About the project
BalinHouseProjects (BHP) is a platform that discusses art and conviviality in a domestic setting. Initiated in 2006 in a London council flat located in one of the largest and oldest council estates in the UK, it is a place for informal social gathering that brings immediate neighbors and the artist community together through exhibitions and participatory workshops.
BHP’s programme consists of activities including artist commissions, collaborative workshops with local residents; themed trips; writer commissions for publications.
BHP also runs Sunday Lunches salon where the guests discuss over informal lunch a range of topics including the artist’s role in the community, and the challenges of bureaucracy when facilitating community-based projects.
BHP is currently developing a two-year project which will take place in its new live-work space in a plot unoccupied since WW2, in Lambeth, London, under the name The Other Space (TOS). BHP will commission an artist and a writer to explore the notion of home as a place for reflection/contemplation and its relationship to the inhabitant’s identity, as well as continuing Sunday Lunches at this new site.
At TOS, BHP is planning new event formats such as the singer/composer-led Complaint’s Choir that explores themes such as the lack of social housing in London. BHP will also collaborate with Remakery (a non-profit organization based in Brixton that teaches skills for repair and reuse) in the design and building for the events at TOS.
The BHP workshop activities will extend to local parks involving local residents under the themes that relate to ecology to reflect the key feature of the plot: a listed mature tree. The outcome of the workshops with the local communities will be presented in a major art institution in London.
About the artist
BHP collaborates with individuals and local organizations. Its aim is the community and individuals’ empowerment through workshops/exhibitions format.
The projects starting point are official and unrecorded local history.
The projects are funded by Arts Council of England, local authorities’ small grants and Sunday Lunches covered by BHP.
Recently BHP has been searching with other organisations for models in which artists can live/work/exhibit and own their dwelling within London