LONDON EXHIBITIONS
Kate Davis: Not Just the Perfect Moments, Drawing Room
4 December 2012 – 2 February 2013
Kate Davis has been commissioned to realise a new body of work for her solo exhibition at Drawing Room. Questioning how to bear witness to the complexities of the past, Davis’ artwork is an attempt to reconsider, reclaim and reinvent what certain histories could look, sound and feel like. This has often involved responding to the aesthetic and political ambiguities of historical art works and their reception. Working across a range of media, drawing remains the critical core of her visual vocabulary, and this exhibition will be the first time she addresses her relationship to drawing (as a medium, activity and history) so directly.
Image: Installation view Kate Davis, Not Just the Perfect Moments, 2012. Courtesy the artist and Drawing Room 2012. Photo: Dave Morgan
Stuart Whipps: Birth Springs, Death Falls, Flat Time House
10 January – 10 February 2013
www.flattimeho.org.uk
Flat Time House opened its adjoining flat as a permanent residency space in 2012. For his first solo show in London, Stuart Whipps presents an exhibition of work made while in residence.Stuart spent his time at FTHo researching the archive material from John Latham’s Artist Placement Group (APG) placement with the Scottish Office Development Agency between 1975 and 1976. This also involved a visit to the shale bings of West Lothian – Latham’s object of study during his time in Scotland. Stuart’s exhibition maps the connections between Latham and other historical protagonists including James “Paraffin” Young, who was the first to refine mineral oil on a commercial scale. This process left behind the shale heap bings of West Lothian and financed David Livingstone’s “explorations” of Zambia – Latham’s birthplace. Stuart’s complex project involving photography, installation and text aligns multiple histories and geological monuments with the contemporary moment.
Image: Stuart Whipps, A postcard of Victoria Falls leaning against a geological sample from John Latham’s mantelpiece, 2012. Courtesy the artist and Flat Time House.
Film in Space: An exhibition of film and expanded cinema selected by Guy Sherwin, Camden Arts Centre
15 December 2012 – 24 February 2013
Film in Space is a group exhibition selected by British artist-filmmaker Guy Sherwin. The exhibition focuses on expanded cinema, a film movement which came to prominence in Britain in the early 1970s, at the time Sherwin started making films. The movement was closely associated with the London Filmmakers’ Co-operative, an organisation set up in 1966 by artist-filmmakers to exhibit and produce experimental film work which challenged mainstream cinema. Sherwin worked at the LFMC in its early years and was highly influenced by his experience. For Camden Arts Centre he has selected a number of key works from this period and is showing them along with works by younger artists who are continuing to experiment with the versatility of analogue media, as well as others who have started to take on board the advent of digital technologies. Throughout the exhibition there is an emphasis on film, light, and sound as material to be constantly re-worked, manipulated and experimented with.
Artists include: Angela Allen, Gill Eatherley, Louisa Fairclough, Steve Farrer, Nicky Hamlyn, Emma Hart, Dan Hays, Denise Hawrysio, Neil Henderson, Malcolm Le Grice, Lynn Loo, Rob Mullender, Annabel Nicolson, Simon Payne, William Raban, Lucy Reynolds, Guy Sherwin, Chris Welsby.
Image: Film in Space, Camden Arts Centre, installation shot. Photo by Andy Keate. Courtesy the artist and Camden Arts Centre.
Tomorrow Never Knows, Jerwood/ Film and Video Umbrella Awards, Jerwood Visual Arts
16 January – 24 February 2013
The Jerwood/ Film and Video Umbrella Awards is a major new initiative for moving image artists with a commissioning fund totalling £56,000. The Award will run over two years.
In the first year four artists Ed Atkins, Emma Hart, Naheed Raza and Corin Sworn were awarded a £4,000 bursary to develop pre-production proposals for significant new works and were supported to take part in a group exhibition at JVA at Jerwood Space from March – April 2012.
During this exhibition, two of the four artists were selected to receive a £20,000 commission and support from Film and Video Umbrella to develop their ideas into finished works. The final works will premiere at JVA at Jerwood Space from 16 January – 24 February 2013. The two selected artists are Ed Atkins and Naheed Raza.
Image: Ed Atkins, Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths, installation view at Jerwood Space, Tomorrow Never Knows, 2013. Courtesy the artist and Cabinet Gallery, London and and Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie, Berlin.
Sanja Iveković: Unknown Heroine, Calvert 22 in collaboration with South London Gallery
14 December 2012 – 24 February 2013
In her first UK retrospective the work of Sanja Iveković is showcased across two major London galleries, Calvert 22 and the South London Gallery. Iveković (b. 1949 Zagreb) is amongst the best-known artists of her generation, a strident voice whose powerful ideas are explored through a potent mix of collage, film, performance and installation.
