Formwork: The Institution as Artist Medium

About

Saturday 28 February 2026 | 11am - 4pm
Nottingham Contemporary
Free event, donations welcome

Join Nottingham Contemporary for a group session exploring the ways in which public art institutions can become sustainable sites for structural change within the sector.

Organised by Andrew Goffey from the Centre for Critical Theory and Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham, and Katie Simpson, Senior Curator at Nottingham Contemporary, the session explores the institution as an artistic medium that can be shaped and moulded. It considers how this freedom and malleability in design and scope can create opportunities for new ways of organising and working. The event also marks ten years since research and public programming on institutional analysis at Nottingham Contemporary, led by former Head of Public Programmes Dr Janna Graham, grounding the enquiry in past thinking and practice to examine how co-creative, collective, and non-hierarchical approaches operate within the institution today.

We will start by revisiting the research project Building as Body 2016 - 2018 by Manual Labours (Sophie Hope and Jenny Richards). Building as Body saw Nottingham Contemporary undergo a process of examination, exploring the ways in which buildings and bodies are fluid ecosystems which affect each other. This resulted in a co-produced health assessment of the organisation which Jenny Richards and Dr Janna Graham will discuss with us as a case study of institutional analysis in practice.

For the second half of the session, we welcome presentations from artists Débora Delmar, José García Oliva and Sean Roy Parker who each employ methods of institutional critique in their practice to interrogate how mechanisms of power are embedded within institutions. After the presentations, we will break out into small groups to dive deeper into the tactics and strategies used by each artist, to see what change might look like in action.

This event is the first in the Formwork series, which builds on Nottingham Contemporary's ongoing interest in imagining how organisations can align their visible, public-facing work with less visible aspects, such as internal structures, questioning the role of public art institutions today as sites of change, equity, and freedom.