Being independent and creating your own opportunities through self-organisation can be extremely productive for an artist’s career. Join us on Tuesday, 9 June at 5:50pm UK-time for situate and agency, an informative discussion with Karl England, artist, curator, and co-founder of Sluice.
If you have ever wondered where self-organisation as an artist can lead, this talk is for you! Karl makes the argument that artist-led initiatives are actually an extension of artistic practice. He will explain how his studio practice led to self-organising opportunities, and then Karl will discuss how this activity led to the development of Sluice, a peripatetic expo, gallery, biennial, screening platform, publisher, symposium and residency which has existed since 2011.
The talk, situate and agency, connects the personal, domestic scale of Karl England’s practice to broader questions of how artists situate themselves within physical, social, and political contexts. It then moves into how his practice extends into self-organising and the creation of artist-led platforms, focusing on Sluice as an example of building an initiative that reflects a certain anti-detachment, a resistance to the separation between life, work and infrastructure.
Karl is an artist, curator and organiser. Karl’s curatorial activity converges on expanded practice with a particular focus on conceptualisation and methodologies of artist/curator-led organisation and platforms as forms of creative practice. Karl’s studio practice presents as both hubristic and pitiful, engaging with ideas of control, authority and, maybe, dominance. It examines the fragile and illusory nature of power and the roles associated with it. Karl is particularly interested in the dynamic relationship between his work and its context, investigating how the environment shapes the work and how the work, in turn, influences its surroundings.
Karl is the manager of Swiss Cottage Gallery and the Camden Art Collection (for LB Camden, since 2015) and organises large scale events with the independent initiative Sluice. Sluice was founded by Karl and art historian Ben Street in 2011 and works exclusively with artist and curator -led projects and non-profit galleries. Sluice typically works with 30-40 projects at a time to realise ambitious fairs, expos and biennials in different cities around the world (London 2011, 2013, 2015 2017, New York 2014, 2016, Berlin 2018, Odense 2019 and Lisbon 2022, Colchester 2024, Seydisfjorur 2025). Since 2015 Sluice has also existed as a magazine. Sluice magazine is published twice a year, it is designed by CHK design and distributed internationally by Central books. Sluice magazine exists to contextualise artist-led activity as the primary site of art as praxis whilst foregrounding how the societal and economic environment impacts the arts and vice versa.
Tickets are on sale now for £15 in our [cloud] shop. Once the transaction is completed, you will be sent a Zoom link via email to access the lecture space.
Spill the ‘T’ – situate and agency with Karl England, Tuesday, 9 June at 5:30pm UK-time.
