 Hello and welcome from Aberdeen. I'm Jason Williamson, exhibition manager for Aberdeen Archives Gallery and Museums, and I'm delighted to welcome you to this event, Art Is Not an Island, on interdependence and complicity. The hosting of the British Art Show 9 in Aberdeen Art Gallery has been a great honour for all staff across our service, benefiting from such a great opportunity to witness first hand the artworks, develop and present a diverse engagement programme, and host a very exciting exhibition for all our visitors. This event is part of the British Art Show 9 in Aberdeen Art Gallery, and also part of Beyond Bass programme which we have developed in partnership with our colleagues and friends at Look Again, which is part of Grey's School of Art, Robert Gordon's University. Please search for Beyond Bass for further details. You probably know already that Saturday the 10th of October is the final day of Bass 9 in Aberdeen Art Gallery. So if you're in the city, you will have the added bonus of being able to watch the Grey's Nadiatory Plant Theatre for Plant People public procession between 2 and 4pm starting and finishing at the gallery. The final mobile art school will be at Duffy Park in Aberdeen with morning and afternoon sessions. I would now like to hand over to Hamadr Nassar, one of the two British Art Show 9 curators, to introduce the Bass 9 Paul Mellon Centre Partnership. Thank you. Thank you, Jason, and welcome everyone. My name is Hamad Nassar, and along with Irene Aristasabaal on the co-curator of British Art Show 9. I also happen to be a senior research fellow here at the Paul Mellon Centre, so I'm really doubly pleased to welcome you to this event, which is one of four in each of the cities that is hosting the British Art Show 9. And it will culminate with a conference after the British Art Show is over in 2023. Now, this event is very much a pair to pair conversation between artists and curators as cultural workers. And in that spirit, what I also wanted to do was to give you firstly my own sort of position as a curator, and then introduce some of the ideas and frameworks that Irene and I have worked through with a team at Haverd Gallery Touring to really shape British Art Show 9, and that hopefully will give you a context for some of the discussion that will follow. So firstly, I'm a freelance curator, so alongside British Art Show 9, at the moment I'm also a lead curator at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry, where I've recently just curated the Turner Prize exhibition. I'm also an independent researcher at the Paul Mellon Centre and at UAL's Decolonizing Arts Institute, where my field of research is particularly interested in ideas of nation, how it's performed, narrated and curated. So in all of these roles, I'm sort of an independent freelancer, and although the tables may be sort of central, I occupy a seat really at the edge of the table, a kind of an insider-outsider. That's what I wanted to say about me. Now, let me just position the British Art Show in Aberdeen as a context for today. Now, Erania and I, with the team members from Haverd Gallery Touring, as part of our research, sort of went up and down the country, 23 cities, over 230 studio visits. And during our research, we came across a number of artistic initiatives, where the economics and mechanics of artistic infrastructure and of arts relation to wider society had become really central to artistic practice. Many artists were experimenting, not just with media and techniques, but with the forms and systems of support outside the constraints of the art market or its institutions. They're forming companies and communes, collaborating with local communities, charities, universities, and asking really pointed questions about the peculiar economics and labour relations of the art world. So this sense of urgency among artists for new ways of living and working really had a profound influence of how we conceived of the exhibition. And in framing the exhibition, we grouped artworks and practices into three expansive categories that cover a set of common concerns. First among is this idea of healing care and reparative history. The second is called tactics for togetherness. And the third is this idea of imagining new futures. Now we conceived of the British Art Show as a cumulative experience with the distributed and varied set of presentations in the four host cities. Aberdeen, Wolverhampton, Manchester and Plymouth. This allows us to present different combinations of artists and artworks responding to the distinctive local context, as reflected in the collections, communities, urgencies, histories, and the capacities of each city. The opening presentation in Aberdeen is anchored in this effort to develop alternative systems for ethical cohabitation in the world that resist the injustices of extractivism. Aberdeen, which is also known as the Granite City, given its status as the UK's biggest supply and health granite, is in the midst of a complex transition from its economic reliance on oil and gas industry towards a shift to green energy production. Now the presentation of the British Art Show in Aberdeen centres on exploring the different forms of knowledge that can help heal the earth and develop equal and non exploitative ways of living with the non human. What this means practically is that this is the lens we applied into selecting which artists we will show in Aberdeen. And also how we think about the British Art Show itself as a kind of platform for thinking and making together where work in progress can develop, where ideas and works themselves can grow. And in this conversation that we are now having amongst us, we also hope to move beyond the exhibition venue itself into a wider conversation with the city. Where we don't have the last word, but we can be a place to host conversations with people like many of who are participating today, who have a stake in the city, and we have much to learn from. Now this event is also part of an ongoing project and indeed an extension of the work that the artist Catherine Baum has presented in Aberdeen. And with that, I'm going to pass over the baton to Catherine to introduce her practice and these ideas of interdependence that we're