We would like to introduce Reunion, a framework for producing, supporting and translating art practice in the UK and south east Europe. We are B+B, a curatorial partnership based in London. We started working together in 2000 and have been developing a platform for discussion and debate on the role of the artist in society. Through consultation, events, exhibitions, research, residencies and workshops, we test and critique the role of the artist as an agent for change. We believe that artists can disrupt and provoke the institutions and structures around us and argue that art has the potential to change society whilst defending the notion it should be allowed to do what it does best: ask questions without providing solutions and shift understandings without claiming to empower.

Reunion will support a series of projects based on exchange between practitioners in the UK and south eastern Europe to take place from now until June 2007. These projects will be overseen by a fictional union. This union will be made up of a core group of independent art practitioners from the UK and south east Europe and a wider group of interested cultural producers. The union will be a critical platform for the discussion and support of the projects and will meet over two years and will be networked via the B+B website. There will also be regular Reunion newsletters which will document the development of the projects and the issues arising from the projects and meetings.

We wanted to develop Reunion because we feel there is a need to find new and alternative methods of exchanging ways of working and interpreting the complexities of context-specific cultural production. We believe the dominant neo-liberal agendas need challenging. Reunion aims to be a productive space where we can join forces with other art practitioners to discuss our shared politics and concerns and act upon them. It will be a site for investigating spaces for socialist thought within contemporary art practice in the light of the current neo-liberal system in the UK and in the increasingly privatised economies of post-socialist countries. Reunion will support research and projects which experiment with a 'new left' politics within socially engaged art practice. Through Reunion we will address new ways of articulating roles and positions from our specific contexts and histories.

What do we want to change and how are we going about it? Are our actions feeding the neo liberal agenda or are we being critical of it and if we are, how are we? How can we be? How can we learn from each other’s contexts?

Current Reunion union members include allsopp&weir, Ele Carpenter, Ella Gibbs,  Amy Plant, SKART, Erzen Shkololli, and What How and for Whom?

For more information, to receive the Reunion Newsletter or to get involved in Reunion, please contact B+B (Sarah Carrington and Sophie Hope) on www.welcomebb.org.uk

B + B (UK)
Curatorial partnership between Sarah Carrington and Sophie Hope, based in London, England.