence Park Community Centre, we find Day of the Dead celebrations organised by the city’s residents from Mexico, and older people participating in Zumba classes. ‘My mum’s in that photo!’, overheard once here, and no doubt many times again.
MAO boasts its efforts to archive as ‘an active process both dynamic and historical’. But this vision is best realised in the side rooms, where a Kodak Carousel S-AV 2050 projector shunts through slides, soundtracked by contemporary audio responses, and the basement Creative Space, where archive photographs get cut out and layered; interventions which collapse the binary between past and present.
It’s granular and, when indulging in 2000s exhibition posters, perhaps a little too specific for a non-Oxford crowd. But there’s less focus on the individual, exclusively men Directors; curators Sara Lowe and Holly Broughton instead championing the people and collectives who make up any museum. MAO itself dropped the ‘Museum of’ from its original name after Tracey Emin was photographed standing in front of the M, evidence of how the institution continues to be shaped by its contemporary artists.
Anticipating MAO’s upcoming architectural redevelopment – with a new community gallery, and nightclub-cum-café – it ends with prototype designs by David Kohn Architects, and even more striking chairs, by Emma Hart. By this point, Boundary Encounters is less an exhibition and more a town hall (and free meeting space, or place to work, should you accept the invitation).
Whilst particular to Oxford, MAO also presents a more general model for how we might open the museum space, and allow people to shape their own local institutions so that they might better serve them. Take architecture; here discussed in a socially relevant, accessible way, and shaped by the responses and needs of the community. Boundary Encounters will also include a live studio space – soon to be populated by new Creatives-in-Residence, co-selected by the MAO’s own volunteers – and an extensive events programme.
The Wacky Warehouse smell gets stronger downstairs in the Creative Space, where more work will be made for display. For Offeh, this continuous creation is what makes art contemporary (it’s not radical, grounded in the ‘Communities of Practice’ theory, formalised in 1991 and based on many previous generations and cultures’ traditions). It’s almost impossible to write definitively about such an exhibition, where everything might change so soon – and everything’s up for grabs.
Implicit is the need for more intergenerational connections too. Valerie Asiimwe Amani is one of the exhibition’s artists to have recently graduated from Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art; here Offeh, currently based in Cambridge, teaches too (even more might be said of the link between Asiimwe Amani’s interest in the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD), and its co-founder Olive Morris, the subject of some of Offeh’s more compelling works in audio).
For the Tanzanian artist, an encounter is something that dissolves a border. ‘Mkutano’, meaning meeting in Swahili, starts with window-spanning pastel fabrics, filtering the light of – and our perspectives within – the open gallery space. There are tiny videos trapped in boxes and a giant guest book for small hands to scribble in.
Her works are lined with words from journals published by OWAAD in the 1970s and 1980s, a watershed moment in activism for British Black and Asian women, and WhatsApp group chat messages, more contemporary feminist communities of care. ‘How have you survived for this long?’, the artist adds to the painted curve of a Black woman’s body, who lies with her back to us, confined beneath a bench.
Artist Julie Freeman goes bodily too with wooden sculptures modelled on the outline of her own figure. The reward for contorting ourselves into her different positions is hearing audio clips of women artists who have previously exhibited at MAO, questioning how we physically occupy the museum space. (All of these contemporary artists can be heard in their own words by following QR codes, offering layers of participation, and preventing the light space being bogged down with captions.
Indeed, beyond the artworks themselves, it’s more interesting to observe how people engage with them. With its focus on small-scale encounters, Boundary Encounters encourages touching, talking, and participation, all behaviours banned in the conventional white cube. People start tentatively, and then inhabit the space, occupying it as their own.
Sure, the Boundaries bit is less clear than the Encounters, and it’s all a little culture-eating-itself. But, much unlike their recent Gates and Portals, it’s a truly open door towards making museums more accessible, participatory places.
Boundary Encounters is on view at Modern Art Oxford until 29 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
The smell of bouncy castles – or perhaps, swimming goggles – is the first sensation of Boundary Encounters. Only mounting the stairs do we find its source, overlapping PVC curtains in standard industrial colours; an instrumental choice by its creator, Harold Offeh, because of the high cost of making them custom.
Offeh’s ‘Pavilion’ (2023) references the Brazilian modernist architecture of Lina Bo Bardi, first encountered by the artist during a residency in São Paulo fifteen years ago. Her work is increasingly subject to rising international interest, and was referenced in Isaac Julien’s Tate Britain exhibition. Rather than her better-known São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), Offeh draws from her SESC Pompéia, which regenerated the working-class area’s disused factory buildings into a multi-purpose arts and leisure centre. ‘The closest thing you’ll find here is the Barbican,’ Harold tells me.
Bo Bardi’s ‘total’ approach to SESC Pompéia, from its structure to its interior design, is necessarily scaled down in ‘Pavilion’, which features similarly organic forms and flat-pack furniture (a smaller-scale construction in Bo Bardi’s own garden also welcomed many visitors over time). Offeh’s semi-transparent curtains create a permeable space, one which challenges the divisions between culture, work, and play.
Modern Art Oxford (MAO) – itself a renovation, a conversion of the Old Halls Brewery since the 1960s – is a fitting host for Offeh’s tribute, one of four installations challenging the boundaries of the museum space. The artist has long been drawn to smaller, more dynamic, contemporary arts institutions, taking seats at Van Gogh House London, and MK Gallery. Inward-looking at the position and function of museums today, Boundary Encounters explores museums as moving, living spaces. And it is, fundamentally, an exhibition about tables and chairs.
Another artist, Deborah Pill, uses absorptive media like MDF and cork to suggest how furniture facilitates conversation. A former hairdresser, she highlights how ‘there no hierarchy around a table,’ the flat surface levelling the field for participation.
Offeh’s interest in the politics of play, and the importance of learning through experience, is also evident in his participatory practice. Part of ‘Pavilion’ is a week-long residency with young people, who will make chairs to pull up to the roundtable at its core. As education (and society) becomes more transactional and economic, this evolving installation invites us to consider the difference between what is productive and generative work – and whether this is a boundary that matters.
Museums are not static, but constantly under construction; MAO takes this literally, with cardboard captions and two further rooms with a wealth of archive materials, documenting the institution’s own evolution. First conceived as a temporary space, MAO has remained on Pembroke Street since its inception; it continues to eschew a permanent collection.