exploring today. Catherine, over to you. Hi. Thanks so much. I have to admit I'm nervous. And I have to admit I'm so glad we can have this conversation in public, you know, using the publicness of the British Art Show to maybe also difficult conversations. And I'm very grateful to Rachel and Sam for joining today. I have prepared a few slides and I would like to use them to explain a few key ideas. And if that's okay, I start sharing. So this idea to talk about interdependence and complicity came from an unease when I found out that the work I was showing the British Art Show was in galleries that I had. They are partly sponsored by DP. And oil isn't the main topic today, but I think the main topic today is how we as cultural practitioners work together are interdependent on each other, how we use economies and maybe can reorganize economies to maybe also reorganize distorted relationships between the cultural community and institutions. So I've prepared a few slides. I'll just get a lot of notes here. So I think this conversation I'm really grateful that we can have it as like peers is about practice is about the aims we have in our individual practices, and maybe things we can change within the practices and the means we have access to. So just to give a short introduction is I understand artistic practice as economic practice, which is a fact. And I'm often using this iceberg economies and iceberg model from the Community Economies Institute as a very kind of simple fast image to say, yes, we live within an economy that's currently dominated by capitalism. But of course, the economy that's most dominant is underpinned and enabled by many other economies that most of us are part of in our every days. So this iceberg image on the left is a very quick image to say we're all part of the economy. We're all part of like supporting each other's economies. Some of what we are doing is like not wanted to be visible or not seen as important. But the bigger image is that we have like the dominance of a certain economy, which is enabled by all the other economies. And the wider claim would be to reclaim the economy by also stating all those other economic practices as important and crucial, ultimately interdependent, but also to credit us all as economic players. So to bring this to the to the art discussion, the idea of like as the iceberg in economies within the contemporary arts is illustrated by a few simple tape drawings here, which again this idea of like what's visible, what's seen as the kind of dominant, not always purposely dominant, but maybe through history kind of happened up, happened on top of the visibility line. The idea of course that there's more than one art world, there's many, there's art worlds. There's of course a lot of cultural production and art, which Gregory Sholett describes really well as dark matter. That just because it doesn't reach certain visibility doesn't mean it's unimportant or unsuccessful, but that there's a huge quantity of cultural production that doesn't make it to a certain level of visibility. So I stop you for one sec. Could you make a full screen please just thereby the that one. Great. Thank you very much. Sorry, please go ahead. All right there. So I think that the other issue of like what's the relationship between institutions and ecosystems when are they, why and when are they visible and visible. And of course institutions like the Hayward South Bank have huge architectures and they have a very kind of visible architecture where the kind of cultural ecosystems often remain invisible or untangible or very dispersed. And there's a certain priority of like objects versus processes in most of the kind of art production that we see, and a kind of like line between what is art and what is artistic slash kind of cultural democracy, kind of moving away from the idea of art having to be art, but art being part of everyday cultural production. So I'm just going quickly through those images to outline a bit the thinking of my argument. And of course if I think of myself as an artist and also as an artist exhibiting in the British Art Show, I of course would like to tilt this iceberg. I personally feel that the volume of the dark matter of arts that's not produced for the market is incredibly large, however invisible it is. So this tape drawing is a kind of illustrative approach to say plausible artworks are much, much bigger than they are visible. They're made by many. They really define themselves through difference and not dominance. And the other term I would like to introduce here is the one of interdependence to state that within the practice and with my thinking, at no point it's a kind of a kind of binary black and white, us against others, but a kind of acknowledgement of a certain interdependence in sustaining and maintaining each other as each other's artworks. So the other term I would like to introduce is the idea of economic underpinnings. And again in this diagram, which is part of the tip of the iceberg exhibition is for at focal point gallery in south and at the moment, and the little red arrow is pointing it out. Instead of cost the art market, which normally is incredibly dominant because of its financial power, becomes one of the kind of economic underpinnings of those much bigger artworks that most of us inhabit. And again, the economic underpinnings range from sales, from funding, a lot of the economic underpinnings that enable my practice and those of colleagues are gift economies, solidarity economies, and non-monetary economies. And I think it's just incredibly important to acknowledge that most things rely on a very kind of diverse diversity of economic underpinnings. So if we think of who is enabling what to think very carefully about the range and variety of support systems that enable practice. Coming back to the British art show, there's a relationship I have with the museum or the exhibition and some of my friends who know me well will go like Catherine, you are an exhibition accepted, but I think it's not about whether the practice can be shown in museums or not. But it's a question of whether the topic of my work, which is then shown in exhibitions, where the discursive, where the claim of the work and the