I would maintain that art spaces have a duty to be demonstrably different from the kinds of public spaces dedicated to consumption that have invaded the centres of our cities. There, the displays take on some of the aspects of visual art in their seductive, tempting and luscious attraction. However, as presentations dedicated to a single end – individual purchase – there is a limit to their possible effect on our imagination and thinking. They are aesthetic devices at the service of a predetermined motivation and therefore at odds with any idea of artistic freedom, however compromised that now may be. (Esche 2004)
Ambika P3 was developed specifically as an experimental project space. Unlike venues such as museums, galleries and cinemas, the site had a multidisciplinary and industrial nature that enabled the research to operate at arm's length from both the physical boundaries of the white cube and the black box, and their ideological constraints. Ambika P3 opened in 2007, as the University of Westminster's space for international contemporary art and architecture, presenting a public programme of solo and group exhibitions, education projects, talks and events. It encourages a form of research through the development of new forms of content creation, and this is underpinned and evidenced by the multiple roles assigned to the space: for example, as a hybrid studio/production, space/exhibition environment, form of architectural screen, immersive environment, space of narrative encounters, site of discourse and site of pedagogy. Between 2007 and 2017, I commissioned and collaborated on a series of exhibitions that aimed to bring the distinctive elements of film and video installation to Ambika P3's project space in order to explore the form, theme and processes inherent to artists’ film and video as a defined field of practice. In physical terms, the constituent parts of artists’ film and video installation are the screen, time, space, image, projection and audience, which, added to the elements of the space, such as walls, height, light, scale and floor, provide the basic building blocks of these projects. Running in parallel and equally important is the curatorial engagement with identity, history and theory – which translates into an attention to the presentation of artists whose work was difficult to locate and had been often omitted by institutions because it defied dominant categories, slipped between the cultural nets or could not be easily monetised.