How can we adapt and transform the area where we live? – Lucy Jacobs, Adapt Transform co-curator
This is Adapt Transform Stories, a co-created digital series exploring community responses to urban design and creativity. Part of the current Adapt Transform exhibition, in partnership with Oxford Brookes University, this week we’re exploring stories of transformation in urban spaces, told through artworks in the exhibition.
Social enterprise Makespace Oxford is behind the transformation of many of Oxfordshire’s empty and underused buildings into affordable, community-driven workspaces. Led by Makespace, with the support of Oxford City Council and OxLEP, Meanwhile in Oxfordshire (2021-2022) is a county-wide initiative seeking to reanimate underused space in our urban centres. In Adapt Transform, discover some of the stories and individuals involved in some of these initiatives through photography by local documentary and portrait photographer, Hannah Pye. “The collection of images on display,” explains Makespace, “depict a range of inspiring individuals and organisations situated in their newly revived spaces – formerly empty buildings – which have been transformed through the programme.”
Oxford Poetry Library. Photo by Hannah Pye
Two new works, Fragment Interface (2022) and FG Warehouse (2022) by multidisciplinary artist Alexander Stavrou continue a practice of thinking-through-making. Inviting us to collectively consider the design and architecture of the exhibition space in new ways, in Fragment Interface we encounter a discarded fragment of piano, a found object which inspired Stavrou as he “engaged with its newly exposed strings and surfaces. I found myself reaching into its interior-come-exterior, scratching, knocking and strumming its topography with my fingers, knuckles and elbows/digits,” he recalls.
Alexander Stavrou, Fragment Interface, 2022. Performance at Modern Art Oxford, 19 August 2022. Photo by Phil Brooks.
Alexander Stavrou, FG Warehouse, 2022. Adapt Transform installation image at The Glass Tank Gallery at Oxford Brookes University, 2022. Photo by Ben Westoby
For Adapt Transform, Muesli Collective present the new site-specific work, Sisters: A conversation between two sites (2022) a duo of what they call “unruly paintings” with hypersensitive materials that react to and reflect the environment they inhabit. Muesli is a collective of three artists, Louis Darcel, Hannah De Corte and João Freitas. For Adapt Transform, the group respond to the two sites of the exhibition with a pair of paintings cut from the same cloth, one ‘sister painting’ placed at each site to embody the differences between, and variations in, their respective environments.
Muesli Collective, Sisters: A conversation between two sites, 2022. Adapt Transform installation image at The Glass Tank Gallery at Oxford Brookes University, 2022. Photo by Ben Westoby
Through showcasing successful initiatives like Makespace’s Meanwhile in Oxfordshire, Adapt Transform seeks to inspire new creative opportunities and spaces for collaboration in Oxfordshire. As you explore the exhibition at Modern Art Oxford, Oxford Brookes University, and online, our Adapt Transform artists, creatives and co-curators have shared various ways to get involved.
You can follow the whole Adapt Transform Stories series here on MAO Studio, and on the Modern Art Oxford Instagram feed.
Visit the exhibition Adapt Transform until 18 September at Modern Art Oxford and 11 September at The Glass Tank Gallery at Oxford Brookes University.