practice of the exhibition matches. And I think that's kind of a bit the point of today to say, as cultural practitioners, we are very welcome to share our ideas to represent our kind of propositions to imaginary futures, to the topics that are also outlined in the curatorial statement for the British art show. But how do the practices that we embody actually sit alongside the kind of institutional realities of the places we exhibit in. So this is like idea of radical ideas shouldn't just be shown but being operationalized and institutionalized and a certain unease around showing versus doing. So one of the tapings I have in the British art show at the moment is that statement that, and I'm not just talking for myself, I think it's many colleagues, it's across the kind of cultural community that does a certain tiredness of being invited and asked to share those ideas for change and other possibilities. But it's in context where many of us have a feeling we are mainly being shown, instead of those ideas being implemented. I have those funny red dots, I was trying to make three points, I'm going to quit now. The second point for today is of course, if we think about the visible invisible line that art has those diverse economic underpinnings, and as someone who doesn't know Aberdeen very well doesn't know the cultural scene, how it actually works very well. I still wanted to use the opportunity of the British art show to talk about that oil is a significant factor in financing and enabling artistic practice. And what do we do with that fact? How can we talk about it in a way that moves us forward? I quickly wanted to refer to a conversation we started in June with Sam here from a sculpture workshop I'm working with as my villages. And it was an invitation to the feminist economic geographic Catherine Gibson to explain this idea of interdependence as a kind of economic concept. And a way to develop a language, a methodology, a shared ground where we kind of can talk about complicities within the arts, how they meet our kind of radical, like so-called radical propositions for new futures. A kind of language that allows us to actually together talk towards possible practicalities that change current relations, that change current economies, but are not based on a kind of purist idea of either or. So if anyone wants to watch that recording, it's available on the showroom website, but also on the compost and Catherine boom.info website. And I think I'm running out of time as a practical proposition against forward is within also the context of the British art show being in Aberdeen using many, many different economies to enable the event. Some very practical propositions are that we actually redraw and draw the actual economies that underpin underpin our practices. And here just a few are few practical examples of like if we start to describe the relationships we want with each other, be between an institution ecosystem, what kind of relationship should this be should it be a mutual one, whether or a relationship where the institution supports the ecosystem, or in a negative case where the institution extracts from the ecosystem. So think about economy amongst all the players also in terms of us all carefully organizing the relationships we want to have with each other, ideally not having extractive and relationships at all. And I think the other kind of thing of using the practice is like to make budgets available in terms of the kind of diverse economic contributions that come from many, many different partners collaborators on so on. So this is the example of compost at the showroom at the moment where of course the Arts Council puts in money, but overall if you look at across the contributions. The actual financial contribution by beat the Arts Council or beat BP are relatively small in comparison to to other contributions. This is not to. Maybe I'm on. So I think for today, the invitation was to talk about certain complicities to talk about interdependencies. I'm here today as a British art show nine artist, which is a very kind of temporary moment within the city. The much bigger foundation on which my presence is grounded today is an ongoing relationship with the Scottish Scottish sculpture workshop which is independent from the British art show and which enables the kind of long term collaboration. Locally from this year until 22 that uses a lot of kind of different economic underpinnings to enable it. So I just also wanted to invite you to an event next Tuesday where we talk with other colleagues about how to practically move toward art worlds that we want that are organized around diverse and solidarity economies. And that's my contribution for right now. I'm lost in the system now am I back at the main screen. You are which is welcoming the rest of the panel back on now. Okay. So I wanted to like explain my position today but also raised this issue of we can't ignore to talk about the dominance of certain systems when when we show art and to also. Acknowledge an urge to change the actual operations and institutional set ups of of the frameworks we work within. So I think from what I understand I've finished here now and and Sam is following. Yep, I can follow on as a thank you so much Catherine. That's really great. And thank you for referencing the workshop as well. Okay, I'm going to just read because I have a very young baby in my arms and it will be a lot more clear if I can just read this aloud so I'm really up for talking more informally and everything when we get to have a chat together and looking forward to that but for now I'll just read what I've written. So, hi, I'm Sam. I'm the director at Scottish sculpture workshop. We are an arts facility and residency space in Aberdeenshire in a wee village called Lumsden, which is about 45 minutes from Aberdeen Art Gallery. And most of our work focuses around our workshops. We support artists in coming to the workshops from all over Scotland, but we also work a lot internationally. And we work very closely with our local community as well. Our workshops are run by technicians, and we have a foundry, ceramics, wood, metal, etc. Lots of making goes on here. But we work with artists from all disciplines. Over the next six months