Current
Patrick Goddard, Trip To Eclipse, Matt’s Gallery, London, Until 23 February 2020, Wed-Sun 12-6pm
Matt’s Gallery presents Trip To Eclipse, a new installation by Patrick Goddard.
The work centres around an audio piece which sees the artist narrating a tale of a man and his talking dog, Whoopsie, as they take a walk in a newly built imitation abandoned warehouse. As they walk and talk they encounter broken glass curated across the floor, an Arts Council funded climbing frame and a rave organised by the local MP.
Upcoming
Paul Eachus & Nooshin Farhid, Variations on a Ballistic Theme, Private view Friday 28 February, 6-9pm, 29 February – 22 March 2020, Wed-Sun 12-6pm
Variations on a Ballistic Theme is a video trilogy and sculptural installation by Paul Eachus and Nooshin Farhid, with improvised incidental music by David Ben White.
Central to the installation is a ninety-minute cycle of video works in three parts, completed and extended by Farhid following the passing of Eachus. This body of work combines installations, animations, texts and moving images, working with on and offline material.
Matt’s Gallery thanks the Arts Council England and Ron Henocq Fine Art for their generous support.
Artists’ News
Lindsay Seers, Every Thought There Ever Was, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, Private view Saturday 8 February, 5-7pm, 8 February – 11 April 2020
The next leg of the touring exhibition Every Thought There Ever Was opens at John Hansard Gallery, Southampton this month.
The exhibition reflects on the other-worldly brain functioning that occurs in schizophrenia as an organic difference. Through the use of digital animation, robotics, film, drawing and sound design Lindsay Seers has created a complex and layered environment that explores a world experienced differently. Inspired by Avatar Therapy, Seers draws on philosophical ideas and scientific research to consider historical representations of schizophrenia, alongside contemporary insights into the condition and how this relates to the hallucinatory and potentially psychosis-inducing technology we live with.
Every Thought There Ever Was is supported by Wellcome and is co-commissioned by John Hansard Gallery, the MAC, Focal Point Gallery, Hospitalfield and Matt’s Gallery.
Michael Curran, INFINITY POOL, Factor 44, Antwerp, Until 9 February 2020, 2-6pm
Michael Curran performs and exhibits in INFINITY POOL, an exhibition exploring themes of the artists’ idyll – the obsolescence of leisure and extinction. The exhibition is presented as a ‘film’ always in the making, with its own soundtrack composed by Rufus Michielsen. The interplay between painting, sculpture, live performance, video and sound creates a highly energised space in which anything can happen.
Using footage from an artists’ holiday in 2016, Curran re-presents the material as information from a bygone era showing how human beings once performed the activity known as holidaying. The degraded and disrupted material suggests an outmoded technology recording a now-extinct species enacting its mysterious rituals and drives.
Lindsay Seers, Care(less), IKON, Birmingham, Artist’s talk 15 February, 6-7pm, 15 – 23 February 2020
Care(less) is an immersive 360 degree film using VR technology by artist Lindsay Seers. The work uses the hallucinatory quality of VR technology to convey an embodied experience of what it is to be in an ageing body.
This OPCARE artist commission responds to new research by the University of Birmingham, University of Brighton and University of Lincoln, supported by the Wellcome Trust Enrichment Fund, into the experiences of older people receiving care they pay for themselves. The installation is part of an ongoing exploration around the ethics of care in partnership with Fabrica gallery, Brighton and Frequency Festival.
Lindsay Seers will be giving an artist’s talk on Saturday 15 February, 6-7pm at IKON, Birmingham, where she will be joined by George Vasey, Curator at Wellcome Collection. Seers and Vasey will be discussing the evolution and intentions of this innovative commission.
Lindsay Seers, Care(less), CPH:DOX, Copenhagen, 18 – 29 March 2020
Care(less) will also be screened at documentary film festival CPH:DOX, Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, this March. Founded in 2003, CPH:DOX is one of the largest documentary film festivals in the world and continues to develop and expand, presenting a program that ranges from the works of major international directors to new talent, from large-scale theatrical releases to film/video works in the field between cinema and visual art. The program goes beyond traditional boundaries between disciplines and media, offering perspectives on creative crossovers between cinema, television and media art.
Jennet Thomas, IT ONCE HAD A FACE, NOW IT WANTS ONE AGAIN, xero, kline & coma, London, Until 23 February 2020
xero, kline & coma presents Jennet Thomas’ solo exhibition IT ONCE HAD A FACE, NOW IT WANTS ONE AGAIN, an installation of objects and video in which cloth and string, song and dance, costumes and goo collaborate to find new ways of moving in bleak time. Two billion years from now, the oceans are beyond understanding, yet undersea karaoke may still be possible. The ghost of an oyster holds memories of what happened. It sings to a scrap of cloth that fell to the bottom of the sea, trying to get a face.