Photographs (laid on more tables) catalogue its long history of collaboration, and offsite projects, in prisons, schools, and community centres. ‘No Parking! Youth work in progress’, says one road sign in front of Bicester Courtyard Youth Arts Centre, a coffee bar and alcohol-free alternative to the typical social space. Leafing through a box file of reproductions, we find a letter from Bryan, a schoolchild, in 2006. He feeds back that ‘I have learnt that Art is not just painting or pictures. I have discovered how to think.’
The final room, Activate our Archives, highlights MAO’s engagement with six different community centres in Oxford. There are hints of the global in the hyper-local; at Florence Park Community Centre, we find Day of the Dead celebrations organised by the city’s residents from Mexico, and older people participating in Zumba classes. ‘My mum’s in that photo!’, overheard once here, and no doubt many times again.
MAO boasts its efforts to archive as ‘an active process both dynamic and historical’. But this vision is best realised in the side rooms, where a Kodak Carousel S-AV 2050 projector shunts through slides, soundtracked by contemporary audio responses, and the basement Creative Space, where archive photographs get cut out and layered; interventions which collapse the binary between past and present.
It’s granular and, when indulging in 2000s exhibition posters, perhaps a little too specific for a non-Oxford crowd. But there’s less focus on the individual, exclusively men Directors; curators Sara Lowe and Holly Broughton instead championing the people and collectives who make up any museum. MAO itself dropped the ‘Museum of’ from its original name after Tracey Emin was photographed standing in front of the M, evidence of how the institution continues to be shaped by its contemporary artists.
Anticipating MAO’s upcoming architectural redevelopment – with a new community gallery, and nightclub-cum-café – it ends with prototype designs by David Kohn Architects, and even more striking chairs, by Emma Hart. By this point, Boundary Encounters is less an exhibition and more a town hall (and free meeting space, or place to work, should you accept the invitation).
Whilst particular to Oxford, MAO also presents a more general model for how we might open the museum space, and allow people to shape their own local institutions so that they might better serve them. Take architecture; here discussed in a socially relevant, accessible way, and shaped by the responses and needs of the community. Boundary Encounters will also include a live studio space – soon to be populated by new Creatives-in-Residence, co-selected by the MAO’s own volunteers – and an extensive events programme.
The Wacky Warehouse smell gets stronger downstairs in the Creative Space, where more work will be made for display. For Offeh, this continuous creation is what makes art contemporary (it’s not radical, grounded in the ‘Communities of Practice’ theory, formalised in 1991 and based on many previous generations and cultures’ traditions). It’s almost impossible to write definitively about such an exhibition, where everything might change so soon – and everything’s up for grabs.
Implicit is the need for more intergenerational connections too. Valerie Asiimwe Amani is one of the exhibition’s artists to have recently graduated from Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art; here Offeh, currently based in Cambridge, teaches too (even more might be said of the link between Asiimwe Amani’s interest in the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD), and its co-founder Olive Morris, the subject of some of Offeh’s more compelling works in audio).
For the Tanzanian artist, an encounter is something that dissolves a border. ‘Mkutano’, meaning meeting in Swahili, starts with window-spanning pastel fabrics, filtering the light of – and our perspectives within – the open gallery space. There are tiny videos trapped in boxes and a giant guest book for small hands to scribble in.
Her works are lined with words from journals published by OWAAD in the 1970s and 1980s, a watershed moment in activism for British Black and Asian women, and WhatsApp group chat messages, more contemporary feminist communities of care. ‘How have you survived for this long?’, the artist adds to the painted curve of a Black woman’s body, who lies with her back to us, confined beneath a bench.
Artist Julie Freeman goes bodily too with wooden sculptures modelled on the outline of her own figure. The reward for contorting ourselves into her different positions is hearing audio clips of women artists who have previously exhibited at MAO, questioning how we physically occupy the museum space. (All of these contemporary artists can be heard in their own words by following QR codes, offering layers of participation, and preventing the light space being bogged down with captions.
Indeed, beyond the artworks themselves, it’s more interesting to observe how people engage with them. With its focus on small-scale encounters, Boundary Encounters encourages touching, talking, and participation, all behaviours banned in the conventional white cube. People start tentatively, and then inhabit the space, occupying it as their own.
Sure, the Boundaries bit is less clear than the Encounters, and it’s all a little culture-eating-itself. But, much unlike their recent Gates and Portals, it’s a truly open door towards making museums more accessible, participatory places.
Boundary Encounters is on view at Modern Art Oxford until 29 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
The smell of bouncy castles – or perhaps, swimming goggles – is the first sensation of Boundary Encounters. Only mounting the stairs do we find its source, overlapping PVC curtains in standard industrial colours; an instrumental choice by its creator, Harold Offeh, because of the high cost of making them custom.
Offeh’s ‘Pavilion’ (2023) references the Brazilian modernist architecture of Lina Bo Bardi, first encountered by the artist during a residency in São Paulo fifteen years ago. Her work is increasingly subject to rising international interest, and was referenced in Isaac Julien’s Tate Britain exhibition. Rather than her better-known São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), Offeh draws from her SESC Pompéia, which regenerated the working-class area’s disused factory buildings into a multi-purpose arts and leisure centre. ‘The closest thing you’ll find here is the Barbican,’ Harold tells me.
Bo Bardi’s ‘total’ approach to SESC Pompéia, from its structure to its interior design, is necessarily scaled down in ‘Pavilion’, which features similarly organic forms and flat-pack furniture (a smaller-scale construction in Bo Bardi’s own garden also welcomed many visitors over time). Offeh’s semi-transparent curtains create a permeable space, one which challenges the divisions between culture, work, and play.
Modern Art Oxford (MAO) – itself a renovation, a conversion of the Old Halls Brewery since the 1960s – is a fitting host for Offeh’s tribute, one of four installations challenging the boundaries of the museum space. The artist has long been drawn to smaller, more dynamic, contemporary arts institutions, taking seats at Van Gogh House London, and MK Gallery. Inward-looking at the position and function of museums today, Boundary Encounters explores museums as moving, living spaces. And it is, fundamentally, an exhibition about tables and chairs.
Another artist, Deborah Pill, uses absorptive media like MDF and cork to suggest how furniture facilitates conversation. A former hairdresser, she highlights how ‘there no hierarchy around a table,’ the flat surface levelling the field for participation.
Offeh’s interest in the politics of play, and the importance of learning through experience, is also evident in his participatory practice. Part of ‘Pavilion’ is a week-long residency with young people, who will make chairs to pull up to the roundtable at its core. As education (and society) becomes more transactional and economic, this evolving installation invites us to consider the difference between what is productive and generative work – and whether this is a boundary that matters.
