Manifesto for Sustainable Experimentation

21 May-9 Aug 2025

Overview

Manifesto for Sustainable Experimentation celebrates thirty years of Beaconsfield commissions in an exhibition of historic works and ephemera, interspersed with new commissions, performances, readings, workshops and other happenings curated by founding directors David Crawforth and Naomi Siderfin. Working in collaboration as BAW (Beaconsfield ArtWorks) they set the exhibitionary tone with visual and sonic interventions. Exhibition artists include:

Sonia Boyce, David Burrows, Luana Duvoisin Zanchi, Minna Haukka, Trevor Mathison, Emily Mulenga, Ellis Parkinson, A.L. Steiner, Luke Turner.

The project title is imbued with irony, since making art for most artists is simultaneously unsustainable (due to lack of resource) and yet sustained by the vocational pursuit of aesthetic and political expression. The exhibition seeks to bring to light some of the strategies in which artists engage to survive and be heard. Contributing artists and writers to the performances, readings and workshops include:

Tamsyn Challenger, Jules Clarke, Michael Curran, Dubmorphology, Bruce Gilbert, Colin Herd, Fran Painter-Fleming, Plastique Fantastique, Anne Robinson and The Charmers, Simon Tyszko, Joseph Walsh.

Manifesto for Sustainable Experimentation is more than a retrospective. It is a dynamic, durational exploration of how identity is constructed through class, gender, and cultural memory  –  and a call to recognise ‘environment’ not only as physical landscape, but as the social and political ecosystems we inhabit and shape.