Trace: to find something or someone that was lost
Online programme - 1st May - 31st May 2020
New Geographies and the East Contemporary Visual Arts Network (ECVAN) are delighted to announce Tracing the East, a series of digital events and new audio-visual content that reflect on the traces of New Geographies.
New Geographies is a three-year project which invited the public to nominate locations for ten site-specific art works across the East of England. Eleven artists were commissioned to make ambitious new works. The commissioned artists were: Maria Anastassiou, David Blandy, Marcus Coates & Leah Millar, Cooking Sections, Ian Giles, Krijn de Koning, susan pui san lok, Studio Morison, Stuart Whipps and Laura Wilson. Each artist has worked closely on the realisation of their work with one of the New Geographies partner institutions.
Over the month of May 2020, Tracing the East will be an opportunity to come together with the artists and ECVAN to experience some of the works that were produced and discuss and reflect on three key themes that emerged from the ten commissions: Population, Landscape and History.
Tracing the East will include: ten podcasts, five films, one soundscape, one audio walk and a live online game. There will also be two live performances and three live panel discussions discussing themes of Population, Landscape, and History.
From 1 May 2020, material will be available to listen, browse and enjoy via newgeographies.uk:
• The first 4 episodes from our series of ten podcasts from Studio Morison, Ian Giles, David Blandy & Maria Anastassiou
• Open Ramble East - Queer walking guide by Ian Giles
• An audio walk by Cooking Sections, Moveable Estates, 2020
• Four films: David Blandy, The World After, 2019, Laura Wilson, Deepening, 2020, Stuart Whipps, Necessary
Amendments: Homes for the People, 2019, Maria Anastassiou, Way My It Did I, 2019
• Poems by Mervyn Linford, inspired by The World After, 2019
• A soundscape by susan put san lok, Seven Sisters, 2019
• Archive interviews and in-conversations events from Ian Giles, David Blandy & Dr Merline Evans.
• Downloadable unlimited edition artwork by susan pui san lok, Score for Voices, 2019
Three live panel discussions will take place on Zoom on 4 May, 14 May and 28 May. In order to view live, you will need to book before the event via Eventbrite. Please follow the link below the event. Instructions for connecting to the discussion via Zoom will be emailed to you before the event.
4 May 6-7pm, Population – discussing the changing communities of the East in relation to the LGBTQ community, immigration and population change, how do communities adapt and respond to change? Maria Anastassiou, Ian Giles, moderated by Dr Amy Tobin, Curator of Exhibitions at Kettle’s Yard.
14 May 6-7pm, Landscape – from local to global, the effects of climate change in the landscape of the region is addressed through storytelling with David Blandy, Studio Morison, Cooking Sections, moderated by publisher, writer and curator, Sarah Shin.
28 May 6-7pm, History – how can the past that inform our future? The use of symbols and references to histories, storytelling and myths – with Laura Wilson, susan pui san lok, Marcus Coates, Leah Millar, Krijn de Koning, moderated by independent Curator, Kate Phillimore.
For press information please contact Albany Arts Communications:
Carla von der Becke
carla@albanyartscommunications.com
t: +44 (0) 20 78 79 88 95; m: + 44 (0) 79 74 25 29 94
Notes to Editors:
Maria Anastassiou
Maria Anastassiou (b. 1982, Cyprus) is an artist/filmmaker based in Essex. She uses analogue and digital media in moving image, social practice and curatorial projects. Her work is informed by experimental ethnographic approaches to documentary and structuralist film traditions. She uses the form and application of the filmmaking process as an entry point into responding to place, historical narrative, communities, individuals and other artists. Recent commissions: Bedford Creative Arts (2016, 2017), Creative Europe Program (2015-2017), and Europe for Citizens (2014) . Selected shows include: Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, curated by Chrissie Iles, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016); The Equilibrists, Benaki Museum, Athens (2016); Contact Artist’s Film Festival, Apiary Studios, London (2016); Movement in Light: A contemporary expression, National Portrait Gallery, London (2013); and Cyprus Dossier 05: Collabo-Nation! launched at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013.
David Blandy
David Blandy (b. 1976, UK) lives and works in Brighton and London. He has established his terrain through a series of investigations into the cultural forces that inform and influence him, in recent works examining human consciousness within the digital world. His works slip between performance and video, reality and construct, using references sampled from the wide, disparate sources that provide his (and our own) individualist sense of self. He has exhibited at venues nationally and worldwide such as Bloomberg Space, London; Art Tower Mito, Tokyo, Japan; Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum, Helsinki, Finland; Tate Modern, London; The Baltic, Gateshead; Turner Contemporary, Margate; Spike Island, Bristol; Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany; MoMA PS1, New York; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, China.
Marcus Coates & Leah Millar
Marcus Coates (b. 1968, UK) lives and works in London. Coates has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally. Exhibitions and performances include: The Land We Live In, The Land We Left Behind, Hauser & Wirth Somerset, 2018; Functional Improvisation with percussionist Terry Day, William Morris Gallery, London, 2017; As Above, So Below, IMMA, Dublin, 2017; Ape Culture, HKW Berlin, 2015; The Trip, Serpentine Gallery, London and Implicit Sound, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, 2011; Psychopomp, Milton Keynes Gallery, 2010; Marcus Coates, Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland, 2009; Altermodern, Tate Triennial, Tate Britain, London, 2009. He won the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award in 2008 and the Daiwa Foundation Art Prize in 2009.
Leah Millar (b. 1982, Belfast) is an artist and filmmaker whose practice is inspired by both the relationships she forms with nature and the material experience of constructed audiovisual landscapes. Often relating to particular sites, her films build worlds in which ideas about agency, memory and the physical and psychic experience of environments can be explored.
