Manifesto for Sustainable Experimentation is an exhibition of historic works and ephemera, interspersed with new commissions, performances, readings, workshops and other happenings curated by founding directors David Crawforth and Naomi Siderfin. Working in collaboration as BAW (Beaconsfield ArtWorks) they set the exhibitionary tone with visual and sonic interventions, inviting queer and ecofeminist artist A.L. Steiner to curate a screening programme from the US that extends the exhibition’s reach across time zones and cultural borders.

The project title is imbued with irony, since making art for most artists is simultaneously unsustainable (due to lack of resource) and yet sustained by the vocational pursuit of aesthetic and political expression. The exhibition seeks to bring to light some of the strategies in which artists engage to survive and be heard.

Manifesto for Sustainable Experimentation is more than a retrospective. It is a dynamic, durational exploration of how environment and identity is constructed through class, gender, and cultural memory – and a call to recognise ‘environment’ not only as physical landscape, but as the social and political ecosystems we inhabit and shape.