New! Details of in/flux
Update! HTAP @ Hackney Wicked
Hackney Transients Art Project (HTAP) is a Hackney-based initiative that investigates everyday experience in this London borough as a catalyst for making new art works and creative processes.
The project brings together twelve artists, two curators and other Hackney enthusiasts to investigate ongoing changes in Hackney, accelerated through flows of people and ideas. HTAP explores various forms of transience, including individuals in flux, shifting communities and expanding notions of art.
HTAP seeks to move beyond familiar conventions of community-based art and manufactured moments of social catharsis intent on repairing the social bond. Spread across an oral history archive, an experimental mapping event and an exhibition of new artworks produced in response to the project’s ongoing development, HTAP explores the idea of the production and distribution of art as a means of community formation.
Reflective/reflexive discussion furthers HTAP’s development and sustainability as a multi-stage initiative. Since January 2009, the artists and organisers have met regularly to unpick preconceived ideas, find points of affinity and to identify areas for further investigation. Through both face-to-face and online dialogue, the group works together to tease out the complexities that make HTAP such a compelling and ultimately expandable project. These include the politics surrounding ‘transience’ as HTAP’s overarching theme, public engagement, the challenge and benefit of working with other organisations including local and national administrative bodies, and the opportunity of developing exhibitions in response to, and in parallel with, other events, namely Pattern Making for Beginners, HTAP’s contribution to the Hackney Wicked Festival 2009. Generative and topical, these discussions also grapple with new expressions of collaborative and/or participatory art.
