Stephen Willats

Installation of Human Right at MIMA, Middlesbrough, 2017

In Human Right, I am responding to an invitation by MIMA to create a work that changes the relationship of the institution from an isolated container of rarified, elevated objects to an interactive facility for local people that presents concerns and issues to which they can relate... Human Right ... externalises the internal context of the museum into the physical and social world in which it is situated by bringing it directly into the reality of the town and creating an interactive network between inside and outside.
Over a six-moth period I worked with four residents of Middlesbrough, each of whom has in their own way self-organised a community facility to transform how a group of people in the local environment can relate to each other and to contemporary society. Each situation has been made a response to a polemic of perceived difference within contemporary society, a need that was seen to be right for redressing in some way, and which as a feature of contemporary society is relatable to, even if not directly experienced personally, by the viewer of the work.
Stephen Willats
From the catalogue for Stephen Willats, Human Right, MIMA, Middlesbrough 2017, ed. Miguel Amado
Panels of Human Right were installed in MIMA and in a shop space in Linthorpe Road, there were films by Willats in shop windows along the route between the two installations.