Museums are not static, but constantly under construction; MAO takes this literally, with cardboard captions and two further rooms with a wealth of archive materials, documenting the institution’s own evolution. First conceived as a temporary space, MAO has remained on Pembroke Street since its inception; it continues to eschew a permanent collection.
Photographs (laid on more tables) catalogue its long history of collaboration, and offsite projects, in prisons, schools, and community centres. ‘No Parking! Youth work in progress’, says one road sign in front of Bicester Courtyard Youth Arts Centre, a coffee bar and alcohol-free alternative to the typical social space. Leafing through a box file of reproductions, we find a letter from Bryan, a schoolchild, in 2006. He feeds back that ‘I have learnt that Art is not just painting or pictures. I have discovered how to think.’
The final room, Activate our Archives, highlights MAO’s engagement with six different community centres in Oxford. There are hints of the global in the hyper-local; at Florence Park Community Centre, we find Day of the Dead celebrations organised by the city’s residents from Mexico, and older people participating in Zumba classes. ‘My mum’s in that photo!’, overheard once here, and no doubt many times again.
MAO boasts its efforts to archive as ‘an active process both dynamic and historical’. But this vision is best realised in the side rooms, where a Kodak Carousel S-AV 2050 projector shunts through slides, soundtracked by contemporary audio responses, and the basement Creative Space, where archive photographs get cut out and layered; interventions which collapse the binary between past and present.
It’s granular and, when indulging in 2000s exhibition posters, perhaps a little too specific for a non-Oxford crowd. But there’s less focus on the individual, exclusively men Directors; curators Sara Lowe and Holly Broughton instead championing the people and collectives who make up any museum. MAO itself dropped the ‘Museum of’ from its original name after Tracey Emin was photographed standing in front of the M, evidence of how the institution continues to be shaped by its contemporary artists.
Anticipating MAO’s upcoming architectural redevelopment – with a new community gallery, and nightclub-cum-café – it ends with prototype designs by David Kohn Architects, and even more striking chairs, by Emma Hart. By this point, Boundary Encounters is less an exhibition and more a town hall (and free meeting space, or place to work, should you accept the invitation).
Whilst particular to Oxford, MAO also presents a more general model for how we might open the museum space, and allow people to shape their own local institutions so that they might better serve them. Take architecture; here discussed in a socially relevant, accessible way, and shaped by the responses and needs of the community. Boundary Encounters will also include a live studio space – soon to be populated by new Creatives-in-Residence, co-selected by the MAO’s own volunteers – and an extensive events programme.
The Wacky Warehouse smell gets stronger downstairs in the Creative Space, where more work will be made for display. For Offeh, this continuous creation is what makes art contemporary (it’s not radical, grounded in the ‘Communities of Practice’ theory, formalised in 1991 and based on many previous generations and cultures’ traditions). It’s almost impossible to write definitively about such an exhibition, where everything might change so soon – and everything’s up for grabs.
Implicit is the need for more intergenerational connections too. Valerie Asiimwe Amani is one of the exhibition’s artists to have recently graduated from Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art; here Offeh, currently based in Cambridge, teaches too (even more might be said of the link between Asiimwe Amani’s interest in the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD), and its co-founder Olive Morris, the subject of some of Offeh’s more compelling works in audio).
For the Tanzanian artist, an encounter is something that dissolves a border. ‘Mkutano’, meaning meeting in Swahili, starts with window-spanning pastel fabrics, filtering the light of – and our perspectives within – the open gallery space. There are tiny videos trapped in boxes and a giant guest book for small hands to scribble in.
Her works are lined with words from journals published by OWAAD in the 1970s and 1980s, a watershed moment in activism for British Black and Asian women, and WhatsApp group chat messages, more contemporary feminist communities of care. ‘How have you survived for this long?’, the artist adds to the painted curve of a Black woman’s body, who lies with her back to us, confined beneath a bench.
Artist Julie Freeman goes bodily too with wooden sculptures modelled on the outline of her own figure. The reward for contorting ourselves into her different positions is hearing audio clips of women artists who have previously exhibited at MAO, questioning how we physically occupy the museum space. (All of these contemporary artists can be heard in their own words by following QR codes, offering layers of participation, and preventing the light space being bogged down with captions.
Indeed, beyond the artworks themselves, it’s more interesting to observe how people engage with them. With its focus on small-scale encounters, Boundary Encounters encourages touching, talking, and participation, all behaviours banned in the conventional white cube. People start tentatively, and then inhabit the space, occupying it as their own.
Sure, the Boundaries bit is less clear than the Encounters, and it’s all a little culture-eating-itself. But, much unlike their recent Gates and Portals, it’s a truly open door towards making museums more accessible, participatory places.
Boundary Encounters is on view at Modern Art Oxford until 29 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
The smell of bouncy castles – or perhaps, swimming goggles – is the first sensation of Boundary Encounters. Only mounting the stairs do we find its source, overlapping PVC curtains in standard industrial colours; an instrumental choice by its creator, Harold Offeh, because of the high cost of making them custom.
Offeh’s ‘Pavilion’ (2023) references the Brazilian modernist architecture of Lina Bo Bardi, first encountered by the artist during a residency in São Paulo fifteen years ago. Her work is increasingly subject to rising international interest, and was referenced in Isaac Julien’s Tate Britain exhibition. Rather than her better-known São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), Offeh draws from her SESC Pompéia, which regenerated the working-class area’s disused factory buildings into a multi-purpose arts and leisure centre. ‘The closest thing you’ll find here is the Barbican,’ Harold tells me.
Bo Bardi’s ‘total’ approach to SESC Pompéia, from its structure to its interior design, is necessarily scaled down in ‘Pavilion’, which features similarly organic forms and flat-pack furniture (a smaller-scale construction in Bo Bardi’s own garden also welcomed many visitors over time). Offeh’s semi-transparent curtains create a permeable space, one which challenges the divisions between culture, work, and play.
Modern Art Oxford (MAO) – itself a renovation, a conversion of the Old Halls Brewery since the 1960s – is a fitting host for Offeh’s tribute, one of four installations challenging the boundaries of the museum space. The artist has long been drawn to smaller, more dynamic, contemporary arts institutions, taking seats at Van Gogh House London, and MK Gallery. Inward-looking at the position and function of museums today, Boundary Encounters explores museums as moving, living spaces. And it is, fundamentally, an exhibition about tables and chairs.
Another artist, Deborah Pill, uses absorptive media like MDF and cork to suggest how furniture facilitates conversation. A former hairdresser, she highlights how ‘there no hierarchy around a table,’ the flat surface levelling the field for participation.