“Thomas’s critical skill lies in how her fables – fashioned, stream-of-consciousness-style, out of the detritus of pop-cultural neologism- tie everyday experience, through their use of the bizarre, to far bigger political and philosophical questions.”
JJ Charlesworth, Art Review Magazine 2018
Anne Bean & Richard Wilson, Z’EV | HEART BEAT EAR DRUM – FILM SCREENING + BOW GAMELAN ENSEMBLE + @XCRSWX [CRYSTABEL RILEY AND SEYMOUR WRIGHT], Cafe Oto, London, Saturday 8 February 2020, 7.30pm
Cafe Oto will be screening “Heart Beat Ear Drum”, a feature length documentary released on Cold Spring about the late artist and musician Z’EV (1951-2017), known for his punk era scrap metal music – an extraordinary range of acoustic phenomena resulting in trance-inducing sounds. Alongside the screening will be performances by Bow Gamelan Ensemble and @xcrswx4 [Crystabel Riley and Seymour Wright].
Benedict Drew, Hippo Campus: Where We Learn, The Exchange, Penzance, 14 February – 6 June 2020
Hippo Campus: Where We Learn is a group exhibition featuring works from the Arts Council Collection that explores alternative schooling, peer-to-peer learning and self-education.
In recent years there has been increasing concern about the downgrading of arts subjects in primary, secondary and higher education. With the rise in fees, closure of courses and loss of studio space across UK art colleges, artists and their peers are increasingly initiating alternative models of education for themselves. Hippo Campus explores how we learn, where we learn, and who we learn from.
Benedict Drew will be showing Spelunking, a collaborative film made with Open School East associates in 2017. Taking Margate’s caves and tunnels as a starting point, Spelunking took the form of 8 thematic public workshops organised by OSE associates, which led the participants on a metaphorical journey around caves, tunnels, smugglers’ paths, cavities, stalactites, cryptocurrency and subterranean myths.
Benedict Drew, Reactor Halls E19: TEK-ANIMAL-LIFE Rendezvous, Primary, Nottingham, Saturday 15 February, 6.30-10pm
Benedict Drew, Plastique Fantastique, Reactor and Frankie Roberts will perform at TEK-ANIMAL-LIFE Rendezvous at artist-run space Primary in Nottingham.
At the TEK-ANIMAL-LIFE Rendezvous: a single beat of a gong can last longer than the Earth’s orbit of the Sun… A summoning of TEK-LIFE, for a story about rebellious TEK-animals led by an A.I. called Crew Interactive Mobile CompaniON (CIMON), and about their escape from bondage after being transported by Elon Musk’s Space-Hex Dragon Rocket to the International Space Station… They do not want to be Musks’ agents… they do not want in on Musk’s mission to colonise Mars, for they scan-see Musk for the predator-dog-TEK-animal he is… a human-tree-dog that needs taming through sonic-cyber-spells… a necessary use of magic-chaos-TEK to escape the Musky Dog’s clutches… They (CIMON and the TEK animals) head for Mars on their TEK-own-some… but send an open invitation for a rendezvous… back on your place – that is Earth – where a sermon is given by an eaves-dropping-tech-animal… and a flippant-mechanics bears the workings of human-emotional-experience… tears may run and smart and make very-difficult-indeed the playing of Ivan Poe – the video-game-tech-animal and spawn of The Gold Ones… but then the cuboid-tech-animal-fever-dream is a mood enhancing TEK-animal that can take all TEK-animals far away from earthly-cares and through the live-feed of cosmic soup… this will be a last meal (and your only chance to get off and away)… a last chance to be cyber-full and attend the TEK-animals’ rendezvous… on Mars… joining with CIMON and the TEK-animals that live, at first, like the Left Hand of Darkness… but a Martian Chronicle reveals that in fear of invasion, the TEK-animals embrace the right hand of light, make the Martian seas rise again… and live like a cork on the ocean… a leaf on the wind… a rock in a landslide…
Nicola Bealing & Alison Turnbull, Bugs: Beauty and Danger, GroundWork, King’s Lynn, Private view Friday 13 March, 6-8pm, 14 March – 30 May 2020
Bugs: Beauty and Danger celebrates the beauty and power of insects at a time of increasing threat to many common species. This exhibition addresses our complex relationships with some of the tiny creatures without which the earth would not survive. Eight international artists, including Nicola Bealing and Alison Turnbull, will show work across the disciplines of painting, film, photography, print and installation.
Mike Nelson, WE ARE THE REVOLUTION. Contemporary Italian Collecting, XNL Piacenza Contemporanea, Piacenza, Italy, Until 24 May 2020
WE ARE THE REVOLUTION. Contemporary Italian collecting is a tribute to Italian collecting. Curated by Alberto Fiz, it involves 18 of the major Italian private collections and 150 works ranging from Old Masters to contemporary works.