we embark on the first phase of a capital development programme. And during this time, as the building transforms, we are starting to transform how we work. Over this time, Catherine Bond and Wabka Fenstra from My Villages will be working with us and our local community to develop a new community making space as part of the work, the Royal School of Economics. How this functions, how it works, all of this is up in the air. We don't know yet. We haven't been in the place together, but we will be soon. As part of the research for this shift, and alongside working with My Villages, I've also been part of a European research collective, which is supported by a European collaboration project called Reshape, which within this we're exploring fairer governance models for the arts. Below I draw on this research that we've developed for governance of the possible. And so I'll just read from some of this extracts. Okay. And some of this will kind of be, yeah, it will be interesting to talk with Catherine afterwards about art worlds, etc. The prominent institutions of the art world are operating at the frontline of neoliberalism and embody its ideologies, acting as if there is no alternative. They may have acknowledged the climate crisis, black lives matter, the exploitation of neoliberal ideology, but have not made it their central preoccupation to imagine, propose or experiment with alternative structures and governance to truly make change happen. It is not a practice for artistic programs, rather than urgent calls to reorganize and confront these hyperobjects. This is in spite of the tireless work, generosity and energy artists and activists working on the frontline of this of these movements. The cultural sector continues to gain social capital from their radical ideas and reimagining, yet its institutions remain largely untouched. More specifically in terms of governance, institutions continue to replicate and rely on structures that keep themselves safe and neutral, remaining accountable to funders and professionalized boards, rather to the artists and communities they are set up to serve. So let's imagine this isn't the case. How else might we organize? I think it was economist Friedman who says, only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change. When a crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas lying around. The Social Justice Waging System. Since 2005, Platform London have been remunerating staff through a socially just waging system. This is from their website. It recognizes the different needs and backgrounds of workers and aims to be fair to all. It looks to provide a maximum financial security and also reflect platforms own ethics and principles. It serves as a model for a more just waging system such that platform would like to see it applied more widely to other organizations. The platform workers should feel proud to talk about it. All the criteria used in determining waging levels for individual working, individuals working with platform have been chosen with the twin principles of recognizing different needs and backgrounds and supporting people's security and creativity as central foci. Two, rethinking hierarchies and how we work. The majority of the arts charities in Scotland exist with a top-down structure, board director senior management, etc. When we imagine an alternative to this, many people assume it's only the cooperative model. There are so many other ways to sit out with and in between these structures. For example, the Glasgow Women's Library, as well as many other organizations internationally, uses a process called clustering, a way for groups to work together equally on a shared area or a stuck issue. We have staff volunteers artists communities together. This brings different knowledges together and shifts how decisions are made. Who is making those decisions. Three, critical spaces for our collective learning. Imagine in the Northeast say it was not artists who had to call out institutions for their unethical positions, doing this unpaid and beyond their hours. Three, as fellow arts organizations in the area took responsibility for doing this together. What if we formed critical connections between organizations, then perhaps we could be doing this work, rather than expecting it of artists as part of their practice. So what next. I think seriously the themes presented in baths around healing care reparative histories tactics were together and imagining new futures that we cannot continue as normal. We must address these structures we hold and remake them differently. The examples tools and knowledge to do this is abundant. Now it's just a case of cracking on with it. That's me. Right. Is it your turn now Rachel. Thanks Sam. So my name is Rachel Grant. And I speak from the position as a freelance curator based in Aberdeen, the previous oil capital of Europe. I wanted to speak today directly to my own practice and how that's been shaped by economies, more specifically oil. And also to the wider underpinning of local economy on the cultural development and offer here. I've tried to ground these in very particular examples of how this happens in the city, but with a note that this doesn't act in any way as an introduction to the arts ecology here. There are multiple forms of working here from organizations and cultural workshop workers, which are not spoken to. So I'm operating in what is a small arts ecology that sits on the periphery and a city that has been dominated by oil and gas since its arrival on shore in the late 1960s. So in the words of researcher Cara Daggett, fossil fuels make identities. For me they also build tools. So we might talk about the tools of oil as the power of private finance applied to the force of public planning aspects of small sea conservatism. Previous rental rates in the city that were on par with London, and a political economy that was buffered by the 2008 global financial crash. So beyond our kind of geographic position, this place can feel a little distant. So I operate my curatorial practice through fertile ground and primarily develop curatorial projects that take context specific approaches and support new commissions of work from interdisciplinary practitioners. So working in this way