Offeh’s interest in the politics of play, and the importance of learning through experience, is also evident in his participatory practice. Part of ‘Pavilion’ is a week-long residency with young people, who will make chairs to pull up to the roundtable at its core. As education (and society) becomes more transactional and economic, this evolving installation invites us to consider the difference between what is productive and generative work – and whether this is a boundary that matters.
Museums are not static, but constantly under construction; MAO takes this literally, with cardboard captions and two further rooms with a wealth of archive materials, documenting the institution’s own evolution. First conceived as a temporary space, MAO has remained on Pembroke Street since its inception; it continues to eschew a permanent collection.
Photographs (laid on more tables) catalogue its long history of collaboration, and offsite projects, in prisons, schools, and community centres. ‘No Parking! Youth work in progress’, says one road sign in front of Bicester Courtyard Youth Arts Centre, a coffee bar and alcohol-free alternative to the typical social space. Leafing through a box file of reproductions, we find a letter from Bryan, a schoolchild, in 2006. He feeds back that ‘I have learnt that Art is not just painting or pictures. I have discovered how to think.’
The final room, Activate our Archives, highlights MAO’s engagement with six different community centres in Oxford. There are hints of the global in the hyper-local; at Florence Park Community Centre, we find Day of the Dead celebrations organised by the city’s residents from Mexico, and older people participating in Zumba classes. ‘My mum’s in that photo!’, overheard once here, and no doubt many times again.
MAO boasts its efforts to archive as ‘an active process both dynamic and historical’. But this vision is best realised in the side rooms, where a Kodak Carousel S-AV 2050 projector shunts through slides, soundtracked by contemporary audio responses, and the basement Creative Space, where archive photographs get cut out and layered; interventions which collapse the binary between past and present.
It’s granular and, when indulging in 2000s exhibition posters, perhaps a little too specific for a non-Oxford crowd. But there’s less focus on the individual, exclusively men Directors; curators Sara Lowe and Holly Broughton instead championing the people and collectives who make up any museum. MAO itself dropped the ‘Museum of’ from its original name after Tracey Emin was photographed standing in front of the M, evidence of how the institution continues to be shaped by its contemporary artists.
Anticipating MAO’s upcoming architectural redevelopment – with a new community gallery, and nightclub-cum-café – it ends with prototype designs by David Kohn Architects, and even more striking chairs, by Emma Hart. By this point, Boundary Encounters is less an exhibition and more a town hall (and free meeting space, or place to work, should you accept the invitation).
Whilst particular to Oxford, MAO also presents a more general model for how we might open the museum space, and allow people to shape their own local institutions so that they might better serve them. Take architecture; here discussed in a socially relevant, accessible way, and shaped by the responses and needs of the community. Boundary Encounters will also include a live studio space – soon to be populated by new Creatives-in-Residence, co-selected by the MAO’s own volunteers – and an extensive events programme.
The Wacky Warehouse smell gets stronger downstairs in the Creative Space, where more work will be made for display. For Offeh, this continuous creation is what makes art contemporary (it’s not radical, grounded in the ‘Communities of Practice’ theory, formalised in 1991 and based on many previous generations and cultures’ traditions). It’s almost impossible to write definitively about such an exhibition, where everything might change so soon – and everything’s up for grabs.
Implicit is the need for more intergenerational connections too. Valerie Asiimwe Amani is one of the exhibition’s artists to have recently graduated from Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art; here Offeh, currently based in Cambridge, teaches too (even more might be said of the link between Asiimwe Amani’s interest in the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD), and its co-founder Olive Morris, the subject of some of Offeh’s more compelling works in audio).
For the Tanzanian artist, an encounter is something that dissolves a border. ‘Mkutano’, meaning meeting in Swahili, starts with window-spanning pastel fabrics, filtering the light of – and our perspectives within – the open gallery space. There are tiny videos trapped in boxes and a giant guest book for small hands to scribble in.
Her works are lined with words from journals published by OWAAD in the 1970s and 1980s, a watershed moment in activism for British Black and Asian women, and WhatsApp group chat messages, more contemporary feminist communities of care. ‘How have you survived for this long?’, the artist adds to the painted curve of a Black woman’s body, who lies with her back to us, confined beneath a bench.
Artist Julie Freeman goes bodily too with wooden sculptures modelled on the outline of her own figure. The reward for contorting ourselves into her different positions is hearing audio clips of women artists who have previously exhibited at MAO, questioning how we physically occupy the museum space. (All of these contemporary artists can be heard in their own words by following QR codes, offering layers of participation, and preventing the light space being bogged down with captions.
Indeed, beyond the artworks themselves, it’s more interesting to observe how people engage with them. With its focus on small-scale encounters, Boundary Encounters encourages touching, talking, and participation, all behaviours banned in the conventional white cube. People start tentatively, and then inhabit the space, occupying it as their own.
Sure, the Boundaries bit is less clear than the Encounters, and it’s all a little culture-eating-itself. But, much unlike their recent Gates and Portals, it’s a truly open door towards making museums more accessible, participatory places.
Boundary Encounters is on view at Modern Art Oxford until 29 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
The smell of bouncy castles – or perhaps, swimming goggles – is the first sensation of Boundary Encounters. Only mounting the stairs do we find its source, overlapping PVC curtains in standard industrial colours; an instrumental choice by its creator, Harold Offeh, because of the high cost of making them custom.
Offeh’s ‘Pavilion’ (2023) references the Brazilian modernist architecture of Lina Bo Bardi, first encountered by the artist during a residency in São Paulo fifteen years ago. Her work is increasingly subject to rising international interest, and was referenced in Isaac Julien’s Tate Britain exhibition. Rather than her better-known São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), Offeh draws from her SESC Pompéia, which regenerated the working-class area’s disused factory buildings into a multi-purpose arts and leisure centre. ‘The closest thing you’ll find here is the Barbican,’ Harold tells me.
Bo Bardi’s ‘total’ approach to SESC Pompéia, from its structure to its interior design, is necessarily scaled down in ‘Pavilion’, which features similarly organic forms and flat-pack furniture (a smaller-scale construction in Bo Bardi’s own garden also welcomed many visitors over time). Offeh’s semi-transparent curtains create a permeable space, one which challenges the divisions between culture, work, and play.
Modern Art Oxford (MAO) – itself a renovation, a conversion of the Old Halls Brewery since the 1960s – is a fitting host for Offeh’s tribute, one of four installations challenging the boundaries of the museum space. The artist has long been drawn to smaller, more dynamic, contemporary arts institutions, taking seats at Van Gogh House London, and MK Gallery. Inward-looking at the position and function of museums today, Boundary Encounters explores museums as moving, living spaces. And it is, fundamentally, an exhibition about tables and chairs.
