User talk:Nilfunct

Outlet Project Room
The Outlet Project Room is an experimental art space, engendering awareness for the various tenets of emergent art and conceptual practices in South Africa. Using the established model of the micro gallery as a starting point, Outlet began its life in 2003, above an old assembly hall, in a small and insignificant projector room. This first Outlet space was a hijacked room on the arts campus of the Tshwane University of Technology (previously known as Pretoria Technikon). The 3 X 3 meter room size made Outlet a proverbial 'white cube', initially used as a projector housing for the hall below, and transformed into a gallery of sorts.

The original space in Pretoria, South Africa was founded by Berlin-based artist Abrie Fourie, who gave Outlet to Johannesburg-based artist and curator Shane de Lange in 2007, after leaving South Africa to further his artistic career internationally. Between 2003 and 2010 Outlet held over fifty events in Pretoria, some resembling ordinary exhibitions with pictures hanging on the walls, and others verging on ritualism or happenings. From this premise, if there was a list of artistic disciplines and mediums that Outlet propagated most, painting, drawing, sculpture, and printmaking would be at the very bottom. That is not to say such disciplines are irrelevant, but merely have the luxury of being exposed; the greater public seeing them as art, as opposed to disciplines such as video, performance, digital, sound, and other conceptually-driven practices. Thus, Outlet supports less bankable art, avoiding profit-margin orientated art practices, endeavoring to deconstruct the ideological foundations of art markets and gallery systems.

Outlet can be understood as a quasi-socialist, discursive project, commonly placed under the banner of a 'project room' or 'out-space'. Simply put, Outlet is a virtual, ever-evolving, non-structured, organic place where young artists can generate exchanges and create discourse, particularly surrounding the orthodoxy of art and institutions in South Africa.

In 2010 de Lange moved Outlet to Braamfontein, Johannesburg, evolving upon the now traditional conceptual foundations of the project room, encompassing alternative notions of platform and space, leading to ad-hoc extensions and partnerships, such as residencies, seminars, workshops, lectures, and publications. As de Lange places it: "This approach has moved the micro gallery into the realm of [micro] networks, where collaboration, cross-pollination, discussion, and artistic awareness challenge the predominantly closed establishment, of buying and selling art, creating a more dynamic space for the production and distribution of art, including close co-operation with other, like-minded micro spaces".