‘Urgent Moments: Art and Social Change’ edited by Sophie Jerram

‘Urgent Moments: Art and Social Change: The Letting Space projects 2010-2020’ was edited by 2020 AFIELD Peer Sophie Jerram, alongside Mark Amery and Amber Clausner !

This latest publication chronicles the remarkable artistic activation of the 2010s, when Letting Space public art curators took over vacant spaces in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis.

After first occupying vacant spaces in post-stock-market-crash Auckland in the mid-1990s, public art curators Letting Space re-emerged in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis. Confronted by the thin net of social welfare, the waste of the capitalist system and the climate emergency, it brokered spaces for artists to think and act radically, outside gallery walls.

This book chronicles the projects those artists drove. From a grocery store where everything was free to an ATM for depositing moods and a citizens’ water-testing lab, they added to the civic dialogue at a time when public space and media were increasingly commodified and under surveillance.*

Written by leading New Zealand writers and thinkers including Pip Adam and Chris Kraus, Urgent Moments demonstrates the vital role artists can play in the urgent discussions of our time.

*Massy University Press