Another artist, Deborah Pill, uses absorptive media like MDF and cork to suggest how furniture facilitates conversation. A former hairdresser, she highlights how ‘there no hierarchy around a table,’ the flat surface levelling the field for participation.
Offeh’s interest in the politics of play, and the importance of learning through experience, is also evident in his participatory practice. Part of ‘Pavilion’ is a week-long residency with young people, who will make chairs to pull up to the roundtable at its core. As education (and society) becomes more transactional and economic, this evolving installation invites us to consider the difference between what is productive and generative work – and whether this is a boundary that matters.
Museums are not static, but constantly under construction; MAO takes this literally, with cardboard captions and two further rooms with a wealth of archive materials, documenting the institution’s own evolution. First conceived as a temporary space, MAO has remained on Pembroke Street since its inception; it continues to eschew a permanent collection.
Photographs (laid on more tables) catalogue its long history of collaboration, and offsite projects, in prisons, schools, and community centres. ‘No Parking! Youth work in progress’, says one road sign in front of Bicester Courtyard Youth Arts Centre, a coffee bar and alcohol-free alternative to the typical social space. Leafing through a box file of reproductions, we find a letter from Bryan, a schoolchild, in 2006. He feeds back that ‘I have learnt that Art is not just painting or pictures. I have discovered how to think.’
The final room, Activate our Archives, highlights MAO’s engagement with six different community centres in Oxford. There are hints of the global in the hyper-local; at Florence Park Community Centre, we find Day of the Dead celebrations organised by the city’s residents from Mexico, and older people participating in Zumba classes. ‘My mum’s in that photo!’, overheard once here, and no doubt many times again.
MAO boasts its efforts to archive as ‘an active process both dynamic and historical’. But this vision is best realised in the side rooms, where a Kodak Carousel S-AV 2050 projector shunts through slides, soundtracked by contemporary audio responses, and the basement Creative Space, where archive photographs get cut out and layered; interventions which collapse the binary between past and present.
It’s granular and, when indulging in 2000s exhibition posters, perhaps a little too specific for a non-Oxford crowd. But there’s less focus on the individual, exclusively men Directors; curators Sara Lowe and Holly Broughton instead championing the people and collectives who make up any museum. MAO itself dropped the ‘Museum of’ from its original name after Tracey Emin was photographed standing in front of the M, evidence of how the institution continues to be shaped by its contemporary artists.
Anticipating MAO’s upcoming architectural redevelopment – with a new community gallery, and nightclub-cum-café – it ends with prototype designs by David Kohn Architects, and even more striking chairs, by Emma Hart. By this point, Boundary Encounters is less an exhibition and more a town hall (and free meeting space, or place to work, should you accept the invitation).
Whilst particular to Oxford, MAO also presents a more general model for how we might open the museum space, and allow people to shape their own local institutions so that they might better serve them. Take architecture; here discussed in a socially relevant, accessible way, and shaped by the responses and needs of the community. Boundary Encounters will also include a live studio space – soon to be populated by new Creatives-in-Residence, co-selected by the MAO’s own volunteers – and an extensive events programme.
The Wacky Warehouse smell gets stronger downstairs in the Creative Space, where more work will be made for display. For Offeh, this continuous creation is what makes art contemporary (it’s not radical, grounded in the ‘Communities of Practice’ theory, formalised in 1991 and based on many previous generations and cultures’ traditions). It’s almost impossible to write definitively about such an exhibition, where everything might change so soon – and everything’s up for grabs.
Implicit is the need for more intergenerational connections too. Valerie Asiimwe Amani is one of the exhibition’s artists to have recently graduated from Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art; here Offeh, currently based in Cambridge, teaches too (even more might be said of the link between Asiimwe Amani’s interest in the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD), and its co-founder Olive Morris, the subject of some of Offeh’s more compelling works in audio).
For the Tanzanian artist, an encounter is something that dissolves a border. ‘Mkutano’, meaning meeting in Swahili, starts with window-spanning pastel fabrics, filtering the light of – and our perspectives within – the open gallery space. There are tiny videos trapped in boxes and a giant guest book for small hands to scribble in.
Her works are lined with words from journals published by OWAAD in the 1970s and 1980s, a watershed moment in activism for British Black and Asian women, and WhatsApp group chat messages, more contemporary feminist communities of care. ‘How have you survived for this long?’, the artist adds to the painted curve of a Black woman’s body, who lies with her back to us, confined beneath a bench.
Artist Julie Freeman goes bodily too with wooden sculptures modelled on the outline of her own figure. The reward for contorting ourselves into her different positions is hearing audio clips of women artists who have previously exhibited at MAO, questioning how we physically occupy the museum space. (All of these contemporary artists can be heard in their own words by following QR codes, offering layers of participation, and preventing the light space being bogged down with captions.
Indeed, beyond the artworks themselves, it’s more interesting to observe how people engage with them. With its focus on small-scale encounters, Boundary Encounters encourages touching, talking, and participation, all behaviours banned in the conventional white cube. People start tentatively, and then inhabit the space, occupying it as their own.
Sure, the Boundaries bit is less clear than the Encounters, and it’s all a little culture-eating-itself. But, much unlike their recent Gates and Portals, it’s a truly open door towards making museums more accessible, participatory places.
Boundary Encounters is on view at Modern Art Oxford until 29 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
The smell of bouncy castles – or perhaps, swimming goggles – is the first sensation of Boundary Encounters. Only mounting the stairs do we find its source, overlapping PVC curtains in standard industrial colours; an instrumental choice by its creator, Harold Offeh, because of the high cost of making them custom.
Offeh’s ‘Pavilion’ (2023) references the Brazilian modernist architecture of Lina Bo Bardi, first encountered by the artist during a residency in São Paulo fifteen years ago. Her work is increasingly subject to rising international interest, and was referenced in Isaac Julien’s Tate Britain exhibition. Rather than her better-known São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), Offeh draws from her SESC Pompéia, which regenerated the working-class area’s disused factory buildings into a multi-purpose arts and leisure centre. ‘The closest thing you’ll find here is the Barbican,’ Harold tells me.
Bo Bardi’s ‘total’ approach to SESC Pompéia, from its structure to its interior design, is necessarily scaled down in ‘Pavilion’, which features similarly organic forms and flat-pack furniture (a smaller-scale construction in Bo Bardi’s own garden also welcomed many visitors over time). Offeh’s semi-transparent curtains create a permeable space, one which challenges the divisions between culture, work, and play.
