
The Guild
NN Contemporary Art is excited to announce the launch of The Guild. A new initiative that invites artists and local communities to collaborate with NNCA in shaping future programmes for The Northampton Rooms, a new experimental space designed by artist Giles Round at 24 Guildhall Road. Starting in December 2024.
Through The Guild, NNCA will begin to activate the new rooms in the lead-up to reopening 24 Guildhall Road via a series of generative, open research sessions that foreground artist-led initiatives, art practices, and the establishment of a new institution for Art and Community Knowledge.
One of the standout features of The Northampton Rooms is a new community kitchen. In the kitchen, sculptural elements capture some of the town’s cultural landmarks, such as 78 Derngate (designed by Charles Rene Mackintosh), alongside significant artist-led architectural histories; a kitchen island is inspired by the iconic artist Derek Jarman’s herb garden at Dungeness.
Other features include a new cafe kiosk and an adaptable suite of spaces that could be used for pop-up supper clubs, talks and readings, performances, screenings, rehearsals, listening sessions, or just to meet new people. The interiors and their unique functions aim to foster an environment of creative sociality, care, and sustainability.
This initial phase of Guild events will include cooking demonstrations (and eating together); presentations on new institutional models, artist-led broadcasting, and creative skills surgeries; maker markets, performances, conferences, and screenings from guest artists, curators, and speakers. Highlighting some of the current artist-led practices and interventions in communities and institutions across the country, these sessions aim to provoke a dialogue with our community to explore key questions to create a new artist-led agenda for Northampton.
Prompts include – what does it mean to be artist-led today? How do artists and communities influence the working practices of institutions? and how do we collectively establish sustainable, creative ecosystems?
The Guild will start with a festive inaugural event: the NN Nights Christmas market featuring an artist-led showcase of locally made goods, DJ sets, talks, and festive food & drink. This market will begin a regular programming calendar intended to spotlight artist-led practices and bring attention to emerging voices in the area.
Further events will feature presentations by prominent voices in artist-led initiatives, including Resolve Collective, Grizedale Arts, TACO and Flatland Projects. NNCAs will host workshops for artists, community groups and local organisations to develop concepts for future programs at The Northampton Rooms. This collaborative effort will create a sustainable, cooperative arts model driven by local interests, bridging community needs, and cultural engagement through artistic-led enquiry.
NNCA envisions The Northampton Rooms as a dynamic regional centre for contemporary art and social engagement, fostering a responsive and collaborative arts program that enriches Northampton’s cultural landscape while amplifying the impact and value of artists within society at large.
Dates:
13 December 2024, 4-8pm – NN Nights Christmas Artist & Makers Market
The inaugural NN Nights Christmas Artist & Makers Market, organised in collaboration with NN Associates, will showcase the work of local artists and makers, alongside DJ sets, and festive food & drink.
22 Jan 2025, 5.30-7.30pm – Introducing the Guild: Giles Round & Simon Wright
Simon Wright and Giles Round will host this introductory session to The Northampton Rooms and The Guild programme.
Giles Round (b.1976) lives and works in London and St Leonards-on-Sea. Round works across disciplines – including art, design and architecture. Works often take the form of long-term open-ended projects in which exhibitions themselves become the medium. For example, Round’s ongoing work, The Art Direction of the Noguchi Museum (2018–) is an enquiry into the role an artist might play as an embedded part of institutional and design teams, but also of society’s infrastructures and organisations at large. Recent works have increasingly conflated biographical details, imagery and writings of artistic antecedents with Round’s own. The resulting objects, populated with citation and ‘misappropriation’, are semi-autobiographical, somewhat fictitious and all, in their own way, attempts to communicate with the dead.
Round’s recent exhibitions include: Back to Earth, Serpentine Galleries, London, 2022 (group); Persones, Persons, Biennale Gherdëina ∞, Val Gardena, Dolomites, 2022 (group); 91 days of clear blue skies, Quench, Margate, 2021 (solo); Untitled, circa 1994, Brighton CCA, Brighton, 2020 (solo).
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6 February 2025, 5.30-7.30pm – What is an artist-led space? Mat Jenner, TACO! & Ben Urban, Flatland Projects
This session will explore artist-led spaces and the civic role of artists in developing new models and community knowledge regionally.
Mat Jenner is an artist who works in art making, curating, studios, and institutions. He has exhibited nationally and internationally. In 2017, he established TACO! An artist-led space in SE London that is engaged with its local context, centres artist practices in the way it works and grows, and supports a dialogue between artists, audiences, community, and place. Mat has previously held leadership roles at a range of arts organisations, including Studio Voltaire, Forma, Grand Union and SPACE.
Ben Urban is a curator and cultural worker based in Hastings, where he was born. He studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths University of London, and later studied for his research degree at the University of Kent, specialising in Disability access in cultural, leisure and sporting environments. Currently, he works as the Director and Co-founder of Flatland Projects, an arts organisation focused on artistic development and the commissioning of national and international artists’ first institutional exhibitions. He is also the lead, and member of the founding steering group of Beeching Road Studios, a brand-new facility focused on artistic production, studio space, and viable career pathways for artists and creatives of East Sussex. As a curator he has worked on significant curatorial projects including artists such as Tarek Lakhrissi, Harmeet Rahal, Lucy Evetts, Alison Wilding, Florence Peake, Madeleine Pledge, Martyn Cross, plus many more.
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27 Feb 2025, 5.30-7.30pm – What is an Institution? Adam Sutherland, Grizedale Arts & Akil Scafe-Smith, Resolve Collective
This session will explore alternative institutional models and co-designing with communities. Adam will also prepare and serve a delicious vegetarian soup for all participants as part of his presentation.
Adam Sutherland is the director of Grizedale Arts a position he has held for over 25 years. Over that time the programme and ambitions of the organisation have increasingly focused on the role or artists within and as a part of communities/society. The notion of Socially Engaged Practice and Useful Art were pioneered at Grizedale, in particular through The Coniston Institute, a Mechanics Institute re imagined by John Ruskin and his followers in the late 19th century. Adam’s talk will focus on this history of community engagement from 2009 to 2019 as well as the follow on project, the purchase of a large country Inn and the trials and tribulations of making that work.
RESOLVE is an interdisciplinary design collective that combines architecture, engineering, technology and art to address social challenges. They have delivered numerous projects, workshops, publications, and talks in the UK and across the world, all of which look toward realising just and equitable visions of change in our built environment.
Book your free ticket here