Sigi Krauss and Lisa Reneé Newman in conversation with Antony Hudek and Alex Sainsbury via Skype

Sigi Krauss, Founder/Director of Gallery House, and Lisa Reneé Newman, in conversation with Antony Hudek and Alex Sainsbury via Skype Sunday 19 March A panel of artists and art historians return to the notion of the avant-garde, which Rosetta Brooks invoked in her three-part exhibition 'A Survey of the Avant-Garde in Britain'. Opening with a screening of three films by Stephen Dwoskin, and concluding with a Skype conversation with the director of Gallery House, Sigi Krauss, the discussion will focus on the plurality of mediums and styles featured at Gallery House, and on how the historical category of avant-garde seems ripe for reappraisal. Please see our website for more information: www.ravenrow.org --- Presented as part of the exhibition 'This Way Out of England: Gallery House in Retrospect' at Raven Row Gallery House was one of London’s most influential and extraordinary art spaces in the 1970s, directed by Sigi Krauss with assistant director Rosetta Brooks. For only sixteen months in 1972-73, in a vacant mansion provided by the German government next to the German Institute in South Kensington, Gallery House hosted exhibitions, residencies, performances and events as well as pioneering ‘expanded cinema’ and much new film and video work. For many of the featured artists Gallery House would prove a formative experience. Gallery House favoured heterogeneity, colliding the multiplicity of forms and styles co-existing at the time, from performance and experimental cinema to cybernetic, social and conceptual practices. Ultimately, the radical nature of Gallery House’s programme led to its abrupt and contested closure by the German Institute. 'This Way Out of England' seeks to emulate the spirit of Gallery House by inviting a number of artists to rethink their original interventions in the space. The episodic nature of this project acknowledges the impossibility of framing what was an ephemeral experiment. The project is curated by Antony Hudek and Alex Sainsbury. --- Image: Susan Hiller, 'Transformer', Gallery House, April 1973