We launched transitstation in 2003 at Kingston University London. The curatorial programme for exhibition-as-event within a scaffolding framework was established from the outset. We then went to Berlin, for the first fully international collaboration. A year later in Edinburgh we refined the co-curator concept, creating a ‘classic transitstation’. The first run concluded in Copenhagen in 2010, under the auspices of the Royal Danish Academy.
transitstation follows unconventional methodologies and socio-critical stances in its challenges to confront extraordinary locations and places.
This entices a close view for site-specific research to format the event in its acuteness for the communicative dispositions and the artistic, authentic contest between matter and concept.
Interferences and Interventions make up for the specificities of places and their physical and ephemeral inhabitants.
Katherine Hymers, Performance Day. Photo: film still, Charles Ryder
London 2003
The first transitstation Exhibition-as-Event was Dagmar Glausnitzer-Smith's valedictory show as a Stanley Picker Research Fellow in Fine Art at Kingston University London. Glausnitzer-Smith created a three day event featuring on each of three successive days continuous performance art, theatre, and music.
transitstation London set standards for curating and producing mixed-disciplinary performance, encouraging young and established artists and students to explore their creative potential within a supportive and challenging collaborative framework. The transitstation scaffolding system provided that framework replete with all of its practical and philosophical connotations.
Sabine Sarnighausen
Berlin 2005
The second transitstation Exhibition-as-Event took place at the Gebauer Höfe Berlin, an ensemble of 19th Century textile and engineering buildings on the River Spree in Berlin Charlottenburg.
Dagmar Glausnitzer-Smith and Charles F. Ryder refined the transitstation concept, creating, along with the London artists and their Berlin-based colleagues, the first non-stop 24-hour weekend.
Throughout preparation, performance and production, the transitstation artist forms the centre of the work, both as a maker and as a participant in the project's social and intellectual discourse.
OUT OF ORDER Sorry for any inconvenience. Nanna Lysolt-Hansen, Edinburgh 2006
Edinburgh 2006
For the third transitstation stop organizers Dagmar Glausnitzer-Smith and Charles Ryder chose Ocean Terminal, a vast shopping and leisure centre at the heart of Edinburgh's regenerated waterfront. Ocean Terminal offered a paradoxical atmosphere to the viewers' experience, a confrontation between the worlds of consumerism culture.
transitstation Edinburgh 2006 represented a maturation of the production methodolgy: the on-site logistical preparation, publicity, networking and accommodation for transitstation was managed by the host city partners, artists' collective TotalKunst along with curators Rosemary Strang and Aaron McCloskey.
Scaffolding visualisation drawing, transitstation Copenhagen 2010
Copenhagen 2010
The fourth transitstation stop was Copenhagen, Denmark, in partnership with the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts at Festsalen.
The final schedule with set times for the artists’ work was revised twice on April 16th due to the cancellation of flights for 20 arriving artists due to the eruption and dusty clouds of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland.
transitstation introduced EduAction Day on Monday April 19, following the transitstation 24-hour weekend. Artists presented lectures and performance art workshops, including theoretical discussion groups reflecting on the concept of exhibition-as-event. Our Danish hosts artists provided food and drink.