Conjunction08

The Biennial will take place in the city centre - predominantly at The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, AirSpace Gallery, the beautiful Bethesda Chapel, a temporary Conjunction 08 gallery space in a vacant retail unit on Piccadilly - Area 23, and the Main Post Office in Tontine Street. There will also be site-specific artworks in and around a variety of spaces and places in the city centre and an exhibition of street and urban art at the region’s newest commercial gallery, Let them Create in Barlaston.

The theme is perfectly suited to a multi-sited event, where the audience encounters its apparently everyday nature - things we find in the streets of our city suddenly take on a new significance. It is no coincidence that many of the sites chosen for Conjunction are not conventional art spaces. Bethesda Chapel, for instance, can certainly be considered a find, now re-opened after having been closed to the public for many years. The artworks placed within the chapel address a sense of this new collective spirit.

Conjunction also features a reclaimed retail space, swapping a commercial exchange (or shopping experience) for an alternative exchange – a cultural one. We hope that the transformation of these spaces by the artists in the festival opens new perspectives on our city's buildings and the value of their contents.