In May 2010, as part of Tate Modern’s 10th birthday celebrations, over 70 international independent art groups descended on the Turbine Hall to take part in No Soul For Sale.
First held in New York in 2009, the event gives each group the same amount of space, marked out by red tape on the floor, in which to present examples of their work. In this film we speak to Cecilia Alemani, co-curator, and contributors including Thurston Moore and Michael Burkitt.
Leeds Creative TimeBank
The Triple Crunch
In early 2009 Sue Ball (MAAP) and Sarah Spanton (Waymarking) as active members of the Leeds arts community, sought to alert the sector to the interlinked crises of credit, climate and energy as described by the NEF’s (New Economics Foundation) report on the Triple Crunch (www.neweconomics.org)
A small research group then emerged, including artists and academics Andy Abbott and Garry Barker, looking at non-cash economy models such as guilds, LETS systems and Time Banks. Ideas arising from and models of non-cash economies were brought into public forums for wider discussion with a broad base of the arts community and included different models of skills exchange, the potential for entrepreneurship and innovation using a skills exchange model and the philosophical and political discourse on value systems pertaining to worth and profit.
Pilot Phase
In March 2010 under the organisational umbrella of MAAP, the steering group successfully applied to Arts Council England for a small grant to set up and run a test period for Leeds Creative Timebank. Employing artist Michael Burkitt as Timebroker, members were recruited via a series of events and meetings, followed by a period of review.
For more information about Leeds Creative TimeBank please visit:

BLACK DOGS
Michael Burkitt collaborated
consistently with Leeds based art collective BLACK DOGS between 2007 and 2012
Black Dogs is an art collective formed in 2003 in Leeds. Their output has included formal exhibitions, relational and participatory installations, public events
and interventions, publications, video, audio works and records and collaborative learning projects. The membership of the group is notionally fluid and can vary on a project-to-project basis, although in practice they have a fairly consistent core of fourteen members currently living and working between Leeds, Bradford, Huddersfield, London and Milton Keynes.
Black Dogs artistic and critical interests are broad and varied, underpinned by an interest in art’s potential as a social practice. They approach art as a space in which to experiment with new ways of understanding the world - and of being and acting together - that have social, economic and political resonances. They aim to unpick and problematise values such as self-advancement, competition, professionalism and the separation of art from life that we understand as being ingrained in capitalism and, by extension, the institutional art world.
Black Dogs see their practice as having two main dimensions. Firstly, the projects and artwork they create. Secondly, the process of working as a collective. Attentive to the way in which Black Dogs organises and goes about its (non) business, the alternative sphere in which they play (and help shape), and the ethics and social relations that arise from this. Through the structure and operation
of the group dogs digest and analyze collectivity, collaboration, not-for-profit motives, hierarchies, waged-labour and DIY or self-organised approaches.
For more information please visit:
