Ort Gallery are thrilled to announce Resting Up Collective’s biggest programme to date!
Join Resting Up Collective (RUC) and Ort Gallery for Crip Resistance: Holding Space, Building Community, an online programme of events exploring disabled, sick, mad, and crip modes of resistance and remote community care.
From January to April 2025, this interdisciplinary collaboration will feature a series of online events including creative workshops, artist talks, live performances, and film screenings.
The programme will include a print and online publication documenting and expanding on the programme's themes. Finally, RUC will curate a book collection for Birmingham Resistance Library.
20% of the event and publication proceeds will support Gaza Sunbirds.
Programme to be announced in due course.
About the organisers:
RUC—resting up collective is an interdisciplinary group of chronically ill and disabled friends practising slowness/crip time to create, think, and interrupt neoliberal pressures and expectations on the body. We offer workshops and spaces for the crip community. We are running our second iteration of Postcards from Flaresville, a slow mail chain of care-full postcards from one resting space to another. We are slow works in progress, open to all who wish to join and help dream/organise.
Ort Gallery is a visual arts and poetry organisation based in Birmingham. We are on a social mission to redefine contemporary visual arts by rejecting the sector’s exclusivity, centring access and equity, and providing inclusive high quality art experiences. We support this mission with a care-centred approach (aka Warmth) and give artists, team members and participants autonomy over their projects.
Ort believes everyone should have access to high quality art experiences and aims to meet this standard by providing exhibition and professional development opportunities to artists, creatives and community members across all backgrounds.
We place Warmth at the heart of all our work. We recognise that galleries can be sites of oppression which centre and reproduce white normative and elitist ways of “being’ under the supposed guise of neutrality. We are interested in challenging this head on; whilst also committing to creating space for local artists and marginalised community groups across Birmingham and beyond to play an active role in shaping such practices, in the hopes of transforming ourselves, our city, and the wider arts ecology.
Crip Resistance: Holding Space, Building Community
ort on the road
2024: An Update
In January 2023, we made the difficult decision of leaving our gallery space in Balsall Heath. Since then, we have been programming without a fixed venue and funding; whilst also spending the last year turning inwards, deeply reflecting and working towards finding a way forward for us as an organisation.
It goes without saying that this past year has been an incredibly challenging one. But it hasn’t been without its various joys and wins. So, although we do not currently have a permanent public venue, we are deeply delighted to announce that we are back with a super exciting and fixed programme.
Building on the Warmth work we embarked upon in 2020, our 2024 programme aims to continue placing care and community at the heart of our work. 2024 will see us programming events, exhibitions, workshops, talks, residencies; sharing our Warmth findings; supporting artists and creatives and so much more!
By taking Ort On The Road, we hope to spread Warmth to other physical spaces across Birmingham and beyond via establishing meaningful partnerships and sharing good practice whilst no longer being attached to a single fixed space. In doing so, we aim to provide artists and our wider community with the space and tools to experiment, interrogate, play, demystify, feel and exhibit in Warm environments that we create together.
Ultimately, in this new phase of Ort, we will employ our ethos of Warmth to encourage cultures of experimentation rooted in collective care and liberation on all levels. In doing so, we hope to radically empower, inspire and transform our community, our city, and the wider arts ecology.
With warmth and solidarity from
The Ort Team xxx
We are going on the road
The Ort Gallery team has made the decision to move out of our gallery space on Moseley Road. We have spent the past 2 years exploring what 'Warmth' means in our day to day work and the deeper we look into this the more we realise that there is still so much more to research, learn and unlearn. We have decided to spend the next few months turning inwards and doing more research in order to develop further. We will therefore work remotely for a few months.
We spent 2022 fundraising to expand our team and identify core funding but were not successful. We will continue exploring how to make our small organisation more sustainable in the long term. 2023 will still see us programming events, exhibitions, workshops and talks, sharing our Warmth findings with you all and supporting artists. But we will do this without a fixed venue. We hope to see many of you around the city as we take Ort Gallery on the road!
Warm wishes and happy new year,
The Ort team x
January 2023