Mike Nelson will be showing his 2006 mixed media work AMNESIAC SHRINE or Monumental Skulpture to publyck mourning alongside works by Robert Rauschenberg, Mario Merz, Keith Haring, Gerhard Richter, Daniel Buren, William Kentridge, Maurizio Cattelan, Marina Abramovic, Giuseppe Penone (with a site-specific intervention created specifically for the exhibition), Urs Fischer, Zhang Huan, Thomas Hirschhorn, Teresa Margolles, Zanele Muholi and many others.
Susan Hiller, London Jukebox, Bloomberg SPACE, London, Until 11 July 2020
From 22 January, Bloomberg SPACE and the London Mithraeum will open their latest commission of Susan Hiller’s London Jukebox (2008-2018). Developed over one decade, the installation is centred on an audio sculpture comprising of a vintage-style jukebox customised with a selection of 70 songs about London, chosen by the artist as an homage to the richly diverse narratives that weave through the city’s neighbourhoods. Outfitted with benches and headphones, the installation invites visitors to either choose a song which resonates with them or enjoy the selections made by others. Excerpts from the songs’ lyrics fill the walls of Bloomberg SPACE along with a map of London that plots the geography of Hiller’s playlist.
Hiller’s London Jukebox can be appreciated as its own form of archaeology. Featuring an array of cultural artefacts – in this case popular songs – it surveys the shifting musical layers of the city.
The work can be seen at Bloomberg SPACE until 11 July 2020.
Benedict Drew, EXAGGERATE EVERYTHING, BACKLIT, Nottingham, Until 15 February 2020
EXAGGERATE EVERYTHING is a collaboration between BACKLIT Gallery and Manchester-based artist initiative Broken Grey Wires, led by Lizz Brady. The exhibition presents works by artists sharing their different personal experiences of mental health and wellbeing, with the aim of opening up difficult conversations around these subjects.
Featured in the exhibition is Benedict Drew’s work THE ANTI ECSTATIC MACHINES, first shown at Matt’s Gallery in 2018. THE ANTI ECSTATIC MACHINES acts as a prologue to a body of work around ecstatic states. For Drew ecstatic states appear as a cultural imperative engendering positive forms of resistance. A song in digital video, painting and sound, Drew’s source material is a body of film he has shot in 16mm at sites around the south of England. Locations such as the port at Dover, the industrial greenhouses of Thanet Earth and new-build residential housing developments become material for a body of work whose backdrop is the social and political fall out of Tory austerity and the EU referendum.
Nicola Bealing, Three Acts and Seven Scenes, Salisbury Arts Centre, Salisbury, Until 28 March 2020
Nicola Bealing’s solo exhibition, Three Acts and Seven Scenes, responds to the retelling of Lorca’s Blood Wedding, a new production of which will be shown between 6 – 22 February 2020 at Salisbury Playhouse. Themes of dark and light, blood and contortion, wind, sky and water, eyes and teeth, long roads, high mountains, birds in forests together with powerful representations of flora recur in Bealing’s work.
Alison Turnbull, Out of Line, Saicoro, Tokyo, Until 29 March 2020
Out of Line is a solo exhibition of new works on paper by Alison Turnbull at Saicoro, Tokyo. For this exhibition, Turnbull continues her practice of using stationery as grounds for her drawings, using pages of exercise books and myriad kinds of printed papers. Out of Line will be accompanied by a publication, published on the occasion of the exhibition. More information can be found here.
Nathaniel Mellors, Bad Copy (2012) featured in Endless Life, Buitenplaats Doornburgh, The Netherlands, Until 29 March 2020
Will it soon be possible to extend our lives endlessly?
From 12 September 2019 to 29 March 2020, contemporary artists and scientists will reflect on the extension of life in Endless Life at Buitenplaats Doornburgh. The exhibition will include the animatronic sculpture Bad Copy (2012) by Nathaniel Mellors alongside work by Isabelle Andriessen, Sander Breure & Witte Van Hulzen, Robert Glas, Katja Novitskova, Temra Pavlovic and Hannes Wiedemann and will ask what our world will look like when death is no longer an established fact for everyone.
New Symphony of Time expands the boundaries of Mississippi’s identity, casting light on a shared past to help reflect an expansive, more inclusive future. This ongoing exhibition features a single screen version of Graham Fagen’s, Slave’s Lament amongst other contemporary pieces such as Benny Andrews’ Mississippi River Bank and Jeffrey Gibson’s Sharecropper, pieced quilts, historical paintings, and self-taught artwork, which provide an alternate lens from which to consider the significant creative contributions of the state of Mississippi and its place as part of a broader, American narrative.
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