The Politics and International Relations programme at Canterbury Christ Church University has collaborated with local organisations and schoolchildren to curate and present a live art intervention held at the Tate Modern: “Waste Not, Want Not”. Curated as part of the Tate Exchange programme, the intervention will be live from Wednesday 12 April until Saturday 15 April 2017. Dr David Bates, director of Politics & IR, reports from the scene of the ‘Fairground’:

“We finished installing ‘Waste Not Want Not’ into floor 5 of the Switch House, at Tate Modern at 6pm on Tuesday. We got back to Canterbury at 9pm, then back to London for a 10am start.

When the doors opened, the people started to flood in. As the saying goes ‘build it and they will come’! 

All the work in our fairground looks fantastic.

Robert – a talented Slovakian student from Astor College in Dover – has produced a work called ‘The Booth’. Visitors to the exchange seem most curious to see what is inside!

Reece also from Astor college has completed his ‘House of Horrors’. For some reason, members of the public are using this to take ‘selfies’. I have no idea why!

The work by Valley’s Kids – all the way from the Rhonda Valley in Wales – is wonderful. (See their ‘Merry-go-round of Arts and Ideas’.)    

Our colleagues from People United are enjoying lots of success with their work ‘For Me For You’, which explores the idea of reciprocal altruism.

And the work of the artist Holly McKenzie encourages you to ‘Smash the Patriarchy’!

Finally, we must note that Susannah Campbell and Lewis Bloodworth, two of our own Politics and international Relations students from CCCU, were part of the live art piece ‘Test Your Mental Strength’, a two hour discussion of concerns of a theoretical nature. Joining with visitors to Tate, we debated such questions as: ‘Democracy: Is it Worth It?’ ‘You read all em books, but you don’t know what’s living!’; ‘Survival of the unfit’; ‘gender and being a woman’; ‘the industry of love’; ‘Is there a world beyond capitalism?’

I encourage everyone to roll up to take exchange – open until 6pm on Saturday.”

Find out more here: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/workshop/tate-exchange/fairground