State Your Business

State Your Business was hosted by the publicly funded international art organisation LOKAAL 01 in Breda, Netherlands. Clarke was invited to create a project during the city’s annual visual arts festival Cultuur Nacht Breda, that would alter the landscape of the city by incorporating artworks in key public spaces.

Interested by the boundaries of art and graphic design, Clarke selected practitioners from both fields to test the significance of each subject in an international, public engagement project and stipulated that each participant must exhibit artwork in the city and the LOKAAL 01 space. He asked each of the contributors to generate work that would compete against advertising and government properganda in Breda, confronting the public with a visual alternative during much political and financial change.

Each practitioner was given a research grant to visit the city before the installation date and a materials budget to generate works in response to the city, funded by LOKAAL 01 and overseen by the curator. Permission was granted to exhibit works on and around civic offices, the park, the central car park and rail station, The Museum of Breda, The Mezz concert hall, twelve public houses and local residents’ windows.

Funded by LOKAAL 01, Clarke’s own contribution consisted of banners exhibited on 10 permanent flagpoles outside the Museum of Breda. Within the LOKAAL 01 gallery space he exhibited 10 plastercast busts that would later appear in the London Open 2012 at the Whitechapel.

Clarke and LOKAAL 01 produced an edition of 5000 full-colour State Your Business Gazette newspapers: this included an essay by the curator and was distributed by local teenagers at the launch of Cultuur Nacht Breda.

• http://www.cultuurnachtbreda.nl/