means I'm not often producing exhibitions and don't have a regular space to operate from. The kind of shaping has happened because despite recent downturns in oil prices, the city is not post industrial. And using spaces autonomously is hard to come by, or actually kind of impossible. So the ways in which that's worked into particular projects, for example, a very recent one called crude, that have begun to address oils complexity and supported writer Shane Strachan and artists Ashanti Harris and Alison Scott, and was funded by Creative Scotland. So attempting to read oil when it is at one time everywhere, a kind of giant machine that's attached to social and political matrixes, but also invisible and for the northeast anyway is production and emissions are off short. This tension became constant throughout the projects and the artist's work. At a time when oil does become very visible is through oil sponsorship. So great school of art, the local art school in Aberdeen, until very recently was sponsored by oil company BP for over a decade. For Aberdeen Art Gallery's redevelopment was part funded by BP, which publicly anyway did not have any questions or resistance to this when it happens. In this is beyond shaking through just oil sponsorship and includes approaches to local cultural development, not to needs and values, but about culture and its development as part of an economic profile, and includes arts festivals which are culturally imported. So a couple of examples of these include spectra festival of light organised by curated place. Their conference attached to the festival use the marketing tagline culture is not a luxury. And then charge around 20 pounds of a ticket. Another is New Art Aberdeen. An offshoot of New Art Street Art Festival in Stavanger in Norway. A festival brought to Aberdeen by a business levy group to increase footfall in the center, and is currently match funded 100,000 per festival to a mix of public and private finance. It's a dark text but I would encourage everyone to read that I'll pop in the chat box, and by Derek Gunt called new oil, which traces all of these infrastructures of public and private finances, and the relationship of oil in the context of New Art Aberdeen. I think it's a great opportunity to this stuff happening local authority has cut funding to arts organizations working in the city anywhere between 50 and 100%. And just, um, yeah, kind of a final no, I suppose I wanted to talk a little bit about. Complicity or nervousness in this event today. I am participating in the event, but it wasn't without kind of questions or concerns in the run up to it about how I might be kind of capitalized on as the air quotes local person with a particular body of knowledge, and actually trying to generate questions and articulate critical dialogue in public spaces, particularly in Aberdeen can carry certain risks as a freelancer. And that's me. I'll put the text in the chat box for everyone. Everyone should read that's great. Thank you. Well, everyone actually for just laying it on and we haven't. We haven't sort of concocted a pre programmed format of questions there. They're a group of core questions, which were agreed and have shaped the presentations, but I think it's really up for us to sort of ask questions of each other. Maybe if there are questions from the audience, if they can start feeding, feeding us and then we will will will come come to those. And if I could just, you know, maybe start with one particular question, and also perhaps a sort of a response and a clarification with with something that's on a Sam was pointing out, which was the sort of pointing to those three. Thematics of the British art show. And these were not sort of curatorial flights of fancy. As much as our effort at distilling what we were seeing artists doing in as we go up and down the country. So this was not us saying, Okay, this is what we think British art should be. This is more of a result of the distillation process to say this, this is what seems to be the sort of motivating forces for some of the artists that we find most compelling that we've that we've observed. I think in today's what the way we've sort of thought about the exhibition is that kind of open forum, and sort of an open forum, which is, and I sort of Catherine has laid out, it is about these ideas. So, you know, so great ideas that then ask questions of practice. And I think what we are interested in, and certainly I will speak for myself, what I'm interested in is not the, not the purest position of, you know, sitting on top of the hill. The exhibition which says, which is which recognizes the complicity, but is is willing to, to use a Tai Chi metaphor to push hands, rather than to sort of meet the force with force is to think about well how can we use it deflect it, or sort of swing it around. And hence, then the exhibition becomes a possibility of not just display. I think, of course, yes, there, there is a, there is something about display, which is an invitation, it invites people in, but it's also about how, how to use that force, and I think if there's no invitation, we end up kind of talking to ourselves. One of the things that I've really taken a lot of heart from was the, the example in football. So whereas it was the fans who forced the sort of the neo liberal forces that we're going to create the Super League to back down. It wasn't regulation. It wasn't actually the formal sources of governance. It was actually the fans who who have no stake in in those clubs, no official stake that would be recognized in the government and governance, but then forced their hand. And to my mind what I took away was, oh, what would it take for people to feel the same way about their cultural institutions, about their library, about their gallery about the museum. I don't have an answer to that, but that to me feels like that's the kind of relationship I particularly find sort of inspiring. Maybe it's up to me to say something now and I think you can all sense a certain nervousness, because I think we all agreed that this session when it's not about a personal attack on anyone as huge respect for everyone in the space. But for me, the discrepancy between what's laid out in words as an intention