The Wrong Place: Rethinking Context in Contemporary Art was organised by Situations in association with Arnolfini and Bristol Legible City and hosted at Bristol Zoo on 3, 4,
and 5 February 2005. Contributors to the conference included Jason E. Bowman,
Alex Coles, Phil Collins, Jeremy Deller, Okwui Enwezor, Dan Hicks, Lu Jie, Declan McGonagle, Ewen McDonald, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Susan Norrie, Paul O’Neill and Mario Rizzi.

Artist Jason E. Bowman’s Untitled (The Theory of Parachuting) seminar kicked off the three-day conference in the expansive space of Cameron Balloon Factory. A military paratrooper, physiotherapist and base-jumper led the audience through the physical
and psychological effects of parachuting. ‘Freefall’, a fleeting moment of exhilaration, freedom and terror, became an apt metaphor for discussion of the creative process as the conference relocated to Bristol Zoo. Taking Miwon Kwon’s theorisation of place in her significant study One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, the presentations and conversations balanced critical analysis with artists’ case studies, bringing together leading scholars, artists and curators to rethink the notion of context in contemporary art.

Kwon suggests, “The wrong place is generally thought of as a place where one feels one does not belong: unfamiliar, disorientating, destabilising, even threatening.” But what curators Okwui Enwezor and Lu Jie revealed was the possibility that a sense of the ‘wrong place’ could expose the instability of the ‘right place’, that large-scale exhibitions such as Documenta or nomadic projects such as the Long March could advance an altogether different notion of a context or place as somewhere or something constituted through social, economic, cultural and political processes.

Archaeologist Dan Hicks drew comparison between an artist’s encounter with place and the performative fieldwork of archaeologists which “constitute broader, sometimes, messy, situations. A central task (for contemporary artists) is to acknowledge materiality: the vernacular, the textures, the things that matter”, whereby contexts are remade.

Download Paul O'Neill's observer's response to the conference here