event - Ellie Harrison

Exhibition

Bus Regulation: The Musical (Merseyside)

15 Jul 2023
The Black-E, Liverpool
Exhibition

Bus Regulation: The Musical (Strathclyde)

28 Jan 2023
Platform, Glasgow
Performance / Events

Bus Regulation: The Musical (Merseyside)

The final part of Harrison’s Bus Regulation: The Musical Trilogy – inspired by the 1980s hit musical ‘Starlight Express’ – re-enacts the history of public transport provision in the Merseyside region from the post-war period to the present day… on roller skates!
Performance / Events

Bus Regulation: The Musical (Strathclyde)

The second iteration of Harrison’s Bus Regulation: The Musical – inspired by the 1980s hit musical ‘Starlight Express’ – re-enacts the history of public transport provision in the Strathclyde region from the post-war period to the present day… on roller skates!
Performance / Events

Bus Regulation: The Musical (Greater Manchester)

Inspired by the 1980s hit musical ‘Starlight Express’, this performance / event re-enacts the history of public transport provision in Greater Manchester from the post-war period to the present day… on roller skates!
Performance / Events

The Elephant in the Room

As part of Panic! It’s an Arts Emergency Harrison was commissioned to make a new work using their research into inequality in the arts as a starting point. In April 2018, Harrison invited 50 participants from the Creative & Cultural Industries and beyond to take part in a Power & Privilege Workshop in London, to explore how these hidden forces in society affect all our lives.
Performance / Events

This Is What Democracy Looks Like!

We live in a liberal democracy, yet how much power do we really have to decide the direction of our country? “This Is What Democracy Looks Like!” gives you the opportunity to meet & greet your newly elected politicians at a roving roundtable discussion upon a bicycle built for seven. Hop on, decide on your direction and then travel together through the Olympic Park whilst discussing the issues that matter to you with the people in power.
Performance / Events

There’s nothing More Unequal than Equality amongst Unequals

A performance / installation exploring the different interpretations of the concept of ‘equality’ favoured by different parts of the political spectrum. On Friday 3 July 2015, a diverse group of six people took part in a simple performance at g39 in Cardiff – standing on a series of special plinths designed to raise each person up to an equal level, so that together they formed a perfect line.
Exhibition

MONEY M€AL

Harrison collaborated with artist Emily Furneaux to facilitate this discussion event about our relationships with money, as part of Glasgow Open House Art Festival in 2015.
Performance / Events

High Street Casualties: Ellie Harrison’s Zombie Walk

A performance / event in collaboration with Ort Gallery staged on Birmingham’s busy shopping streets. Dressed as “zombie employees”, more than 60 participants helped to map the former locations of thirteen of the big retail chains which have disappeared from our high streets since the start of the financial crisis in 2008.
Project website
Performance / Events

Dark Days

An ‘experiment in communal living’, this event offered one hundred participants the unique opportunity to stay the night in the great hall of the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow as part of a pop-up community.
Project website
Performance / Events

The Global Race

The Global Race is an absurd vision of an Olympic games of the future, in which the brilliance of human ‘innovation‘ means we no longer need to break a sweat! At an athletics track in central Berlin, a group of ‘elite athletes’ and members of the public competed in a series of races on Segways.
Exhibition

Anti-Capitalist Aerobics

Re-staged during Gustav Metzger’s Facing Extinction conference on 7 June 2014, Anti-Capitalist Aerobics engages delegates in an energy intensive workout in order to expose some of the fundamental contradictions in the way we live our lives. (Timecode 02:38-10:20)
Performance / Events

Transition Community of One

Devised in 2014 in response to Glasgow Open House Arts Festival, this special event at Harrison’s flat in Glasgow aimed to expose the paradox at the heart of her lifestyle and challenge her actually existing ‘socialism in one person’. Monthly screenings continued in 2016 as part of The Glasgow Effect.
Internet / Broadcasts

Ellie & Oliver’s Long Distance Relationship

For Glasgow Open House Arts Festival 2014, Harrison & her former flatmate Oliver Braid reunited to present two special editions of their popular radio show, as part of three interlinked projects taking place over two weekends, across both their new residences in the west and east of the city.
Performance / Events

Anti-Capitalist Aerobics

Originally created as a disruption during Invisible Dust’s Ways of Seeing Climate Change conference on 30 October 2013, Anti-Capitalist Aerobics engages delegates in an energy intensive workout in order to expose some of the fundamental contradictions in the way we live our lives.
Performance / Events

The Other Forecast

Recorded LIVE in front of a green screen, Harrison’s The Other Forecast offers her summary of the absurd consequences of capitalism, as a warning about the future we are heading towards if the system continues unchecked. Broadcast on the Big Screen at MediaCityUK in November 2013 as part of The Other Forecast project – a collaboration between Harrison & John O’Shea.
Project website
Internet / Broadcasts

Friendship Festival

For Glasgay! 2012, Harrison & her flatmate Oliver Braid presented Friendship Festival. Building on the success of their popular radio show, they invited six other friendly duos with intimate and provocative thoughts to share with the world, into their home for a series of weekend radio show ‘takeovers’.
Installations

The Redistribution of Wealth

Installed in Tate Britain’s Historic Collection Room, this piece retells the history of UK government spending on the arts from the birth of the ‘Council for the Encouragement of Music & the Arts’ in 1940, right up to the present day climate of cutbacks.
Exhibition