for the British art show to then find practices that deal with my work that extract. So I think there was, maybe it's good to be explicit and give details, but there were moments where Sam said to me, do you know that the Dean Gallery is part sponsored by PEP. I'm like, no, I don't, you know, so I'm like, I'm super happy I have this like really great network of colleagues who point this out to me at a moment where of course it's far too late to like make it a big public thing and so on. That's why we have this discussion today to actually talk about those difficult issues. There's moments of, you know, I really would want an organization like the British Art Show and the South Bank to honour the ecosystems they rely on. The South Bank clearly hasn't done it as the start of the pandemic, they clearly have ignored the many work has the cultural sector that enables them as an institution. We all know the strike that happened and the consequences. But I think there is a tendency and I think it's just going to be really explicit now to make this also practical that where do institutions like the British Art Show and the South Bank extract. So my working relationship with Sam, which comes from completely somewhere else, you know that comes from a kind of not for market, peer led European, European wide network of practitioners could then easily be used by the British Art Show to confirm that artists in the show work locally. And that's when that's when for me the narrative of non extractive doesn't work anymore. So the capital, the cultural capital that my villages has with like Scottish Sculpture Workshop gets then capitalised upon by the British Art Show to demonstrate that it's locally connected. And I think I don't want to emphasise this point but I think those are points where we need more care. You know where we need more care and saying it's not because of the British Art Show, it's because it was there anyway. I think that's what I meant earlier by the invisibility of the ecosystem versus the institution and how much I understood your introduction as an invitation for like how do the fans move it forward. So those are very, very concrete points to at those moments be very, very careful of what's been, what's the British Art Show, what's the relationship and not reformulate those relationships in order for something like the British Art Show to profit. But that's just an example but I think that's why we're having a discussion today is to say every little thing counts, you know every little text counts every recognition counts and how can this be institutionalised operationalised you know how, how does this kind of care about care also reflect in practice in those in those details. I think it's a good photo long and I'm probably shouldn't have brought up those those examples but I think they're good because at the end of the day it comes down to moments where the word doesn't match the action. And I can I maybe I should say this and I was nervousness around this event that I think Sam you're here as a colleague. What do we use our informal networks the knowledge we shared in a public forum like the British Art Show and to feel safe you know we all want to feel safe in those in those moments in those discussions, knowing that it won't be capitalised upon without our consent, for example. Yeah, and I think that's also about scale as well like how much of this I mean like Rachel discussed around oils in the city is like total dominance, yet total invisibility not total invisibility but also it's like it's elusiveness. And I think that's often what is relied upon when they're when you're working at a smaller scale perhaps as an individual artist or as a small organisation. There's less space to have this evasiveness relationships form, and you sort things out whereas there's this deferring and shifting and amorphous relationships that you can never quite hold within a bigger setup. I don't even get my head around how British Art Show works with South Bank with Hayward touring with like, like how you deal with it I don't even know. I can't even imagine the structures, but these are things that also as well as being complex for change. Also, give us a space to make an excuse to not change. I mean so I think there's something there as well about these relationships and how we've professionalised and increased this distance and made it quite invisible in some ways that feels kind of relevant to the conversation. Well maybe I could say a couple of things and then perhaps we also sort of listen to Rachel if there's a particular point on it. Firstly, and I think you know most of you know this anyway but I will just emphasise this for those who don't so I'm a freelance curator working for the British Art Show, which is arranged by Hayward Gallery, which is part of the South Bank, you know. Those are the structures that exist, and then as part of developing the British Art Show for different cities and multiple institutions within those cities host the British Art Show. So part of, and this would be our approach I think is to say how do we use those relationships and those ecosystems to have the kinds of conversations that we're doing, and to have the conversations that we're having, while we're working within the constraints. You know so the budgets, who those institutions are, those cities, they're given. And that's what we sort of work with. And then that's what we shape. And one of the things that we have shaped is for like these and the fact that there will be four of them that will, although they're part of a series. I imagine, and I think this is, Irene and I have discussed this, is that they're not a cookie cutter, so they're not going to look exactly the same in each of the cities, they will perhaps bring forth different conversations, different questions and concerns. The idea of a conference that will happen after the British Art Show has has done that will allow us a time to reflect, and quite often, particularly from a freelance position, which I'm guessing that Rachel and I would share also with Catrin, with an artist, which share is that reflection, you know, is, is, is quite hard to do if what you're then looking at is to doing the next project or the next gig or the next