Modern Art Oxford (MAO) – itself a renovation, a conversion of the Old Halls Brewery since the 1960s – is a fitting host for Offeh’s tribute, one of four installations challenging the boundaries of the museum space. The artist has long been drawn to smaller, more dynamic, contemporary arts institutions, taking seats at Van Gogh House London, and MK Gallery. Inward-looking at the position and function of museums today, Boundary Encounters explores museums as moving, living spaces. And it is, fundamentally, an exhibition about tables and chairs.
Another artist, Deborah Pill, uses absorptive media like MDF and cork to suggest how furniture facilitates conversation. A former hairdresser, she highlights how ‘there no hierarchy around a table,’ the flat surface levelling the field for participation.
Offeh’s interest in the politics of play, and the importance of learning through experience, is also evident in his participatory practice. Part of ‘Pavilion’ is a week-long residency with young people, who will make chairs to pull up to the roundtable at its core. As education (and society) becomes more transactional and economic, this evolving installation invites us to consider the difference between what is productive and generative work – and whether this is a boundary that matters.
Museums are not static, but constantly under construction; MAO takes this literally, with cardboard captions and two further rooms with a wealth of archive materials, documenting the institution’s own evolution. First conceived as a temporary space, MAO has remained on Pembroke Street since its inception; it continues to eschew a permanent collection.
Photographs (laid on more tables) catalogue its long history of collaboration, and offsite projects, in prisons, schools, and community centres. ‘No Parking! Youth work in progress’, says one road sign in front of Bicester Courtyard Youth Arts Centre, a coffee bar and alcohol-free alternative to the typical social space. Leafing through a box file of reproductions, we find a letter from Bryan, a schoolchild, in 2006. He feeds back that ‘I have learnt that Art is not just painting or pictures. I have discovered how to think.’
The final room, Activate our Archives, highlights MAO’s engagement with six different community centres in Oxford. There are hints of the global in the hyper-local; at Florence Park Community Centre, we find Day of the Dead celebrations organised by the city’s residents from Mexico, and older people participating in Zumba classes. ‘My mum’s in that photo!’, overheard once here, and no doubt many times again.
MAO boasts its efforts to archive as ‘an active process both dynamic and historical’. But this vision is best realised in the side rooms, where a Kodak Carousel S-AV 2050 projector shunts through slides, soundtracked by contemporary audio responses, and the basement Creative Space, where archive photographs get cut out and layered; interventions which collapse the binary between past and present.
It’s granular and, when indulging in 2000s exhibition posters, perhaps a little too specific for a non-Oxford crowd. But there’s less focus on the individual, exclusively men Directors; curators Sara Lowe and Holly Broughton instead championing the people and collectives who make up any museum. MAO itself dropped the ‘Museum of’ from its original name after Tracey Emin was photographed standing in front of the M, evidence of how the institution continues to be shaped by its contemporary artists.
Anticipating MAO’s upcoming architectural redevelopment – with a new community gallery, and nightclub-cum-café – it ends with prototype designs by David Kohn Architects, and even more striking chairs, by Emma Hart. By this point, Boundary Encounters is less an exhibition and more a town hall (and free meeting space, or place to work, should you accept the invitation).
Whilst particular to Oxford, MAO also presents a more general model for how we might open the museum space, and allow people to shape their own local institutions so that they might better serve them. Take architecture; here discussed in a socially relevant, accessible way, and shaped by the responses and needs of the community. Boundary Encounters will also include a live studio space – soon to be populated by new Creatives-in-Residence, co-selected by the MAO’s own volunteers – and an extensive events programme.
The Wacky Warehouse smell gets stronger downstairs in the Creative Space, where more work will be made for display. For Offeh, this continuous creation is what makes art contemporary (it’s not radical, grounded in the ‘Communities of Practice’ theory, formalised in 1991 and based on many previous generations and cultures’ traditions). It’s almost impossible to write definitively about such an exhibition, where everything might change so soon – and everything’s up for grabs.
Implicit is the need for more intergenerational connections too. Valerie Asiimwe Amani is one of the exhibition’s artists to have recently graduated from Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art; here Offeh, currently based in Cambridge, teaches too (even more might be said of the link between Asiimwe Amani’s interest in the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD), and its co-founder Olive Morris, the subject of some of Offeh’s more compelling works in audio).
For the Tanzanian artist, an encounter is something that dissolves a border. ‘Mkutano’, meaning meeting in Swahili, starts with window-spanning pastel fabrics, filtering the light of – and our perspectives within – the open gallery space. There are tiny videos trapped in boxes and a giant guest book for small hands to scribble in.
Her works are lined with words from journals published by OWAAD in the 1970s and 1980s, a watershed moment in activism for British Black and Asian women, and WhatsApp group chat messages, more contemporary feminist communities of care. ‘How have you survived for this long?’, the artist adds to the painted curve of a Black woman’s body, who lies with her back to us, confined beneath a bench.
Artist Julie Freeman goes bodily too with wooden sculptures modelled on the outline of her own figure. The reward for contorting ourselves into her different positions is hearing audio clips of women artists who have previously exhibited at MAO, questioning how we physically occupy the museum space. (All of these contemporary artists can be heard in their own words by following QR codes, offering layers of participation, and preventing the light space being bogged down with captions.
Indeed, beyond the artworks themselves, it’s more interesting to observe how people engage with them. With its focus on small-scale encounters, Boundary Encounters encourages touching, talking, and participation, all behaviours banned in the conventional white cube. People start tentatively, and then inhabit the space, occupying it as their own.
Sure, the Boundaries bit is less clear than the Encounters, and it’s all a little culture-eating-itself. But, much unlike their recent Gates and Portals, it’s a truly open door towards making museums more accessible, participatory places.
Boundary Encounters is on view at Modern Art Oxford until 29 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
The smell of bouncy castles – or perhaps, swimming goggles – is the first sensation of Boundary Encounters. Only mounting the stairs do we find its source, overlapping PVC curtains in standard industrial colours; an instrumental choice by its creator, Harold Offeh, because of the high cost of making them custom.
Offeh’s ‘Pavilion’ (2023) references the Brazilian modernist architecture of Lina Bo Bardi, first encountered by the artist during a residency in São Paulo fifteen years ago. Her work is increasingly subject to rising international interest, and was referenced in Isaac Julien’s Tate Britain exhibition. Rather than her better-known São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), Offeh draws from her SESC Pompéia, which regenerated the working-class area’s disused factory buildings into a multi-purpose arts and leisure centre. ‘The closest thing you’ll find here is the Barbican,’ Harold tells me.
