LONDON
Edward Thomasson, The Present Tense
3 July – 24 August 2014
64 Chisenhale Road, London E3 5QZ
Chisenhale Gallery presents the first major solo exhibition by Edward Thomasson and the premiere of his video, The Present Tense, commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery and Create as part of the Chisenhale Gallery Create Residency (2012-14).
The Present Tense brings together three interconnecting stories, exploring the ways in which proximity and distance alter our understanding of one another. Set on and around a building site, a cycle of urban demolition and construction provides a backdrop for the physical and emotional regeneration of the central characters.After falling in the street, a woman observes the slow healing process of her grazed skin as she negotiates personal and professional transformations affecting her life. In a consulting room, a therapist uses Sandplay Therapy to mobilise communication with a young client. Elsewhere, police officers put on a performance for a group of teenagers, singing about their daily interactions with people on the street. These three scenarios come together to describe our public personas as narratives that are continuously rewritten by one another and ourselves.
IWM Contemporary: Mark Neville, Imperial War Museum London
19 July – 25 September 2014
Lambeth Road, London SE1 6HZ
In 2011 British artist Mark Neville spent two months with 16 Air Assault brigade in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. During his time in Helmand Province he was taken out on regular patrols, experiencing the conflict at an unusual, first hand level.
This exhibition showcases a new body of work created in response to the war in Afghanistan. Using techniques such as slow-motion filming with traditional 16mm film to capture rich, grainy colours and textures Neville avoids the familiar images of contemporary conflict.
The slow motion films and large photographic portraits of young Afghan children and British soldiers give an arresting, direct yet poetic view of the British troops and the Afghan people Mark Neville encountered.
Created as part of a unique collaboration between IWM’s Art Commissions Committee and arts organisation firstsite Colchester, this exhibition is part of IWM Contemporary – a programme of contemporary art and photography in response to war and conflict and part of the IWM’s First World War Centenary Programme.
Mark Neville, On Patrol in Gereshk,1, 2011. Courtesy the artist
Fiona Banner, Mistah Kurtz – He Not Dead, PEER
5 June – 26 July 2014
97 & 99 Hoxton Street, London N1 6QL
Fiona Banner in collaboration with Paolo Pellegrin and in association with The Archive of Modern Conflict
Fiona Banner’s project for PEER has been in response to an invitation to collaborate with the London-based Archive of Modern Conflict. Rather than delving into the archive to draw out, spotlight or re-contextualise specific material for special scrutiny, Banner has elected to commission a new body of work by award winning Magnum photographer Paolo Pellegrin who she briefed to explore the City of London and to reflect its activities, behaviours, customs and costume through the lens of conflict photography. In a subversion of roles, Banner will then present a selection of these images to be accessioned into the archive, to be filed under the heading Heart of Darkness, 2014.
Banner has taken Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1899) as her starting point for a number of projects in recent years. At PEER she has created a rich and complex installation that combines drawing, photography, projection, sound and artefacts and continues her long-held fascination with Conrad’s disturbing narrative into the moral and psychological depths of man’s inhumanity to man. Conrad’s story begins on the Thames with Marlow giving an account of his steamboat journey into the Congo on board the Roi de Belges. He was in pursuit of a renegade ivory trader, Mr Kurtz, whose management of his enslaved workers had seriously disintegrated. At the end of this doomed journey, the seemingly self-appointed demigod Kurtz has died and Marlow bears the scars of having witnessed both extreme savagery and the horrific effects of unsuppressed greed. The title of the exhibition is misappropriated from a key line in the text that reads, ‘Mistah Kurtz – he dead.’
Fiona Banner, Mistah Kurtz – He Not Dead. Installation view at PEER 2014. Courtesy the artist and PEER
Sam Falls and Samara Scott, Zabludowicz Collection
26 June – 10 August, 2014
176 Prince of Wales Road, London NW5 3PT
Sam Falls
www.zabludowiczcollection.com/london/exhibitions/sam-falls
The time-based nature of photography is the core of Sam Falls’ practice, which he expands into sculpture, painting and video. The centre-pieces of his exhibition are large-scale sculptures in copper, marble and coloured aluminium. While they may appear crisp and monumental they also contain the potential for aging through the inclusion of deliberately untreated surfaces. Alongside will be presented five video works from the Final Forever series. For each work the artist appropriates one of Andrei Tarkovsky’s famously lingering shots and couples it with a section of a song by the Velvet Underground. Both the footage and the audio track are seamlessly and endlessly looped, going nowhere, but full of tension.
A series of new works have also been produced in the weeks preceding exhibition on Finnish island of Sarvisalo, as part of the Zabludowicz Collection residency programme
Sam Falls, Untitled (Marble, copper & aluminium box sculpture diptych), 2013. Installation view, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, 2013. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber. Photo: Stefan Altenburger Photography, Zurich
Samara Scott, High Street
www.zabludowiczcollection.com/london/exhibitions/samara-scott
Samara Scott lifts textures and sensations directly from the daily flow of images that surround us, addressing head-on our complex contemporary experience of the body. She describes her process of making as ‘a sort of sentimental material investigation; a slow digestion of cosmetic, edible and chemical cultural debris’. Interested in the lure of superficiality, Scott fuses together make-up, painted silicone, tin-foil and felt in delicate and suggestive combinations. Allusions to personal and collective memories are suggested in layered, theatrical environments which reference to numerous art historical and decorative styles, such as Post-Impressionism, Colour Field painting, postmodern décor, through to present-day Pop iconography.