project. So if we try and build in structural time for reflection, our hope of course is that that will then enable and inform what the next British Art Show may be, and what kind of protocols, or what kind of challenges and questions. We may collectively throw up and ask of, you know, okay, if this is what we've inherited and this is what we run with, what do we pass on. I mean, this is not an attempt to say, oh yes, we can't sort of change the system while we're working it. We can, but those things are limited. I think what we can also do is also identify those things, point them out to the community at large of cultural workers, and then invite people in to say, okay, how do we change this. I think that's sort of part of the, of the issue. And Catrin, the couple of points that you raised, I think, you know, one was around. I mean, so I think if, if you look in either the catalogue or the label, there's, there's never been an attempt to portray that because of the British Art Show, you are working locally, or we're showing you because you're working locally in there. But actually, that's come by the by, you know, that's not something I, at least to my knowledge that we've ever tried to say to make a claim on it. I think that the other question you raised about, it's about BP. I mean, I think, frankly, it would be quite astonishing if a major cultural institution, given the economic history of Aberdeen was not funded by the oil and gas sector, and to make a wider point, and just looking at thinking about where money comes from, if you look at any cultural institution of any size in this country, and compare it to the database that UCL has developed out of the legacy of slave ownership. And I think you would see a very large overlap. So does that mean we shun those institutions because of clearly the trouble economic legacies that they were born out of, or do we then think about, well, you know, what, what forms of repair. And I think those are questions that I don't have an answer to, but from speaking for myself personally, I think we want to engage in in repair, and then figure out what that looks like. I'm going to stop now. Maybe just quickly as a response to the BP discussion perspective, maybe Rachel, you will also come in on this. I think there's something about in Aberdeen, the trauma is still happening like the oil is currently being extracted. As we speak, it's continued within all parties that this is a central form of income. It's happening now this violence is happening now. And so to be thinking about healing, whilst at the same time the violence is happening right on the spot. For me, there's something there that we're not able to do that yet. We can't heal because we need to stop the violence before we can heal the blood's pouring out, you know. So, so I think there's something there around actually where are these forums, which Rachel picks up on where we can talk explicitly with the gallery around taking this money, where are these critical conversations happening. And I think it thinks, I think. I don't think it's expected that Aberdeen would take money from oil because I think the wider social contract has shifted within the arts as a wider sector that actually it looks very naive, but as a, you know, to be doing that it looks like we're not engaged in a critical practice that we're not part of that. Maybe Rachel, you have something as well to say around or could back up with just around that from a local perspective on oil. Rachel, yeah. I'm, yeah, I would agree that it is still in a state of violence for us to so far to think about kind of repairs is actually not in. We're not, we're not in that context yet. I think, you know, it was mentioned earlier that it's not surprising for an institution to take oil sponsorship. But at the same time, there is this question that is within Aberdeen, but still outside of the arts sector, and it is what is oil done for Aberdeen. There was a sociologist called Leslie Lapp Mabon who's done a lot of work on energy transition, and he used to ask this question to students, and his students would turn around and say, oh well they sponsored the roundabouts, do they not? Because there's a plaque on certain roundabouts in Aberdeen that are to do with oil sponsorship. And in that way, it's, it's again going back to this kind of hard to read moment of oil. But also, I think I reflected quite a lot when Aberdeen Art Gallery specifically took oil sponsorship, and I remember reading press release. And within it, you know, they had expressed a relationship of consulting with staff over a long period of time. And the decision was made to take the sponsorship, and they expressed the kind of ethical tensions in that, but also that BP is the biggest employer in Aberdeen. And to not take that, you know, and the link was made between the biggest employer in Aberdeen and BP employees being a regular audience for the gallery. And for me those, it kind of shut down a space of possibility because first and foremost, if you kind of cut an oil worker, they don't bleed company colours. These are industry workers who, for a long time, were not unionized. These are industry workers that are precarious, and they are like at the mercy of women-bust economics. These are oil workers who some of them are in astronomical amounts of money, others are caterers and admin staff and all of that. These are workers that, you know, in terms of energy transition are being failed by the state in terms of being able to secure meaningful work and job security to be able to move away from fossil fuels. And I think at times the assumptions around it's not surprising kind of shuts down possibilities at the same time. I just quickly wanted to add something to the no possibilities. I think this, I would think most people on the panel and the audience would like the idea of imaginaries, you know, we love to think better futures around politics we support. But I think we have to recognize this kind of discrepancy, the kind of gap to the big institutions, you know, when when Sam told me about the BP logo, you know, we had this conversation and the explanation was, of course, institutions have to accept private sponsorship, corporate sponsorship. And that was a kind of like