Some etymologists believe that the name Easter is derived from the pagan goddess Eostre, the goddess was associated with love and fertility, however there is no definitive evidence that there was a goddess named Eostre and or that her hare familiar was part of pagan folklore at all.

SPUR was invited to design and contribute to a research publication for the Autumn 2017 exhibition Digital Matters: The Earth Behind the Screen at Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art (CFCCA) in Manchester.

The Girl Library – a Reading Group, hosted by SPUR
As part of the exhibition Reading Gendered Words at Leeds Arts University, SPUR hosted two reading and screening groups around the theme of the word girl, where we read, watched and discussed together a number of texts that investigate the word girl and girl culture.

In September 2017 we took part for the third year running in London based arts festival Art Licks Weekend. As a non venue based organisation we enjoy collaborating with national organisations on events and projects and enjoyed taking part in Art Licks Weekend for the third time!

A new video commission by artist Jade Annaw responding to SPUR’s research themes of GIRL and spores, Wiiatu finds itself exploring relationships, the digital realm and communication.

Online exhibition featuring newly commissioned works by artist Jade Annaw for isthisit’s on going online exhibition series.

nawki or ‘not as we know it’, organised by 12o collective began in 2016, with the intention to experiment with the art fair model, each iteration shifts its focus to a different framework with a selection of arts organisation/spaces across the UK invited to participate, resulting in a cross organisation collaborative outcome.

Leeds Arts University 2017 Library Interventions: Reading Gendered Words

Artist, designer, writer: An aporetic collaboration between library, gallery and symposium. As part of Reading Gendered Words SPUR presented a pop up ‘girl library’ and a series of reading groups.

The Art Licks Weekend (30 September – 2 October 2016) celebrates the creative energy of
the emerging London art scene. For the three-day festival young galleries, not-for- profit
projects, artist-run spaces and independent curatorial projects open to the public with special
events and exhibitions of work by early career artists.

For the Spring Equinox 2016, 20 March, we commissioned two artists to create a Thaumatrope which will be available to freely download from our website.

A Thaumatrope is a disk with a picture on each side which is attached to two pieces of string, when the strings are twirled quickly between your fingers the two pictures appear to blend into one.

For 2016 we hosted a digital vs physical collage work by Norwegian artist Maria Midttun. The moveable collage invited visitors to the website to create their own collage that we re-set each time the page refreshed.

On Saturday 16 April in partnership with The Hepworth Wakefield we hosted Show + Tell – a free event with local photographers presenting their work and ideas in a fun, informal manner.

Women in Sink tells the story of a little hair salon in the heart of the Christian Arab community in Haifa, where director Iris Zaki goes to work as a shampoo girl.

Originally produced for SPUR’s Annuale 2015 publication It’s Not My Fault, an exhibition in the form of an A5 folded publication.

Proposal for the Museum of the Agreed Future by Owen Booth

What is Galentine’s Day?

Oh, it’s only the best day of the year. Every February 13th, Leslie Knope and her lady friends leave their partners at home and just kick it breakfast style.

A screening and artist talk event on 27 November 2015 for SPUR’s commission by Georgie Grace, ‘A wonderful future whereyou have back up copies’ (2015), which is part of an ongoing research project into speculative technologies, wishful thinking, and the concept of The Singularity. Beginning with the claim made by tech entrepreneurs that in the near future we might be able toscan and fully capture the data of our minds, the video explores what implications the ability to upload our brains and restore ourselves from back up would have for our concepts of time, memory, experience and risk.

For this screening event SPUR developed our research into the idea of the impending dystopic future, relaying our fears about what could happen to what might already be happening now.

Originally produced for SPUR’s Annuale 2015 publication It’s Not My Fault, an exhibition in the form of an A5 folded publication.

Zombie by Bruce Asbestos

The Pain Management Programme, 2015

Kadish Morris is a London based poet b. 1990. She has performed her work at ICA, Southbank Centre, Rich Mix and has poetry published in Popshot and most recently in It Wasn’t My Fault.