Ellie & Oliver Show

3 Aug 2012
Edinburgh Art Festival
Exhibition

Ellie & Oliver Show

20 Apr 2012
Glasgow International
Performance / Events

Relentless Innovation

Devised by Harrison for the The List Hot 100 Party at the National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh after being voted No.93 in this annual list of Scotland’s ‘creative talent’. A ‘propaganda striptease’ of sorts, this artist’s talk / performance attempts to address the relentless innovation cycles such hitlists celebrate, and to explore the detrimental impact this obsession with the new might have on our mental health and the world around us.
Internet / Broadcasts

Best of the Rest

The final instalment in her series of 4 LIVE Broadcasts made over the course of a year (December 2010 – November 2011). Harrison draws on recurring themes from her previous broadcasts, to introduce the ideas behind Oliver Braid’s exhibition I’ll Look Forward To It and tell the story of her own work-life successes and failures in 2011. (Duration: 27:50)
Performance / Events

Desk Chair Disco

Ellie Harrison & Adele Prince (Sports Day) staged the first ever Desk Chair Disco in Newcastle upon Tyne on Friday 4 November 2011. City dwellers were offered the opportunity to redress their work-life balance by reclaiming their ordinary office furniture and taking it out on the town. As part of Wunderbar festival, Sports Day were invited to take over an empty office unit in the Pandon Building and put on this ‘roller disco with a difference’. The evening featured disco lights, DJ sets, live music and daring Desk Chair Derby displays courtesy of the Newcastle Roller Girls.

Ellie Harrison Louise Haigh and Labour say that they will reform the complex fares system to ensure that passengers are confident that they are getting the best fare; confidence that X is the case, and X being the case are not necessarily the same thing. Simplification of fares would have to include the abolition of many fares. The assertion that simplifying the fares structure would reduce travelling costs is based upon a false premise, that being that the complicated-ness of the fares-and-ticketing structure is the reason why fares are expensive, that is not why they are expensive. They are expensive because the base level is too high. If you massively simplify the fares, one might then always be certain of getting the best available fare because there are no obscure cheaper fare hidden away in a Byzantine monolith, but that best fare is likely the best of a bad bunch. Railway fares are complicated, but it is within this myriad complexity that the nuances which facilitate cheaper options lurk; if you take a sledgehammer to the behemoth you bring down the cheaper options which lurk within the behemoth. If there are presently 18 options for doing Thing X, with 15 of those ways being cheap, and 3 of those ways being expensive, if you abolish the 15 cheap options for doing thing X you have massively simplified the paying-to-do-Thing X process because having 3 ways is much simpler than having 18 ways, and you have made it such that one is highly unlikely to not notice the cheapest of the available fares, because one is more likely to notice something when it is one amongst 3 than if it is one amongst 18, but it is nevertheless the case that the person is selecting the cheapest of the 3 most expensive. (i) Being guaranteed to always get the best fare; and (ii). getting cheaper fares are not necessarily the same thing. Be mindful of the actual specific wording of things: both before and after coming into government, Labour has never in actually promised cheaper fares, what Labour has promised is that one will be guaranteed to get the best available fare. The general public, politicians and public-transport campaign organisations alike have been seduced by the word 'simplification'. Simplification is not a virtue in and of itself. Simplification is a neutral concept, neither a good thing nor a bad thing; what is pertinent and important is the nature of the simplification. One can simplify travelling costs upwards. Simplification can simplify out the cheaper options. I deliberately say 'travelling costs', not 'fares', because thinking only terms of fares when it comes to simplification of railway fares and ticketing, and when it comes to Single-Leg Pricing is a proverbial red herring, one should think both in terms of fares AND in terms of travelling costs. Fare decreases do not necessarily mean travelling-cost. LNER is a prime example: with the June of 2023 introduction of Single-Leg Pricing on LNER, and the February of 2024 introduced of the Simpler Fares pilot, travelling costs for using LNER have gone up. Two halved-in-price Singles are more expensive than one Day Return; a fare reduction, but a travelling-cost increase. The changes December of 2023 fares-and-ticketing changes on c2c have many of the same fare-decreases-but-travelling-cost increases as LNER, plus its pay-as-you-go tap-in-tap-out integration with Transport for London (to simplify things) has necessitated the introduction of a weekday early-evening peak period between 4.00 p.m. and 7.00 p.m., which has numerous knock-on effects which can hugely increase one's travelling costs. The answer is not reform of the fares-and-ticketing structure. The answer is not simplification of the fares-and-ticketing structure. The answer is to decrease the price of all existing fares. Do not abolish any existing fares. Do not introduce any new types of fare. Just make all existing fares 45% cheaper, and leave it at that.

As the idiom goes: 'Be careful what you wish for, because it might come true'. Reform will only be good if it is good reform. We don't need reform, we need good reform. Some might fear that prices would inevitably be rationalised upwards. Inevitably, the rationalisation would rationalise out the cheaper options. Some might fear that reform of the fares-and-ticketing structure would, inevitably, reform travelling costs upwards, and reform out the cheaper options. Some might fear that simplification of the fares-and-ticketing structure would, inevitably, simplify travelling costs upwards, and simplify out the cheaper options. Just take a look at LNER. Be careful what you wish for, because it might come true.