The Anti-bodies programme is developed for different cultural contexts and produced by a network of contemporary visual arts organisations based in the south west of England, in collaboration with national and international partners.

The Anti-Bodies network is Arnolfini, Bristol; Kurator, Plymouth; ProjectBase, Cornwall; Plymouth Arts Centre, Relational, Bristol; and Spacex, Exeter.

The current curatorial and production partners are: amino, Newcastle upon Tyne; Animate Projects; LX 2.0 // Lisboa 20 Arte Contemporanea, Lisbon, Portugal; Picture This Moving Image, Bristol; Post Museum, Little India, Singapore; Townhouse Gallery, Cairo; and Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

The Anti-Bodies Interaction programme includes the website, an online open submission and presentation platform Open Anti-Bodies developed by Kurator, a youth initiative Young Anti-Bodies, events, discussion, and resources.

Anti-Bodies seeks to encourage critical engagement with international contemporary art and extend notions of context-led working and participation in the wider social realm. It is scheduled to run until 2012.

The overall Anti-Bodies programme is curated and co-ordinated by Relational.

Anti-Bodies has been developed thorugh a process of dialogue between the network partners, Relational, and Arts Council England, South West, which has supported both the research and development phases of the programme.

In 2007, Relational developed the Anti-Bodies curatorial theme and invited eleven key curators and organisations based in the south west of England to respond and make proposals. Five of these proposals were selected and, in 2008-09, Relational supported their further development.

Anti-Bodies is supported by Arts Council England and has been granted the London 2012 Inspire mark as part of the Cultural Olympiad.

THE ANTI-BODIES THEME:

Anti-Bodies: beyond the body ideal explores different attitudes to the body. It contrasts the particularity of the artist's body-concept against the ideal body-machine of the Olympic athlete, so revealing underlying idealisations of the body as they are reproduced within different everyday social contexts.

The body is a key site of cultural enquiry that is relevant to a range of artists, curators, audiences and contexts.

Anti-Bodies invites people to participate in a process of reflection upon, and engagement with, the Olympic Ideal.

From a medical perspective, the programme's title refers to the anti-bodies produced by our immune systems in response to things that threaten us. In this sense, the title could be seen as a poetic idea of 'my body' fighting off the imposition of an ideal body.

In the context of everyday life, Anti-Bodies refers to the underlying models of the ideal body which produce power hierarchies, for example around issues such as race, gender, sexuality or disability, privileging those 'bodies' closest to the supposed ideal model.

Anti-Bodies also refers to the way in which, as a political event, the Olympics applies the ideal model of the athlete to the state striving for supremacy in the sporting arena, with the athlete becoming an emblem of state identity and a metaphor for national wellbeing.

Anti-Bodies is also an opportunity to unpack the way in which the Olympics refers to a fantasy of universalism, a Western concept based upon the ideal of common shared values. The notion of the ideal body as a common denominator can work as a kind of cultural imperialism, covering up the real inequalities of social and economic conditions around the world.

Similarly, in the Paralympics, athletes are invited to compete and aspire to an ideal model of the body by transcending their 'disabilities'. Rather than accepting difference, the Olympic ideal invites participants to overcome the particularities of their own body so as to be tested against the standard model.