Home | Friday 28th March 2008 | Issue 626

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TAA VERY MUCH

Hold onto your hats, get your glad rags on - next week Brighton becomes host to its very first Temporary Autonomous Art Exhibition! Running from 2nd-6th of April and coming to a reclaimed space near you, the TAA is promising to be Brighton’s finest community arts, music and performance event of the year.

Born out of frustration with the commodification of art, and a lack of autonomous space, TAA aims to create a free, not-for-profit environment, built and enjoyed by the whole community. Gallery exhibition and studio space have become the preserve of an artistic elite, with rent soaring and many galleries becoming sterile, impersonal, and out of reach of the majority. TAA provides artists, musicians, writers and performers who would otherwise have no outlet with a space to display their work, uninhibited by the constraints of the mainstream art cliques.

While TAAs have been happening for 8 years now in London, Bristol, Manchester and Edinburgh, this is Brighton’s first and from Wednesday to Saturday, midday to midnight, anyone can get involved. Exhibit your own stuff, get involved in workshops for kids and adults, and check out the evening entertainments, film, spoken word, open mic, cabaret, live music and DJs. There’s something for everyone – and if all gets too much, you can always regroup at the TAA café and bar.

And if you can't make it, local alternative radio dation 4a (www.radio4a.org.uk) will be doing live broadcasts from the venue.

Despite the friendly local bobbies shutting down one of the fundraising events for the TAA (See SchNEWS 623), and pestering some of the organisers, many people have been mucked in to reclaim the building, fix it up, clean, creating a stage, and make it safe.

Check out www.subterraneanartbrighton.org for more details.

* SchNEWS hears on the grapevine that a Brighton-produced TAA spoof-tabloid to big up squatting has been hit with censorship just like ‘On The Verge’ - Brighton’s SmashEDO documentary. OK, it’s not quite the same orchestrated clampdown, but their printer has refused to print it because of the content. Hopefully, it won’t transpire that all other printing firms turn out to have been nobbled and you will be able to read ‘the paper they tried to ban’ at the TAA!

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