Samara Scott, Salami, 2013. Courtesy the artist
REGIONAL
Daniel Buren, Catch as catch can: works in situ, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead
11 July – 12 October, 2014
Gateshead Quays, South Shore Road, Gateshead NE8 3BA
BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead presents the work of Daniel Buren (born Boulogne-Billancourt, 1938), widely considered to be France’s greatest living artist and one of the most influential and important figures in contemporary art for the last 50 years. Buren has exhibited in many of the world’s major art institutions and realised numerous external commissions. This summer, a major exhibition at BALTIC will include new and existing work by Buren.
In the 1960s Buren developed a radical form of conceptual art, a ‘degree zero of painting’, creating works which draw attention to the relationship between art and context. He abandoned traditional painting and adopted the 8.7 cm wide vertical stripe, used as a ‘visual tool’ to prompt a reading of the work’s surroundings rather than just the work itself. Made with paint, fabric, paper, tape among other materials, the stripes appear in his interventions in galleries, museums, and public sites. For almost four decades, Buren has chosen to make work in situ, responding to a particular location, and colouring the spaces in which they are created.
Daniel Buren, Excentrique(s), travail in situ, Monumenta 2012, Grand Palais, Paris, mai-juin 2012. Détail. © DB-ADAGP Paris
Artliner, The Wind Tunnel Project, Farnborough
9 June — 20 July, 2014
The Wind Tunnels Hall Road, Farnborough, Hampshire, GU14 7EP
The Wind Tunnel Project brings together new commissions and performances by UK and International artists at a unique location hidden from public view for over 40 years. A programme of events and talks runs throughout the exhibition.
Artliner, an organization which stages art experiences around the world, will this year launch The Wind Tunnel Project. This exhibition will be housed in and around 1917 and 1935 Grade 1 and 2 Listed buildings which will open to the public for the first time in history.
Q121 and R52 are two of the most iconic examples of historic 20th century wind tunnels and flight testing centre technology anywhere in the world. Both buildings were designed to help push the boundaries of British aviation, in the race for dominance of the skies and homeland protection. The Portable Airship Hangar of 1910 was restored in 2006 and has become a centerpiece of the public square. The hangar was originally built to house military airships prior to the First World War.
The Wind Tunnel Project is a multi-sensory experience; therefore the number of visitors is restricted to specific time slots. Book your preferred date and time by clicking here. Adult ticket, £10
The Wind Tunnel Project, 2014
Liverpool Biennial 2014, A Needle Walks into a Haystack, Liverpool
5 July – 26 October 2014
Various locations across the city. Please click here for a map.
A Needle Walks into a Haystack is an exhibition about our habits, our habitats, and the objects, images, relationships and activities that constitute our immediate surroundings. It’s about effecting larger questions facing contemporary life and art, from an intimate and tangible scale that’s within everyday reach. The artists in this exhibition disrupt many of the conventions and assumptions that usually prescribe the way we live our lives. They attack the metaphors, symbols and representations that make up their own environment, replacing them with new meanings and protocols: bureaucracy becomes a form of comedy, silence becomes a type of knowledge, domesticity becomes a place of pathology, inefficiency becomes a necessary vocation, and delinquency becomes a daily routine.
The 8th Biennial Exhibition, A Needle Walks into a Haystack, is curated by Mai Abu ElDahab and Anthony Huberman. It includes a group show at The Old Blind School, James McNeill Whistler at the Bluecoat, Sharon Lockhart at FACT, Claude Parent at Tate Liverpool and Jef Cornelis at St. Andrews Gardens. Also featured as part of Liverpool Biennial 2014 are the John Moores Painting Prize, Bloomberg New Contemporaries, a group show at Open Eye Gallery and Adrian Henri at LJMU’s Exhibition Research Centre. In addition, there will be work by artists and curators throughout the city.
ThE riGHt tO RighT (2012) by Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson, 2012. Commissioned for Liverpool Biennial, The Unexpected Guest © Jerry Hardman-Jones
POP EUROPE!, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Wolverhampton
5 July – 7 February 2015
Lichfield Street, Wolverhampton, West Midlands, WV1 1DUA colourful display of Pop and Op Art, Expressionist and Abstract works, POP EUROPE! looks at artists working on the continent in a comparative aesthetic. Reviewing the idea of a Pop beyond Britain and America, this exhibition considers the context of their work alongside their transatlantic counterparts.
Featuring new editions to the Pop collection donated by Eric and Jean Cass through the Contemporary Art Society, with major loans from Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz and The Mayor Gallery, London.
Click here to find out more about the Eric and Jean Cass gift
Julio le Parc, Longue March,1976, Lithograph © the artist
