Hostile takeover or incubated startup? Busy office on a lunch break or liquidated business destined for an auction lot?
Production Methods at Watermans presents a familiar environment, a part of but apart from the every day. You have walked past a reception and into a seemingly familiar space, at once banal but then baffling. Scale, time, natural light and your role in all this seem variable, uncertain and at risk.
Whether you have had a job for life, you are on a zero-hours contract or an unpaid intern, Production Methods will seem familiar to all that have ever worked. With an unsettling sense of scale the artwork places you amidst the infrastructure and digital technologies that influence so many of our waking and working hours. Throughout the space the remains of a bankrupt business sit, machines still running but the workers absent.
When visiting the gallery it might be buzzing with energy, and words, or lying dormant waiting for the start of the business day. The boxes that dominate the space are the kind hastily packed with possessions and clutched by a worker just made redundant. Containing within them the promises and produce of marching progress, these boxes also serve as the site of artistic production.
Participation Programme
The gallery will be re-energised, a business founded anew through a group of new economy workers who will bring the space to life through a programme of participatory public workshops.
A series of five free workshops will allow members of the public to engage and interact with the project, and work with the artists towards a new artwork and/or publication to be included in the exhibition. For further information, please ask at the Box Office.
About Executive Chair

Executive Chair are the artists Haydn Jones, Fabio Lattanzi Antinori, Jonathan Munro working with curator Ozden Sahin. The group examines the worlds of work and finance and how art and technology can be used to cast a light on the diffuse boundary between work and life. They make playful, challenging and engaging installations and sculptures that examine complex personal, governmental and organisational relationships. They work with a diverse range of materials, references and tools.
The inaugural Executive Chair exhibition opened the 2015 programme of Yinka Shonibare’s Guest Projects in January 2015 with a residency touching upon issues such as corporate influence on workspace