In Kind

By

Ailie Rutherford & Janie Nicoll

 
Photograph of a festival-goer reading a reference book at the In Kind Kiosk, Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, CCA Glasgow, 2018. Photographed by Bob Moyler.

Photograph of a festival-goer reading a reference book at the In Kind Kiosk, Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, CCA Glasgow, 2018. Photographed by Bob Moyler.

In Kind is a research project by artists Ailie Rutherford and Janie Nicoll charting the hidden economies of the visual arts.

The project began in 2018 at Glasgow International festival of Visual Art, interrogating the festival from within, their findings exhibited as part of the festival program. Ailie and Janie invited artists participating in in the festival to log their unpaid labour, exposing the “below the water-line” economy of the arts; charting the unseen and unaccounted for efforts that enable large scale arts festivals to take place. In Kind challenges the apparently successful arts festival model rolled out across major cities, looking at whether this is actually a sustainable model. Since beginning the project in 2018 In Kind events and workshops held at venues across the UK have continued to dig into to the culture of unpaid labour, using their visual arts practice to expose the ways in which such endemic exploitation within the art world exasperates the lack of diversity in the arts, asking who gets to make art and Who Can Afford to Be An Artist?

More information: https://inkindproject.info

Ailie’s website: https://ailierutherford.com

Janie’s website: http://www.janienicoll.co.uk

Click the PDF below to read the In Kind zine….

Featured
Janie Nicoll

“Nicoll’s work is involved in the process of translation and conversion – of scale and of materials – to make new stories from old. Her work involves small acts of scrutiny and transformation that uncover beauty, banality and anxiety in the overlooked details of the everyday. Small things, maybe, but not insignificant“ — Moira Jeffrey.

Ailie Rutherford

Ailie Rutherford is a visual artist working at the intersection of community activism and creative practice. Her collaborative artworks bring people together in conversations about our social and economic landscape using print, performance, sci-fi visioning, games and technology as playful means to work through difficult questions and radically re-think our shared futures. Resulting works range from proposed new models for living and working together to the building of new infrastructure.

Recent projects include:

The People’s Bank of Govanhill a long term social art project in Govanhill (Glasgow) realising feminist economic theory in a community context. String Figures collaborative software for collective working centred on a principle of mutual care and co-operation, titled after techno-feminist Donna Haraway’s metaphor for the inextricable threads that connect us all.

Her feminist economic artworks have been shown at Unbox festival, (Bengaluru, India) MoneyLab at Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam, Netherlands), Supermarkt (Berlin, Germany) and for Tracing The Tracks//Work Affair at Rum 46 (Aarhus, Denmark). Ailie is currently working as curator for NEoN digital arts Wired Women festival

https://ailierutherford.com

ProjectContributorEconomy, Labour, Exploitation, Diversity, Art World