there is no alternative reply, which to me completely contradicts the cultural call for like let's imagine better futures together. And I think that comes back to the. What do we say in art spaces and what are the institutions that hold those art spaces actually willing to do with with their own imaginary know to. Could they imagine a collectivity around moving forward, rather than just saying that's how it is accepted. So I think that's the kind of discrepancy between institutional self understanding and institutional curation of artists where where where I become it. And that's not towards you how much I think it's towards the South Bank, which has a business model that's clearly organized around neoliberal ideas of financing a place you know. So I would find it of course absolutely amazing if the fans could reorganize the South Bank, based on those like amazing imaginaries we all have. But is that wanted that wanted by whom Catherine, I mean, South Bank, but obviously not just like it was not wanted by the people who were running those football clubs. But I think that's, I think that's kind of a bigger conversation. And I think we had this briefly also in your last sort of showroom event with that with Catherine Gibson, where I think there was a kind of almost as a case study being held out and when artists can shift the debate, which was this issue of the biennial, where one of the, the chair of the trustees was forced to resign, because his business ran these camps that sort of processed refugees. And there was an outcry and, you know, and it was sort of marked as a big success that artists have forced the trustee to resign. And of course that sort of that gap was met by Australian government money. Now that trustees company was running these counts on the behest of the Australian government. So to me this idea that saying that's a victory that we've sort of, you know, changed one sort of one face of the corporate trustee that will be replaced by another. No problem accepting Australian government money, which is actually behind those policies in the first place. Yeah, to be at best to my mind as a third victory. And then I think that goes back into your wider questions of ecosystems is when we're trying to address large ecosystems. Those little things are, or can become performative. Rather than actually shifting conversations of value. And for me, what, you know, one of the sort of a successful artistic project that that forced me to think about these relationships of value was Tonya Bruguera's intervention in the turbine hole, where you come in. On the right, there's a building named after an oligarch who paid 50 million pounds. And if you look on the left is the work of an artist who's named, who's helped name the building after a local community worker the Natalie Bell building. And I thought that I think that sort of that debate over value in that naming, what was initially meant to be a one year artistic project, and has now become not going to quote unquote, you know, until until until future reference is a really interesting way where that imagination actually takes concrete form. And, and as a really, I mean, I can only imagine the kind of debates that have been in the development team about saying oh yes. Here's an opportunity to name this building and if you're naming this without actually accepting any money for it. What is the opportunity cost of that and I think that would be would have been a very productive debate I'm. I don't have any access into that debate, but I think those are the kinds of debates that perhaps institutions need to be having and be more open to just a quick heads up to everyone that we've about 10 minutes left. I see there's a couple of questions as well come in. I mean, maybe like, it's also like useful to point out that this is, you know, this is a second conversation around topic where we are trying to browse pumps thing where we're trying to bring very different positions together. For me, this is the beginning of an ongoing conversation with Scottish sculpture workshop and hopefully Rachel, you know to also like acknowledge the depths of local knowledge you have and I don't you know this is going to be ongoing over the next two years. And so, at least for our part this conversation today will be continued in Aberdeenshire with the Royal School of Economics. Also just to point this out that there's of course, big efforts constantly to not have those events as purely discursive events but events that affect action. I think that might be a good moment to leave the conversation on unless there's anyone who wants to make any final points. One other thing to also just to point out and I think there's a question also from this idea of composting. There's I think, into you Catherine, but I think in that sort of spirit of composting, because there will be this this idea that works will grow during the British art show. There will be an opportunity for for a bit of composting within the show itself in the sense of. And this is to be to be discussed the greed, but when Catherine sort of presents a work further down the in the iterations of the British art show in another city. There will be an opportunity to reflect and maybe think a bit more with other people in those cities to think about how, how something could be not just on the walls but perhaps beyond them in the cities themselves. It would be great to understand as well as as it develops this waiting of, as you say, the display the element the top of the iceberg the display and then the discussion that's happening here, how that can shift, can it, and what that changes. I'm interested to see as that develops and how this shift between them. That's the that's the local perception of the British art show that it's finally the event arrives now. Okay, well, I ams this the secret book in the background is going to call time on the conversation and what to say thank you to all of our palace to Catherine to him and Rachel Sam and Jason. If you had any questions that weren't answered today. I said an email at the same place you would have received your zoom link. And we hope to see you all soon and good luck with the next edition of the British art show. Thank you very much. Thanks everyone.