GENTLE/RADICAL
Turner Prize 2021
Herbert Art Gallery & Museum
29 September 2021 - 12 January 2022
Gentle/Radical was established in 2017 as a collaborative cultural project based in Cardiff’s Riverside neighbourhood. It comprises community activists, conflict resolution trainers, faith ministers, equalities practitioners, youth workers, land workers, writers and artists. They organise community film screenings, grassroots symposia, performative works, talks and gatherings that bring people together. Their aim to rethink how we live with each other in more equitable ways.
In this exhibition they explore how networks of care and comradeship – often overlooked in working cultures that privilege outputs and results – enable us to face the turbulent present, whilst imagining other futures.
A series of filmed works share slices of their ongoing conversations exploring personal and collective agency in the face of external forces: How do we raise children beyond the nuclear family? How do we hold spaces for grief and loss amidst constant demands to remain productive? How do the multiplicities of diaspora show up amongst us?
A second work shows them coming together to sing Welsh Gorsedd bardic prayers, written in the 18th century as a reimagining of a Welsh culture lost to colonialism. Gentle/Radical are less interested in the polished outcomes of performance than in the act of learning together, giving collective voice to a spiritual knowledge grounded in the pursuit of justice.
Finally, a third element of the presentation takes the form of notes from an emergent curriculum comprising their ideas and those of others. Exploratory, messy and evolving, these offer points of departure into different ways of working and living.
Currencies of Exchange / “Good work involves much giving of honour”
In her book Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown, via Grace Lee Boggs, talks of building ‘critical connections’ in place of critical mass. As a collective of transdisciplinary artists and practitioners, what - for Gentle/Radical – does critical connection look like? How do we generate, as well as protect, the essential time, labour and resource needed to ensure we’re doing the work of critical connection?
Part of Gentle/Radical’s exhibition at the Herbert Gallery is a wall-based artwork in the form of a diagram, depicting some of the processes the collective works with, aspires to working with, or is in proximity of working with (because sometimes there is also attempt and failure). Touching on ways of being, feeling, relating, organising, on systems of care, healing, parenting, solidarity-building and more, what might these principles mean in practice? If we are centring care, what is the work? When we talk of slowness, how does it show up? If the work of witnessing is key, how do we make time to share ourselves, and be seen?
Using Gentle/Radical's wall diagram as a point of departure, we invite people into a space of intimacy around these questions. There will be dialogue, different forms of sharing, group exchange, paired discussion, we may use our voices, we may write a letter.
In contexts where productivity is a constant demand, we are asking: How do we build critical connections, instead of focusing on the numbers. And how do we fight to hold space, for what matters.
