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26/7/05
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Drum: ARTWORKS 31
move the focus from physical attendance of
events to virtual interaction, by opening up the
website as the central focus, as a venue. This has
given us an international profile from the beginning
and a forum for real discussion and open debate.
There are now more than a hundred partners
delivering many, many hundreds of events all over
the country, not just visual arts
but in every art form. Today, the
Africa 05 website gets up to
which have a significantly different ethnic make-up –
Africa Remix got 22,000 people using their Salon
Afrique zone on the ballroom floor. And through
fellowship and residency programmes we have
managed to bring hundreds of African artists to
animate programmes and create real relationships
with galleries. The international interface to our
work has helped us broker a number of key partnerships with governments and a significant amount of
sponsorship and promotional partnership deals,
including the BBC, Time Out and Starbucks – large
organisations working together in ways that they
had never previously conceived and doing it
to deliver great art to diverse audiences.
We are also hoping that we can make this
“ There are hundreds of partners
delivering many hundreds of events
all over the country, not just visual
arts but art in every form.”
65,000 hits a
week and the
participant-facing pages of
the website have had over
45,000 hits from people across the
world interested in partnership. The
exhibitions, such as Africa
Remix at the Hayward, or
Depth of Field at the
South London Gallery
are getting audience
figures that are similar
to their regular
audiences, but
more than a season, more
than a year; this needs to be the
beginning of an ongoing commitment
to a more inclusive, democratic and collaborative
future that puts audience engagement and
partnership up there as priorities along with
scholarship and curation. Each element of the
programme poses a set of questions for the host
institution. How do they continue to engage and
sustain this energy? Each organisation has come up
with a particular set of aims, but every partner is
linked by commitment to harness this energy and
move forward in the spirit of change.