THE MANIFESTATION - Tania Koswycz & Richard Layzell
dialogue becomes form in a global installation

A continually developing show of new and recent work. Touring Tramway - Glasgow, Cafe Gallery Projects - London, SVA Stroud and FirstSite - Colchester.

Preview: Friday 14 November from 6 - 7.30 pm

Exhibition continues 15 - 30 November
Tuesday to Friday 10 - 3pm / Saturdays 10 - 4pm

Sunday 30th November 2-4 pm Closing event:

In Negotiation presents: Performing Architecture a discussion event with Richard Layzell

Performing Architecture is an In Negotiation round table event. Richard Layzell will be joined by the exhibitions Co-curator at SVA Dominic Thomas, and artist and writer Colin Glen, who has been commissioned by Art Monthly to review the work after its next leg at Colchester FirstSite.

Richard Layzell has been exploring the boundaries of performance since 1969. Writing about Layzell’s practice in 1998 Anna Harding says, “There is a range of practices which elude the standard histories of the last 30 years. A practice which defies constraints of media, moving between installation, video and performance is particularly vulnerable to historical oversight. What is more,” She continues, “a practice which is live highlights more clearly than others, that meaning is located in the interaction with audience at a particular moment in time rather than in a finite object itself.”

The Manifestation, currently installed at SVA, is the culmination of a process that goes back at least to 2002 when Layzell first encountered his fictitious collaborator Tania Koswycz. One of the principal ingredients of this process has been a notion of continual dialogue. Not only the dialogue between Richard and Tania, but also between the artist(s) and curators, audiences, participants, venues and places that have been the constantly shifting context of the project.

The Manifestation at SVA is its third incarnation, following stints at Tramway in Glasgow and the Café Gallery Projects in south London. But this is no conventional touring exhibition - in each venue the work has been reconfigured, developed and renewed, responding to changing time and space. An ‘exhibition’, apparently devoid of the ‘live’ becomes itself a performance - performing for and with people and architecture in a dialogue that relocates meaning in the interaction with audience at a particular moment in time.

The In Negotiation discussion series was started in 2005 by James Porter and Colin Glen as a response to setting up a project space in a shop on the outskirts of Stroud. It was conceived as a creative and critical approach to negotiating difference of opinion with regard to issues of production in art practice. Dominic Thomas and Colin Glen continued the series throughout the site festival in 2006, 2007 and 2008 holding discussions where artists with differing backgrounds, ways of working and value systems came together to negotiate their conflicting positions.

In Negotiation aims to encourage and facilitate peer discussion amongst artists and arts professionals on issues of theory and practice in their work in order to create a forum of frank and beneficial exchange.