Fabrica's exhibition programme
The Fabrica exhibition programme consists of four main shows each year, interspersed with smaller experimental exhibitions and events promoted in partnership with others.
Organised on a seasonal basis, Fabrica's programme reflects new developments across four areas of practice: site-specific crafts, large-scale sculpture, lens-based installations and interactive digital media.
New work is created for the gallery that can be categorised under the following interlinked conceptual or thematic strands.
Exploring material culture
Exploring material culture is a concept for exhibitions that take, as starting points, buildings, tools, and other artefacts that have had cultural meaning ascribed to them, in the past or in the present.
The architecture of the mind
The architecture of the mind is a current in exhibitions that formally or conceptually makes reference to the previous use of the gallery as a church and explores the ways in which our individual or social psyche is externalised in various architectural forms.
Photography, representation and spectacle
Photography, representation and spectacle is a programming strand that examines the mediating role of the image in relation to politics, philosophical thought and the representation of lived experience.
Body, culture and identity
Body, culture and identity is a recurrent theme for work that focuses on our image of self and our cultural, and sub-cultural identities.
Site, space and excitement
Site, space and excitement is a concept that typifies a range of work using the scale and capacity of the gallery to create large physical forms that have immediately engaging tactile and material properties.
Crafting and making
The activities of crafting and making are key to defining Fabrica's ethos and are central to a strand of the programme that examines these fundamental human processes as literal and metaphorical carriers of thought and emotion.
Critical process
Encouraging engagement in the critical process of evaluating and understanding contemporary art involves challenging preconceptions, testing boundaries and taking risks across the programme. Thematically, it means presenting work that may demand unusual patterns of time and concentration for visitors, or work that cuts across practice or art form definitions.
Interactivity
Presenting opportunities for visitors to participate in a creative process of their own is part of Fabrica's overarching educational and audience development strategy. Interactivity as a programming strand offers visitors the possibility of active influence in the gallery experience, to personalise and be part of the work.
