&model is a curatorial project established in 2012 by James Chinneck, Chris Bloor and Derek Horton. We have run a continuous exhibition programme (from January 2013 onwards) sometimes working alongside guest curators and showing a diverse range of international artists. We are continuing to use our three-floor 19th century building in central Leeds to develop projects and events that bring contemporary artists and others to work alongside some of the city’s emerging practitioners. Occasional artist residencies complement our exhibition programme. Use of the building is enabled by the Leeds charity RTTA (Regeneration Through The Arts). All our projects, so far involving well over 200 artists are documented in the archive section of our website - http://www.andmodel.com/archive.htm

A Small View is a small, independent, artist-led exhibition space based in the heart of Liverpool. Open since April 2015, the space has collaborated with a number of international and local artists, exhibiting diverse works that reflect the multifaceted nature of contemporary art practice. Managed by Benjamin Davies and Kelly Hayes, A Small View aims to experiment and facilitate new collaborations within the city of Liverpool.

Hickster Projects is a small experimental platform set up by Sue Kennington, It takes place in a remote space near Siena , Italy - where there is a growing audience of international art collectors, who would be unlikely to visit shows on the periphery of western urban centres and thus to showcase some of this exciting emerging artistic talent to a new and international audience. After showcasing the work at Hickster Projects, in the summer, the show then hopes to migrate to an urban ‘base’ – and find another audience.

Five Years is a collaborative artists' project.

Founded in 1998, Five Years' initial aim was to set up a gallery which was artist-run and where programming would maintain a direct relationship to practice. Five Years continues to develop this aim of maintaining close links between the production and exhibition of visual art, and the discourse which informs it. In February 2007 the membership was expanded to form a loose knit collective of artists.

Rather than acting as a 'curatorial' entity, the group's members continue to develop exhibition projects based around concerns emerging from their own practices; offering these projects as frameworks within which other artists can, through participation, respond to or engage in dialogue around the concerns being discussed by the group. Through these processes, Five Years aims to create a context which fosters productive dialogue between artists and the exposure of ambitious new work.

How might an artist-run gallery, a collection, a collective, a communal project?
Such a problem became one of identification. How do we, participants in Five Years, define ourselves in relation to the space and project? How do we identify ourselves to be seen in relation to the expert discourse of the market?
The project must display within its protocol,to being named and identified in this process, to submit (even if marginally) to its form of management.
As a collection of fragments, then, Five Years approaches its own arrangement as a collection that foregrounds the justice of exteriority, a refusal of synthesis through selection, a justice of “arrangement at the level of disarray.”
A gallery in pieces (a collection of pieces, a collective based on the fragment), the inclusion in the space shows not one distilled collective concern, but a concern for collective equivocity. Such a term does not call towards ambivalence or ambiguity. Instead it points towards equal voices, towards the struggle that equality demands.
To place voices in equal is to experience not harmonic synthesis (achieved through the sublime violence of sublation) but the constancy of struggle, of the discordance of discourse among equals.

The collective whole or work of Five Years, then, is the work of the empty place around which a garland of fragments operate. As fragments (each practice a fragment) each practice is that of the ‘complete’ individual – the hedgehog or porcupine principle whereby the fragment individuates completely – but these complete parts converge as on a garland. The string upon which these fragments are strung, Five Years, encircles an ‘empty place’ as the site of incompletion, of the refusal of completion through synthesis. Here the possible activity of dissensus rather than consensus can take place, if one is brave enough.
A fleeting proposition from us: Romantic Bureaucracy is put forward, is put on hold. (To think a bureaucracy in terms of Romanticism put forward by Blanchot would be to think about an instrumentalisation of a movement that necessarily composes and decomposes, that comes together to fall apart.
So. Not Romantic Bureaucracy, then. That is happening already as an artist run space- exhibition-event form, that persistently un-works itself, refuses coherence. To borrow again from Blanchot, we perhaps have here the work of un-working.
To end for now with a question: we might ask, paradoxically, what is lacking in the fragment? Both nothing and everything – it is both irresolutely complete and incomplete. Instead we might ask how one moves from the open field of the social to the abrupt violent gesture that fragments, that causes the fracture of the fragment.

Islington Mill is a leading independent UK arts organisation based in Salford, in the NW England. Structured around an organic network of independent artists, Islington Mill runs innovative inter-disciplinary public arts programmes and artist residencies alongside studio spaces and an artists’ B&B. Drawing on the radical and subversive creative energy running through its arts activities, Islington Mill also has a reputation for putting on legendary experimental gatherings, events and parties.

Based in the evocative buildings and courtyard of a former Victorian mill, Islington Mill is a unique and inspiring environment where the architecture of industrial Britain is fused with the creative energy of industrious artists at work and at play.

Founded by Bill Campbell in 2000, who bought it after spending four years developing the project and raising the initial finance, Islington Mill is the product of a singular dream to form a network of artists around the shared goal of living and working as freely and creatively as possible.

Like the Hacienda before it, Islington Mill is organised along similar principles inspired by the Situationist movement, an avant-garde European art movement formed in the fifties and sixties that became a prototype of punk. Picking up where the former left off, Islington Mill has a similar focus of creating an open-source environment outside of conventional structures and art traditions that can act as a catalyst for “the creative act” in all its many forms and unlock the inner artist in almost anyone.

Currently run by designer Bill Campbell, musician Mark Carlin and visual artist Maurice Carlin, Islington Mill is a non-hierarchical organisation that makes no distinction between work and play, outcome and process, chaos and control. Operating outside a commercial, profit-led agenda, it is a genuinely independent arts organisation that puts nurturing, supporting and inspiring creativity, especially new and emerging talent, at the heart of everything it does.

Forged in the spirit of D-I-Y, it recognises risk-taking and experimentalism in a non-judgmental, non-pressured environment as integral to art practice and is able to offer artists an unusual level of creative freedom in an increasingly market-led cultural landscape.

Although Islington Mill is predominantly focussed around the physical space in Salford, it recently organised its first “mass residency” with thirty artists in Ibiza and now plans to take the spirit of Islington Mill on tour elsewhere, building on existing links starting this October with an exchange with Flux Factory NYC.

Not content with stopping at these achievements, Islington Mill is continuously seeking to progress in its mission to inspire, educate and develop artists in their careers in an ever-changing social and cultural landscape.

Islington Mill was very pleased to have recieved its first ever ACE programme funding in the history of its organisation earlier in 2013, which will be used towards testing new strategies for residencies and developing its marketing and organisational structure.

As part of this forward-looking strategy, Islington Mill is excited about the opportunity to develop it's 6th floor space into further B&B style bedrooms and its 5th floor space into a dedicated artist residency space.

However further funding is still needed for Islington Mill to realise its full potential and so it is constantly exploring funding sources and income streams that will allow it to maintain its unique vision for the arts into the future.

To this end, Islington Mill has also secured Arts Council Catalyst funding, in consortium with the Chinese Arts Centre, this fund helps arts organisations access private funding by exploring how relationships can be formed with patrons and other independent sources.

Islington Mill is now to an exciting future that is global and ambitious. With the right funding in place, it hopes to be responsible for sending local artists out onto international residencies, while receiving incoming international artists in order to realise its full potential as a dynamic international arts hub and creative interchange.