Bo Bardi’s ‘total’ approach to SESC Pompéia, from its structure to its interior design, is necessarily scaled down in ‘Pavilion’, which features similarly organic forms and flat-pack furniture (a smaller-scale construction in Bo Bardi’s own garden also welcomed many visitors over time). Offeh’s semi-transparent curtains create a permeable space, one which challenges the divisions between culture, work, and play.
Modern Art Oxford (MAO) – itself a renovation, a conversion of the Old Halls Brewery since the 1960s – is a fitting host for Offeh’s tribute, one of four installations challenging the boundaries of the museum space. The artist has long been drawn to smaller, more dynamic, contemporary arts institutions, taking seats at Van Gogh House London, and MK Gallery. Inward-looking at the position and function of museums today, Boundary Encounters explores museums as moving, living spaces. And it is, fundamentally, an exhibition about tables and chairs.
Another artist, Deborah Pill, uses absorptive media like MDF and cork to suggest how furniture facilitates conversation. A former hairdresser, she highlights how ‘there no hierarchy around a table,’ the flat surface levelling the field for participation.
Offeh’s interest in the politics of play, and the importance of learning through experience, is also evident in his participatory practice. Part of ‘Pavilion’ is a week-long residency with young people, who will make chairs to pull up to the roundtable at its core. As education (and society) becomes more transactional and economic, this evolving installation invites us to consider the difference between what is productive and generative work – and whether this is a boundary that matters.
Museums are not static, but constantly under construction; MAO takes this literally, with cardboard captions and two further rooms with a wealth of archive materials, documenting the institution’s own evolution. First conceived as a temporary space, MAO has remained on Pembroke Street since its inception; it continues to eschew a permanent collection.
Photographs (laid on more tables) catalogue its long history of collaboration, and offsite projects, in prisons, schools, and community centres. ‘No Parking! Youth work in progress’, says one road sign in front of Bicester Courtyard Youth Arts Centre, a coffee bar and alcohol-free alternative to the typical social space. Leafing through a box file of reproductions, we find a letter from Bryan, a schoolchild, in 2006. He feeds back that ‘I have learnt that Art is not just painting or pictures. I have discovered how to think.’
The final room, Activate our Archives, highlights MAO’s engagement with six different community centres in Oxford. There are hints of the global in the hyper-local; at Florence Park Community Centre, we find Day of the Dead celebrations organised by the city’s residents from Mexico, and older people participating in Zumba classes. ‘My mum’s in that photo!’, overheard once here, and no doubt many times again.
MAO boasts its efforts to archive as ‘an active process both dynamic and historical’. But this vision is best realised in the side rooms, where a Kodak Carousel S-AV 2050 projector shunts through slides, soundtracked by contemporary audio responses, and the basement Creative Space, where archive photographs get cut out and layered; interventions which collapse the binary between past and present.
It’s granular and, when indulging in 2000s exhibition posters, perhaps a little too specific for a non-Oxford crowd. But there’s less focus on the individual, exclusively men Directors; curators Sara Lowe and Holly Broughton instead championing the people and collectives who make up any museum. MAO itself dropped the ‘Museum of’ from its original name after Tracey Emin was photographed standing in front of the M, evidence of how the institution continues to be shaped by its contemporary artists.
Anticipating MAO’s upcoming architectural redevelopment – with a new community gallery, and nightclub-cum-café – it ends with prototype designs by David Kohn Architects, and even more striking chairs, by Emma Hart. By this point, Boundary Encounters is less an exhibition and more a town hall (and free meeting space, or place to work, should you accept the invitation).
Whilst particular to Oxford, MAO also presents a more general model for how we might open the museum space, and allow people to shape their own local institutions so that they might better serve them. Take architecture; here discussed in a socially relevant, accessible way, and shaped by the responses and needs of the community. Boundary Encounters will also include a live studio space – soon to be populated by new Creatives-in-Residence, co-selected by the MAO’s own volunteers – and an extensive events programme.
The Wacky Warehouse smell gets stronger downstairs in the Creative Space, where more work will be made for display. For Offeh, this continuous creation is what makes art contemporary (it’s not radical, grounded in the ‘Communities of Practice’ theory, formalised in 1991 and based on many previous generations and cultures’ traditions). It’s almost impossible to write definitively about such an exhibition, where everything might change so soon – and everything’s up for grabs.
Implicit is the need for more intergenerational connections too. Valerie Asiimwe Amani is one of the exhibition’s artists to have recently graduated from Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art; here Offeh, currently based in Cambridge, teaches too (even more might be said of the link between Asiimwe Amani’s interest in the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD), and its co-founder Olive Morris, the subject of some of Offeh’s more compelling works in audio).
For the Tanzanian artist, an encounter is something that dissolves a border. ‘Mkutano’, meaning meeting in Swahili, starts with window-spanning pastel fabrics, filtering the light of – and our perspectives within – the open gallery space. There are tiny videos trapped in boxes and a giant guest book for small hands to scribble in.
Her works are lined with words from journals published by OWAAD in the 1970s and 1980s, a watershed moment in activism for British Black and Asian women, and WhatsApp group chat messages, more contemporary feminist communities of care. ‘How have you survived for this long?’, the artist adds to the painted curve of a Black woman’s body, who lies with her back to us, confined beneath a bench.
Artist Julie Freeman goes bodily too with wooden sculptures modelled on the outline of her own figure. The reward for contorting ourselves into her different positions is hearing audio clips of women artists who have previously exhibited at MAO, questioning how we physically occupy the museum space. (All of these contemporary artists can be heard in their own words by following QR codes, offering layers of participation, and preventing the light space being bogged down with captions.
Indeed, beyond the artworks themselves, it’s more interesting to observe how people engage with them. With its focus on small-scale encounters, Boundary Encounters encourages touching, talking, and participation, all behaviours banned in the conventional white cube. People start tentatively, and then inhabit the space, occupying it as their own.
Sure, the Boundaries bit is less clear than the Encounters, and it’s all a little culture-eating-itself. But, much unlike their recent Gates and Portals, it’s a truly open door towards making museums more accessible, participatory places.
Boundary Encounters is on view at Modern Art Oxford until 29 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
The smell of bouncy castles – or perhaps, swimming goggles – is the first sensation of Boundary Encounters. Only mounting the stairs do we find its source, overlapping PVC curtains in standard industrial colours; an instrumental choice by its creator, Harold Offeh, because of the high cost of making them custom.