Unknown Heroine covers four decades of pioneering work against a background of political unrest, tackling issues of female identity, consumerism and historical amnesia. Following on from recent retrospectives at Mudam Luxembourg, MoMA New York and participation at dOCUMENTA (13) this timely survey exhibition presents the startling scope of Iveković’s practice.
Image: Sanja Iveković, New Zagreb (People Behind the Windows), 1979, photomontage: digital print mounted on aluminium, 122 x 167.8 cm. Courtesy the artist, Calvert 22 and South London Gallery.
REGIONAL EXHIBITIONS
Amalia Pica: For Shower Singers, Modern Art Oxford, Oxford
Until 10 February2013
Playful and celebratory, Amalia Pica’s sculpture and works on paper – many of which will be shown in the UK for the first time – explore some of the underlying social concerns that relate to our daily experience of life. Examining the nature of participation and interaction between people, her works have a vitality and hand-made quality, which often belie more complex social relations, in particular the importance of communication and the interaction between individuals.
Alongside work from the past six years this exhibition presents a newly commissioned sculpture, which takes the form of a plinth bearing the oxide traces of the sculpture it once supported. Pica’s plinth is as much about the object itself as it is a suggestion of an absent counterpart.
This exhibition continues a conversation, which began with Pica’s first solo UK exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery, London, earlier this year. Included is her large-scale work Strangers on Common Land, 2012, shows two strangers standing in an open landscape, connected by the line of bunting that they hold and the common land on which they stand; a metaphor for the possibility of coming together through cultural celebration.
If you manage to visit Amalia Pica’s exhibition, we also recommend André Cadere, Documenting Cadere, 1972 – 1978, showing at Modern Art Oxford until 10 February 2013.
Image: Amalia Pica, Some of that Color #2, 2009. Courtesy the artist and Modern Art Oxford.
Jim Shaw: The Rinse Cycle, BALTIC, Gateshead
9 November 2012 – 17 February 2013
Los Angeles-based Jim Shaw is one of America’s most important and prolific contemporary artists. Part of a ground-breaking group including Mike Kelley, John Miller and Tony Oursler that graduated from California Institute of the Arts in the late 1970s, Shaw has one of the most distinctive visual imaginations of his generation. The Rinse Cycle is the first ever full-scale survey of Shaw’s work internationally and brings together more than one hundred paintings, sculptures, drawings and videos from the last twenty-five years.
Image: Jim Shaw, Untitled (US Presidents), 2006. Courtesy the artist and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead.
Aid and Abet: Temporary Residence, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge
12 January – 24 February 2013
Aid & Abet was founded in 2009 by artists Sarah Evans, David Kefford and CJ Mahony. Currently occupying a large warehouse near the railway station in Cambridge, Aid & Abet provides artists with opportunities to innovate, collaborate and engage in critical discourse. Their project at Kettle’s Yard looks at transitions and thresholds as a way of exploring the dynamic relationships between artists and institutions.
Image: Kevin Hunt, Empty Space (detail 1), wood soaked in ink. Courtesy the artist and Kettle’s Yard.
Mike Nelson: M6, Eastside Projects, Birmingham
12 January – 9 March 2013
Eastside Projects presents M6 a new commission by Mike Nelson, one of the most significant artists working in the UK today. M6 is Nelson’s first major exhibition in his home region and continues his singular investigation of political histories through the raw materials of our world.
Within the old industrial heart of Birmingham, discarded, utilitarian objects have been collected as if they were trophies of an ignored parallel world – a dark, abject monument. M6 acts as an invocation of the highways and their concrete islands, memorialising their past production and the shifting economies of spent resources.
Image: Mike Nelson M6 (photograph) 2013. Courtesy the artist and Eastside Projects.
Uriel Orlow: Back to Back, Spike Island, Bristol
26 January to 31 March 2013
This exhibition marks the first time that London-based artist Uriel Orlow presents two recent films together in the UK: Remnants of the Future (2010–2012) and Plans for the Past (2011–2012).
Back to Back refers to the manner in which the works are projected — simultaneously as one piece — as well as to the movie industry term for the process of filming two or more films within one production. Though they were not filmed at the same time, each anticipates and acts as a counterpart to the other. They are linked by a focus on the forgotten fates of two towns in the South Caucasus that share a name, Mush, and together form an installation that ruminates on forgotten tragedies and disrupted destinies.
Image: Uriel Orlow, production still from Remnants of the Future, 2010-12. Courtesy the artist and Spike Island.
