A Slow Roasted Subject, And A Lengthy Buffet | Workshop
Goldsmiths Art Writing Group
28.07.2025
On Monday 28th July the gallery hosted A Slow Roasted Subject, And A Lengthy Buffet, a workshop led by Goldsmiths alumni Frank Wates and Oli Mardon, facilitated by Cell’s Trainee Producers Varvara Uhlik and Sam Stewart, invited members of the Goldsmiths Art Writing Group to respond to the Tanja Widmann, Johannes Porsch Produced By -1, plus One exhibition.
Participants began with stream-of-consciousness writing, using the exhibition as a prompt. Inspired by Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style - a book that retells the same story 99 times in different styles, they each rewrote their texts in a new ‘voice’, such as noble, visual, or prosthetic. Pages were exchanged, sentences erased and rewritten, allowing the texts to evolve through editing process of addition and deletion. The pieces became playful cybernetic systems, drawing on the exhibition’s interest in repetition and variation. Finally, fragments were cut out and placed around the exhibition, turning the gallery into a mirrored feedback loop between artwork, artist and audience.
"The compositional aspect of group writing - with its distributed and circulating forms of authorship - strikes a productive and timely experiment, especially within and in response to the exhibition’s periperformative conditions." - Johannes Porsch & Tanja Widmann
Participants:
Niamh Seaber
Martha Lowres
Farah Corrigan
Nicole Di
Emre Ataman
Dawi Moxon
Enoch Hitchcock
Anna Webb Chivite
The Goldsmiths Art Writing Group is a student‑led collective setup by artists Frank Wates and Oli Mardon, exploring writing as an artistic practice.
Varvara Uhlik and Sam Stewart are Cell's Trainee Producers, an initiative supported by Art Fund's Student Art Pass. The seven-month structured programme offers two full-time students a paid work placement to work closely with Cell’s critically focused team to actively engage in all aspects of gallery operations, from supporting the delivery of exhibitions and events to enhancing audience engagement.
'–1, plus One' is the first UK solo exhibition by Vienna‑based artist Tanja Widmann in collaboration with Johannes Porsch. Widmann’s work uses scripts, readymade objects and everyday technologies as 'source code' to create coded feedback loops, while Porsch’s displays operate as performative sets that reveal their own conditions of visibility. Their collaboration invites visitors to consider how processes of cutting, supplementing and repeating shape meaning and subjectivity.