This new commission for the Landing Site took the form of a text piece; a series of instructions, questions and exercises exploring the long-term management of chronic pain. Originally presented as a continuous scrolling text installation.

Feminism and Time: A Reading Group was held on Sunday 18 October 2015 at 2pm, reading and discussing together Julia Kristeva’s important essay ‘Women’s Time’ (1981), as well as reflecting on the question of time and feminism more broadly in the context of the About Time programme.

As part of About Time SPUR presented our new publication We can’t go round it – we’ll have to go through it which launched as part of the Art Licks Weekend 2015 in venues across London.

Chronophobia means a fear of the future. In this audio and visual broadcast SPUR explored possible futures; to either confirm or assuage these fears through key texts that propose creative literary predictions of possible futures, fashion, stock or weather forecasting and live fortune telling.

SPUR’s major video commission; A wonderful future where you have back up copies by video artist Georgie Grace.

About Time was a city wide satellite programme of visual arts activity that aimed to highlight the work of artists, producers and projects based in Leeds.

It Wasn’t My Fault was an exhibition through publication produced for the 2015 Annuale arts festival in Edinburgh. The A5 printed publication was displayed and distributed across Annuale 2015 festival venues in Edinburgh and consists of ten new experimental prose commissions both text and image based, exploring the idea of looking towards an impending dystopian future.

Spring Equinox – a painting in two halves was a one day project to mark the Spring Equinox 2015 on Friday 20 March. The Equinox happens twice a year, in Spring and Autumn, and means ‘equal night’.

Internal Broadcast is a new commission on SPUR”s Landing Site gallery by Sophie Alda & Ximena Alarcon.

The artists, in conversation with each other, exploring the works and their practices alongside the collaborative restructure of their upcoming installation.

I Sought Solitude | Group Show | 07 – 22 February 2015

Opening Night: Friday 06 February 7 – 9pm
Curated by SPUR Co Founder & Programmer Abi Mitchell

SPUR undertook a residency project with Tate, as part of the wider Radio City project, organised by artists Harold Offeh and Marion Harrison, held at Tate Britain between November 2014 and February 2015, which invited artists and artist groups to contribute a project/residency, which looked at broadcasting and communication.

The typical Halloween style white bed sheet ghost, a simple, childish yet effectively subtle and to the point costume, offering full camouflage and anonymity to the wearer. Creating a mask for this ghost is individual to the wearer, inviting an artist to create this face offers an opportunity to explore the notion of subtle individuality and the limits of the imagination when provided with a very limited material.

Appropriation was a quick-fire, explorative print based exhibition and portfolio publication devised to examine the use of appropriation for the making of work. The project’s short deadline pushed artists to explore ideas around appropriation; seizing and taking possession of already existing material to create something new, assemblage, collage and literary based appropriation poetry.

Landing Site is an online gallery and exhibition programme format.

The Landing Site gallery sees a new artist commission every 6-8 weeks, where we work with an artist to develop and produce a piece of site specific work for exhibition.

The AOL Twitter Residency was an explorative online residency project devised to continue SPUR’s experimental residency programme by hosting artists in residence in the virtual space of our Twitter profile. The place of residency still holds the restrictions of dimension, space and use of resources yet allows for a full exploration and imaginative take on the residency process and virtual platform as a whole.

‘Collection of’ is SPUR’s second publication, the publication takes the form of a series of printed artist postcard editions, a small text based zine exploring the notion of image as text/text as image and an audio cassette of diverse local musicians to compliment the visual works.

The Upcoming Graduate Diary Project was an online documentary project, creating an experimental approach to working with our peers and exploring how university provides for our future careers at a time when we are questioning ourselves the most.

The Spur Exchange was a weeklong artist residency project involving six artists each having a one-day long residency within a live, open studio environment in the historic Corn Exchange building.

A work in two parts Volume One, a printed publication and audio cassette, examined the relationship and cross overs between the different cultural elements in Leeds at the time. Including written features and interviews on emerging and well known local artists such as Idiots Pasture and Simon Boase and interviews with artist led projects such as curatorial collective & gallery space Mexico and independent print set up Inpress.