Offeh’s ‘Pavilion’ (2023) references the Brazilian modernist architecture of Lina Bo Bardi, first encountered by the artist during a residency in São Paulo fifteen years ago. Her work is increasingly subject to rising international interest, and was referenced in Isaac Julien’s Tate Britain exhibition. Rather than her better-known São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), Offeh draws from her SESC Pompéia, which regenerated the working-class area’s disused factory buildings into a multi-purpose arts and leisure centre. ‘The closest thing you’ll find here is the Barbican,’ Harold tells me.
Bo Bardi’s ‘total’ approach to SESC Pompéia, from its structure to its interior design, is necessarily scaled down in ‘Pavilion’, which features similarly organic forms and flat-pack furniture (a smaller-scale construction in Bo Bardi’s own garden also welcomed many visitors over time). Offeh’s semi-transparent curtains create a permeable space, one which challenges the divisions between culture, work, and play.
Modern Art Oxford (MAO) – itself a renovation, a conversion of the Old Halls Brewery since the 1960s – is a fitting host for Offeh’s tribute, one of four installations challenging the boundaries of the museum space. The artist has long been drawn to smaller, more dynamic, contemporary arts institutions, taking seats at Van Gogh House London, and MK Gallery. Inward-looking at the position and function of museums today, Boundary Encounters explores museums as moving, living spaces. And it is, fundamentally, an exhibition about tables and chairs.
Another artist, Deborah Pill, uses absorptive media like MDF and cork to suggest how furniture facilitates conversation. A former hairdresser, she highlights how ‘there no hierarchy around a table,’ the flat surface levelling the field for participation.
Offeh’s interest in the politics of play, and the importance of learning through experience, is also evident in his participatory practice. Part of ‘Pavilion’ is a week-long residency with young people, who will make chairs to pull up to the roundtable at its core. As education (and society) becomes more transactional and economic, this evolving installation invites us to consider the difference between what is productive and generative work – and whether this is a boundary that matters.
Museums are not static, but constantly under construction; MAO takes this literally, with cardboard captions and two further rooms with a wealth of archive materials, documenting the institution’s own evolution. First conceived as a temporary space, MAO has remained on Pembroke Street since its inception; it continues to eschew a permanent collection.
Photographs (laid on more tables) catalogue its long history of collaboration, and offsite projects, in prisons, schools, and community centres. ‘No Parking! Youth work in progress’, says one road sign in front of Bicester Courtyard Youth Arts Centre, a coffee bar and alcohol-free alternative to the typical social space. Leafing through a box file of reproductions, we find a letter from Bryan, a schoolchild, in 2006. He feeds back that ‘I have learnt that Art is not just painting or pictures. I have discovered how to think.’
The final room, Activate our Archives, highlights MAO’s engagement with six different community centres in Oxford. There are hints of the global in the hyper-local; at Florence Park Community Centre, we find Day of the Dead celebrations organised by the city’s residents from Mexico, and older people participating in Zumba classes. ‘My mum’s in that photo!’, overheard once here, and no doubt many times again.
MAO boasts its efforts to archive as ‘an active process both dynamic and historical’. But this vision is best realised in the side rooms, where a Kodak Carousel S-AV 2050 projector shunts through slides, soundtracked by contemporary audio responses, and the basement Creative Space, where archive photographs get cut out and layered; interventions which collapse the binary between past and present.
It’s granular and, when indulging in 2000s exhibition posters, perhaps a little too specific for a non-Oxford crowd. But there’s less focus on the individual, exclusively men Directors; curators Sara Lowe and Holly Broughton instead championing the people and collectives who make up any museum. MAO itself dropped the ‘Museum of’ from its original name after Tracey Emin was photographed standing in front of the M, evidence of how the institution continues to be shaped by its contemporary artists.
Anticipating MAO’s upcoming architectural redevelopment – with a new community gallery, and nightclub-cum-café – it ends with prototype designs by David Kohn Architects, and even more striking chairs, by Emma Hart. By this point, Boundary Encounters is less an exhibition and more a town hall (and free meeting space, or place to work, should you accept the invitation).
Whilst particular to Oxford, MAO also presents a more general model for how we might open the museum space, and allow people to shape their own local institutions so that they might better serve them. Take architecture; here discussed in a socially relevant, accessible way, and shaped by the responses and needs of the community. Boundary Encounters will also include a live studio space – soon to be populated by new Creatives-in-Residence, co-selected by the MAO’s own volunteers – and an extensive events programme.
The Wacky Warehouse smell gets stronger downstairs in the Creative Space, where more work will be made for display. For Offeh, this continuous creation is what makes art contemporary (it’s not radical, grounded in the ‘Communities of Practice’ theory, formalised in 1991 and based on many previous generations and cultures’ traditions). It’s almost impossible to write definitively about such an exhibition, where everything might change so soon – and everything’s up for grabs.
Implicit is the need for more intergenerational connections too. Valerie Asiimwe Amani is one of the exhibition’s artists to have recently graduated from Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art; here Offeh, currently based in Cambridge, teaches too (even more might be said of the link between Asiimwe Amani’s interest in the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD), and its co-founder Olive Morris, the subject of some of Offeh’s more compelling works in audio).
For the Tanzanian artist, an encounter is something that dissolves a border. ‘Mkutano’, meaning meeting in Swahili, starts with window-spanning pastel fabrics, filtering the light of – and our perspectives within – the open gallery space. There are tiny videos trapped in boxes and a giant guest book for small hands to scribble in.
Her works are lined with words from journals published by OWAAD in the 1970s and 1980s, a watershed moment in activism for British Black and Asian women, and WhatsApp group chat messages, more contemporary feminist communities of care. ‘How have you survived for this long?’, the artist adds to the painted curve of a Black woman’s body, who lies with her back to us, confined beneath a bench.
Artist Julie Freeman goes bodily too with wooden sculptures modelled on the outline of her own figure. The reward for contorting ourselves into her different positions is hearing audio clips of women artists who have previously exhibited at MAO, questioning how we physically occupy the museum space. (All of these contemporary artists can be heard in their own words by following QR codes, offering layers of participation, and preventing the light space being bogged down with captions.
Indeed, beyond the artworks themselves, it’s more interesting to observe how people engage with them. With its focus on small-scale encounters, Boundary Encounters encourages touching, talking, and participation, all behaviours banned in the conventional white cube. People start tentatively, and then inhabit the space, occupying it as their own.
Sure, the Boundaries bit is less clear than the Encounters, and it’s all a little culture-eating-itself. But, much unlike their recent Gates and Portals, it’s a truly open door towards making museums more accessible, participatory places.
Boundary Encounters is on view at Modern Art Oxford until 29 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
