Any Other Business

Any Other Business is a series of artistic responses to Cubitt’s archive, exploring organisational practice in artist-run spaces. The event was curated by Jennifer Irving as the culmination of her research placement at Cubitt with Goldsmiths Curating MFA. Jennifer Irving (she/her) is a London-based curator, writer and researcher. She is mainly preoccupied with questions around art, labour and power. She has curated programmes at Mimosa House, Alice Black and UCL Decolonial Forum. She organises with the migrant-led women’s charity Xenia. 

Irving project situates the archive as both a resource and a site for collectivity and exchange, this project invited artists to engage with Cubitt’s archive as both an artist and an arts worker. They were invited to lean into the overlaps, tensions and gaps between their individual creative practices and the other work, formal and informal, they do in arts spaces. Thinking through what is valued and what is hidden when defining artistic practice and labour. 

‘Any Other Business’, or A.O.B., is a common phrase found at the end of meeting agendas. Cubitt’s early archive is full of these documents. Handwritten, typed, often without minutes to match, they are small, speculative admin scores, dreaming of a cohesive form that would inevitably digress once enacted in the living world. The A.O.B. refrain offers an opening for uncertainty, for the unresolved, the forgotten and the potential for subverting established power structures. 

An A.O.B to almost a year of research, we share our findings. They are unresolved and uncertain, prone to digression, but nonetheless an opening for speculating and enacting our own artist-run organisational practices. 

Download the Programme Handout pdf.

Any Other Business: Public Programme - Thursday 22 May 2025, 3-9pm

15.00-17:00: ‘Biting the Hand that Feeds’, a writing workshop by Gina Prat Lilly (@ginapratlilly) 

Join us for a creative writing workshop developed from the Cubitt archive. 

This writing workshop will find ways to defamiliarise and fictionalise the space between art-making and art-working. We will explore the dependency on hidden labour and artists’ specialised skills, and probe the way language constructs art-work/art-labour, the shapes it takes, and the forces that act upon it. 

We will begin with a collective reading of selected materials, followed by a series of process-based writing exercises exploring form, and finally exchange and share with the group.

17:30-18.30: ‘Buildinghosttransmissions’: archive listening session with Tom Lye

Pulled from the archive, ‘Buildinghosttransmissions’ is a ‘sonic architecture’ and publication, by the Antwerp-based artist collective Building Transmissions, commissioned by then Cubitt Curatorial Fellow, David Bussel. 

Together we will reactivate the work, reading and listening, as we explore themes of space, maintenance, hospitality and speculative finance. We will redraw connections and spectral traces from Thailand to Antwerp to London, from early 2000s boom and bust economies to contemporary neoliberal realities. 

19.00-20.00: Screening of ‘Clara’s Hard Drive’ by Serena Mirambeau Brey and Rosemary Moss co-curated with Sarah Al-Sarraj

Set in a parallel universe of decommissioned cloud storage and storage scarcity, mandated under an international effort to cut climate emissions, the only way to archive memories is by using the physical hard drives already in circulation. It is the work of ‘hard drive swimmers’ to declutter hard drives according to the previous owner’s ‘ReadMe.txt’. But what happens when one hard drive is left only with vague instructions? 

An ongoing, unfinished moving image and sound project, ‘Clara's Hard Drive’ combines still photographs, stop motion, 3D animation, live music, and existing home video to build a world around a hard drive that was gifted to the filmmaker by their friend, Clara Boulard. The resulting project is a collaborative exploration of outsourced memory, sentimentality, tenderness and the poetics of administrative labour. 

20.00-21.00: drinks and music