System gallery : what's the point?

Abstract

The term “artist-run” is often used to describe self-organized activities by artists, which can take many forms—including galleries, studios, and workshops. This research focuses on my experiences running System, a not-for-profit, predominantly volunteer-led artist-run gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne. In the study, System serves as a research site for collecting, testing, and disseminating data and findings through the day-to-day operations and organization of exhibitions. The research investigates how autoethnography can be integrated into artist-curatorial practices as a self-reflexive methodology to contribute to shared understandings of value generation within Artist-Run Initiatives (ARIs). This approach acts as a tool for understanding and articulating value generation within System, fostering shared insights into how value is continuously generated, contested, and reshaped through interactions and relationships within these contexts. Guibernau’s conceptualization of ‘belonging’ and Massey’s ‘sense of place’ are used as lenses to explore the multifaceted and contested nature of value within ARIs. Through these perspectives, value is understood both as an expression of the emotional and social bonds that constitute belonging and as a dynamic, relational construct that is continuously reshaped through interactions within specific places and contexts. This research was presented as an exhibition at the Hatton Gallery, which spatially articulated the research findings. Drawing on the lineages of reflexive artistic-curatorial practices, such as those of Céline Condorelli and Gavin Wade, the exhibition weaves together a body of work that includes autoethnographic artworks I produced during the PhD (including video game design, exhibition texts, sculpture, and karaoke) alongside objects like dustpans, beer boxes, and artworks. The result is a constellation of elements that thoughtfully and provocatively express forms of value generation within System. To this end, it provides a framework for developing and communicating an understanding of value generation that accounts for the interaction between its social, emotional, and spatial elements.