Forum: Bread and games

Open Space presents Forum: Bread and games, a three-day exhibition of artworks and performances exploring fiction and trust, curated by Natalija Paunić. Over the course of the exhibition, six artists (Louise Ashcroft, Radek Brousil, Lea Collet, Rosa Doornenbal, Caz Egelie, Teal Griffin) will perform individual interpretations of the display, questioning the possibility of both neutral spectatorship and original authorship. Sculptures, drawings, photographs and text will be activated by artist-led guided tours, live performances, talks and sound.

Bread and games comes from the Latin phrase panem et circenses, which, in some languages, is a popular idiom for distraction, appeasement and mass manipulation. This phrase illustrates how the viewers' experience of the exhibition could be manipulated and deconstructed by each artist's intervention. Resonating with Open Space's 2020 curatorial theme Manufacturing Memory, which examines the dichotomy between memory and technology, Bread and games provokes personal experiences with an unpredictable fictional narrative.

The sequence of interventions within the exhibition is initiated by individual installations that explore different modes of storytelling, in relation to the real and the intended, the remembered and the known - in public, political and private life. Re-appropriating the space, the six artists fictionalise the narrative of the exhibition, so that the audience experiences their new interpretations rather than the original voice of the curator. Control of the original idea is lost, allowing the audience to have memories dependent on chance and choice, rather than a singular exhibition theme.

• Thursday 27 February, 6-9pm: Louise Ashcroft
• Friday 28 February, 6-9pm: Rosa Doornenbal, Lea Collet
• Saturday 29 February, 2-6pm: Radek Brousil, Teal Griffin, Caz Egelie