About
The Ministry of Rules
The Ministry of Rules is a fictional organisation that will be based in the Play Ground exhibition at Leicester’s New Walk Museum and Art Gallery between the 21st and 25th of February, 2011.
You can join the Ministry for a series of short, free activities to investigate ideas around rules in art galleries and museums. The activities will be coordinated by artist Nikki Pugh, but you, the Inspectors, will be deciding exactly what you want to investigate, so keep an eye on this website to find out what is happening and when.
Join us in the gallery throughout the morning of Monday 21st of February to make the enormous ideas wall that will start off the investigation. What rules do we follow? Which rules would we like to break? Which rules shall we re-write?
MoR activities will take place daily on a mostly drop-in basis between 11.00am and 4.00pm with a break for lunch.
The Exhibition
Play Ground
5th February – 8th May 2011
New Walk Museum & Art Gallery (in partnership with The City Gallery)
Cory Arcangel, Angela Bulloch, Marcel Duchamp, Hassan Hajjaj, Fischli and Weiss, Takashi Murata, Bob and Roberta Smith, Mungo Thomson, Erwin Wurm.
At an art gallery we usually have to follow a series of rules. Don’t touch the work, don’t run, don’t shout, don’t play. Don’t, in short, have fun. We thought it would be good to try something else – this exhibition shows contemporary artists that treat the gallery like a fairground rather than a church.
The exhibition features Hassan Hajjaj’s Le Salon, a Moroccan influenced café, American artist Mungo Thomson’s production of a large inflatable as an artwork. Angela Bulloch’s light installations that respond to the audience chanting football songs, amazing films of mechanical wonders by Fischli and Weiss and Erwin Wurm’s prints giving instructions on how to turn yourself into a sculpture for one minute.
So welcome to Play Ground, where we can touch the art (at least most of it), where we can shout and sing and where you should have fun. In this exhibition the play is as important as the ideas it may stimulate.
