Community without Propinquity Closing Event - 26 November, MK Gallery, Milton Keynes

Community without Propinquity* is a Vision Forum project exploring the role of contemporary art and understandings of community in New Towns across the globe. It includes an exhibition with work from Paulo Catrica, Nathan Coley, Jesal Kapadia, Wayne Lloyd, Vincent Meessen, Ishmael Randall Weeks, Pia Rönicke, Stuart Whipps, Bai Xiaoci and video programme including Amanda Beech, Cyprien Gaillard, Dominique Gonzalez Foerster, Pierre Huyghe, Minouk Lim, Corey McCorkle, Vincent Meessen, Pia Rönicke and Huang Xiaopeng.

For October and November, the The Project Space at has been an active Research Laboratory and forum for public events and new artist commissions. The focus of the research has been on the meaning of "community" in New Towns. The closing event will frame this work and research within a panel discussion, the launch of a publication published by ANDPublic and And Endless Supply and the first chance to see new work by the six commissioned artists including Caroline Devine, Patrick Staff, Emma Smith, Kelly Large and Mark Aerial Waller.

14.00-15.00 FILM SCREENING (Video Space) Looped
Pierre Huyghe, Streamside Day Follies (2003)

15.00-17.00 PANEL DISCUSSION (Events Room)
Guest Panelists: David Lock, Anthony Iles, Roman Vasseur
Chair: Claire Louise Staunton

David Lock CBE has been an urban planner in MK since 1977, is a founder member of the MK Urban Studies Centre and, in 1987, became President of Milton Keynes City Discovery Centre.

Anthony Iles is a cultural engineer and writer researching and making experiments in the disappearing public sphere. He is Assistant Editor of Mute magazine.

Roman Vasseur is an artist and curator. In 2008 he was appointed ‘Lead Artist’ to Harlow, a post-war New Town in Essex, in the build up to the town’s second phase of regeneration.

17.00 ARTISTS PRESENTATIONS/ACTIONS (Events Room)
Kelly Large, Emma Hedditch and Emma Smith

17:45 SCREENING & Q&A (Events Room)
Carry Gorney introduced by Mark Aerial Waller, followed by a screening of her work at MK Channel 40, Sweet Sixteen and Things that mother never told us.

Carry Gorney is a Systemic Psychotherapist and writer. She has worked with Inter-Action in London and Milton Keynes, developing the use of video for community participation. This became the basis for a series of television programmes broadcast on MK Channel 40 from 1977 to 1979. Mark Aerial Waller is an artist and has been commissioned to make a new work for the Research Lab, to be presented at the event.

19:00 PERFORMANCE (Events Room)
Patrick Staff, Performance, Growth, Forecasts (2011)

A video and performance work by artist Patrick Staff with Milton Keynes' Madcap Performers. The work has developed out of a period of research at the archive of the Milton Keynes Discovery Centre, involving a number of interviews with key planners and academic researchers and participatory workshops. The project explores urban design, growth developments, the history of the garden city and New Town movements with a particular focus on the role of the irrational, mystic and holistic in these plans and cities and how such knowledge is produced, circulated and understood by a community.

All Day EXHIBITION (Project Space)

Generously supported by Arts Council England, Vision Forum, Milton Keynes Community Foundation with assistance from the MK City Discovery Centre