Resolve Collective: them’s the breaks

Using cast-off materials from other institutions – storage boxes, crates, exhibition signs from previous shows and steel fencing – we are made to think hard about the inner workings of an art institution

Resolve collective: them’s the breaks, installation view, The Curve, Barbican, 2023. Photo © Vishnu Jayarajan.

The Curve, Barbican Centre, London
30 March – 16 July 2023

by TOM DENMAN

Resolve collective (Melissa Haniff, Akil Scafe-Smith and Seth Scafe-Smith) seeks to heighten our awareness of the social agency of the spaces we inhabit. The premise of its work is that, by understanding the relationship between design and the communities that live with it, we can use infrastructure – in the broadest sense, denoting the material and systemic linkages of collective organisation – to bring about social and economic change. Its approach is one of intervention – of “breaks”. This usually involves engaging people in discussions about what particular spaces, or aspects of space, mean to them, leading to the creation of structures and images that precipitate further conversation. For example, we can dismantle our restrictive and individualistic assumptions of what a wall is by treating it less as a border than a connector, and the building of walls with this conceptualisation in mind gives us objects to think with. Thus, while exhibitions normally help us see things through fresh eyes, in Resolve’s current intervention at The Curve – titled them’s the breaks – the things turn our attention on the exhibiting institution.

Resolve collective: them’s the breaks, installation view, The Curve, Barbican, 2023. Photo © Adiam Yemane.

The Curve, an exhibition space at the Barbican Centre in London, is an appropriate institutional venue for Resolve’s work, which usually intervenes on peripheral, transient locations. Its project for the Brixton Design Trail in 2017, for instance, repurposed hundreds of banana boxes to form a temporary structure in an abandoned passageway in Brixton Station as a platform for local artists and culinary entrepreneurs. The colonial, migrant histories of the material framework reflected that of the community and the food. Although The Curve is undoubtedly central in terms of prestige, its form – a curvilinear hallway lining the northern edge of the building – maintains a sense of marginality, improvisation and passing through. It posits the viewing of art as a kind of passage from one place, or state of being even, to another. In this sense the gallery, like the Brixton passageway, feels notably infrastructural, even if the doors at one end are closed to visitors and so its (obvious) purpose as infrastructure is arguably in abeyance. That said, it is precisely such nuances that Resolve wishes us to notice.

Resolve collective: them’s the breaks, installation view, The Curve, Barbican, 2023. Photo © Vishnu Jayarajan.

The collective has upcycled materials from the Barbican and other institutions – including Camden Art Centre, the Royal Academy of Arts, Brighton Centre for Contemporary Arts and Gathering, among others – to make an array of structures that occupy The Curve. Throughout the show are postage stickers – a playful take on the Royal Mail format, except with the words “Delivered by Resolve” – indicating where the materials came from. On each ticket is a QR code that takes you to Resolve’s digital game-essay The Institute (hosted by the anticapitalist platform, Break / / Line). The gaming component, made using Bitsy editor, parodies a Barbican-like multiplex institution in which curators waffle on about the “risk management protocols” and how much they “love your work and the energy that you brought”, technicians refuse to let you use a drill in the gallery, and students worship their professor and harp on about boosting their CVs. Countering an institutionalised, neoliberal mindset, the accompanying text promotes infrastructural practice as a means of “reorganising the building blocks rather than building on top of them”. This way, we can achieve what is often (though not explicitly in this essay) referred to as structural change.

Resolve collective: them’s the breaks, installation view, The Curve, Barbican, 2023. Photo © Adiam Yemane.

Reclaimed bookshelves – Kinderboxes originally belonging to the Barbican children’s library – transform the opening section into a study area, displaying texts which inform Resolve’s thinking. There are copies of the magazine Skin Deep: Race + Culture (2018; the “Movements” issue); the catalogue of the RA’s current exhibition Souls Grown Deep Like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South; the proceedings of (the research centre) Theatrum Mundi’s Making Cultural Infrastructure (2017), which seeks to explore the “urban equivalent of the backstage”, and its subsequent volume grappling with the same theme, Urban Backstages (2023). On the opposite wall, and on the walls throughout the space, are scribbled notes, diagrams, to-do lists, printed text messages, and the occasional gag pertaining to the show’s installation. Here, we are brought backstage, as everything reflects on how it got here, how it was installed, and how the space is being implemented. The Curve’s operation as an exhibiting venue is rendered transparent, dispelling the suspension of disbelief that anaesthetises institutional life.

Resolve collective: them’s the breaks, installation view, The Curve, Barbican, 2023. Photo © Adiam Yemane.

After the library, we pass a sequence of benches and ramps (for lying on, the diagrams explain), which line the outer limit of the bend. They are just comfortable enough to serve their purpose as furniture, interrupting rather than beautifying our path. But, more importantly, they are uncomfortable enough to activate a kind of embodied, always conscious questioning. I wrote part of this review sitting on a bench made of steel fencing from the ICA, physically trying to grapple with the show’s systemic makeup. Many of the ramps are made of printed Dibond once used as signs to publicise exhibitions at Camden Art Centre: Resolve’s subject extends beyond this exhibition and the Barbican to engage with the broader exhibitionary complex – while suggesting an alternative, open-ended and communal notion of what a cultural entity could be. The final section features a stage, on which stands a Babel-like tower of packaging materials, including a large crate given by the art logistics company Momart – perhaps a tongue-in-cheek monument, or funeral pyre, to institutionalised mobility.

Resolve collective: them’s the breaks, installation view, The Curve, Barbican, 2023. Photo © Vishnu Jayarajan.

Projected on the wall beside the stage is a passage from the architectural thinker George Kafka’s accompanying text, which outlines a post-institutional world. On the exhibition’s flier, this essay, titled In Which You Will Thrive, is candidly presented with editorial comments in the margin. In one of the text bubbles, someone has written, “Infrastructure just isn’t exciting enough as a word imo,” in response to which are the words: “It might be our job to make it irresistible.” The term “infrastructure” gives apposite justice to Resolve’s intervention at The Curve, just as it would describe the work-in-progress, dialogic presentation of Kafka’s text. For the show draws attention to the physical and systemic form of the space, in contrast to most other exhibitions that harness it to accentuate the art. The representer becomes represented, a dynamic extending to the institutions featuring on the postage tickets. These are not lenders, funders or sponsors (or whatever) with their names executively stencilled in the entrance. They have given things they were unlikely to use again. And yet, as is the way, they benefit by visibly contributing to a radical endeavour.

Resolve collective: them’s the breaks, installation view, The Curve, Barbican, 2023. Photo © Vishnu Jayarajan.

As a visitor, I am participating in a negotiation. As I leave, and in my work as a critic, I take elements of this negotiation elsewhere. This always happens when we liaise with institutions, but what Resolve does is make irresistibly unignorable the inner systems of an institutional body. The passage is not smooth, since Resolve intervenes in the space to upset our autopilot, so that we stop and think, and puzzle over what it means to be a body in an institution. By being tactical rather than strategic – that is, conversing at ground level rather than administrating from above – this is a far cry from vernacularity or utopianism. It is critique, but in a positive sense. In line with Kafka’s thinking, Resolve proposes a possibility: a cultural landscape made of porous and transparent entities that “don’t have a name yet, but they won’t be known as institutions”.