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This month Spacemarket is featuring one of Benjamin Forster’s drawings in its shop window.

Enjoy liquid space…

Benjamin Forster has been selected to participate in the 2011 SPLENDID Arts Lab from 25 June – 12 August.

The Arts Lab residency will bring 15 artists of various disciplines to the north coast of NSW to explore the rich and creative environment of making artwork for large-scale festivals. This process will be facilitated by leading artists, designers, performers, makers and creative thinkers that will assist in developing ideas which promote audience involvement and transform the festival site into an experimental playground. Within the Arts Lab, artists will work collaboratively in a dynamic environment that encourages critical thinking, play and risk-taking. It’s also an opportunity to meet peers from across a range of artistic disciplines and backgrounds.

Find out more about the SPLENDID program here.

Re: is a playful and experimental online project involving six young artists – Anna Madeleine, Benjamin Forster, Robbie Karmel, Luke Penders, Sarah Catherine Firth and Travis H Heinrich. Over seven months each artist will create five artworks – a total of thirty works. The artists will take turns each week presenting a new work. There’s only one rule; each new piece must reference the one produced the week before. Not intended as a site for complete and finished works, rather re: can be seen as a simple game that allows for the artists to play with the intersections of each of their individual practices.

Find out more and view some of the work here.

Benjamin Forster’s exhibition )( is now open at Fremantle Arts Centre from 25 March until 15 May. The result of an extended residency through FACAIR, Fremantle Arts Centres Artist in Residency programme, )( continues Forster’s critique of drawing, tracing the boundaries of logic, economy and the role of the artist in art making.

Forster’s curiously titled )( engages in the meaning of construction and the construction of meaning. His work is full of the fun of language puns but also a serious critique of the limitation of language. In )( Forster has erased much of the source material only to find a significant new language in the often overlooked linch pins of text – punctuation and space. Forster reminds us that translating meaning fundamentally relies on a constant and expected language, however an artist’s practice, and importantly for Forster drawing, relies on and expands from the shortcomings of this same language.

Off the back of )(, Benjamin is now undertaking a three week intensive residence at cia studios. During this time he will be devising a new performance work for future collaboration with a dancer.

Come along to the Fremantle Arts Centre Thursday 24 February at 6:00pm to visit Benjamin Forster’s studio as he talks about his upcoming exhibition )(. Tom Mùller, one half of collaborative duo Maschi Fontana, Lily Hibberd, and Olga Cironis will also be talking about their practices.

More information can be found here.

Benjamin Forster is the recipient of a 2011 JUMP mentorship. He will spend the next ten months being mentored by steve bull, co-founder of pvi collective. During this time Benjamin will be aiming to establish collaborations with performers and dancers in order to work towards an interactive installation.

More information about JUMP can be found here.

Benjamin Forster is currently an artist in residence at the Fremantle Arts Centre. Benjamin will spend his time in the studio continuing his investigation into contemporary systems of rationality and their implicit relationship with the irrational. Benjamin will be producing work for his exhibition, )( at the Fremantle Arts Centre in March 2011.

)( will feature objects and images including books and video, which explores systems of rationality; specifically the storage of information and the tenuous connection to ‘meaning’ and ‘value’.

Realtime 100 includes a brief write up of Last Man To Die’s latest project shown at Under The Radar as part of the Brisbane Festival 2010. Read it here.

This work was also shown at the Blue Room Theatre during September and November. Read the Western Australian’s review here.

A brand new design for emptybook. Over the next few weeks documentation of all Benjamin Forster’s previous projects will be added. Check back here soon for more news and current affairs.