Cooking Sections
Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe) is a London-based duo of spatial practitioners. They explore the systems that organise the world through food. Using installation performance and mapping, their research-based practice operates within the overlapping spheres of visual arts, architecture, and geopolitics. They were part of the United States Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2014; residents of The Politics of Food programme at Delfina Foundation, London; and have shown their work at venues including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; DOCUMENTA(13), Kassel; the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam; and the Centre for Contemporary Architecture, Montreal. They were part of the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale and 2016 Brussels ParckDesign and are part of Manifesta12 in Palermo. They lecture internationally and lead an architecture studio at the Royal College of Art in London that investigates the financialisation of the environment.
Ian Giles
Ian Giles (b. 1985, UK) completed his MFA in 2012 at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. He was a LUX Associate Artist for 2012/13. Recent exhibitions, screenings and performances include: After BUTT, Chesea Space, London (2018); Multiplexing II, Cineworld Cinema, Glasgow with LUX Scotland (2017); AsToAsIsTo, a collaboration with the Youth Forum, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2016); Connected Works, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA (2016); m-Health, Cell Project Space, London (2015); Videoclub, selected UK national tour venues including Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham (2014); The In Between, Carroll/Fletcher, London (2013); 21st Century Screening, Chisenhale Gallery, London (2012) and Whitstable Biennale (2010). He was a resident at Hospitalfield, Scotland in 2017 and awarded a Production Bursary by Spike Island and the Centre for Moving Image Research in 2016.
Krijn de Koning
Krijn de Koning (b. 1963, Amsterdam) creates site-specific sculptures and installations for exhibitions, museums, galleries and public spaces. He constructs his work from floors, walls, rooms and corridors, sometimes in vivid colours, sometimes in natural colours or just in the colour of the space itself. Many of the works can be used: you can enter them, sit on them or stay in them. His interventions raise questions about how architecture conditions us and how certain constructions generate specific meaning. De Koning transforms an existing situation, sometimes literally breaks it down, in order to reveal a different reality. Large projects have been accomplished for the Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam, the Netherlands (2010); the Musée de Beaux Arts de Nantes, France (2011) and the Edinburgh Art Festival (2013). Large public works have been created in the cities of Utrecht, the Netherlands (2013), Hasselt, Belgium (2014) and Rennes, France (2018).
susan pui san lok
susan pui san lok is an artist and writer based in London. Her work ranges across moving image, installation, sound, performance and text, engaging with notions of nostalgia and aspiration, place and migration, translation and diaspora. Projects include solo exhibitions at CFCCA (2016), QUAD (2015), MAI/Montreal Arts Interculturels (2014), and commissions for Film and Video Umbrella, De La Warr Pavilion, BFI Southbank and Cornerhouse/ BBC Big Screen. International group exhibitions include Diaspora Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017) and the 1st Asia Biennial / 5th Guangzhou Triennial (2015-2016). Her artist books and multiples include RoCH Fans and Legends (2017), Faster, Higher (2009), Golden (Notes) (2007) and NEWS (2005).
Studio Morison
Heather Peak Morison (b. 1973, UK) and Ivan Morison (b. 1974) have established an ambitious collaborative practice over the past fifteen years that transcends the divisions between art, architecture and theatre. Heather and Ivan Morison have exhibited widely across the UK, Europe, Australia, Canada and the USA. Key projects include: Sleepers Awake, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2014); All’s Well That Ends, Schauspielhaus Bochum, Germany (2014); Smile All the While, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2014); Shadow Curriculum, South London Gallery, London (2014); Skirt of the Black Mouth, Tate Modern, London (2012-15); Nuclear Family, National Theatre of Wales (2013); Black Pleasure, Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2013); Anna, the Hepworth, Wakefield (2012); Cave, MK Gallery, Milton Keynes (2012); Black Pig Lodge, Southbank Centre, London (2011); Mr. Clevver, Contemporary Art Spaces Tasmania, Australia (2011); Plaza, Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada (2010); The Black Line Void, Derry, Northern Ireland (2009); Black Cloud, Situations, Bristol (2009); Journée des Barricades, One Day Sculpture, Wellington, New Zealand (2008); and And So it Goes, representing Wales at the 52nd Venice Biennial (2007). Their book, Falling into Place, a fictionalised account of their large architectural shelter works, was published by Bookworks in 2009 and made into an audio book by Palaver Press, New York in 2014. A new anthology of their work will be published in 2020 and is edited by Claire Doherty and Gavin Wade.
Stuart Whipps
Stuart Whipps is an artist based in Birmingham, UK. He often makes work about things he doesn’t understand and doesn’t know how to do. Currently this includes restoring a 1979 Mini with the assistance of former British Leyland workers, training to make geological thin sections at the University of Birmingham and working with a seventeenth century sign language devised by Sir Christopher Wren. He has exhibited his work across the UK and internationally and is the recipient of a number of awards. Selected solo exhibitions include: Isle of Slingers, Spike Island, Bristol (2016); Photo Colour Services, Ithuba Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa (2015); Birth Springs, Death Falls, Flat Time House, London (2013). Why Contribute to The Spread of Ugliness?, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2011); and New Wooabbeleri, Focal Point Gallery, Southend-On- Sea (2010). Selected group exhibitions include: British Art Show 8, UK, 2015 – 2017; Reference Works: Guangzhou, Guanghzhou, China (2014); Relatively Absolute, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire (2013); Community Without Propinquity, MK Gallery, Milton Keynes (2011); and East International, Norwich (2009).
Laura Wilson
Laura Wilson (b. Belfast, UK) is an artist based in London. She is interested in how history is carried and evolves through everyday materials, tradesand craftsmanship. She works with specialists to develop sculptural and performative works that amplify the relationship between materiality, memory and tacit knowledge. Wilson’s interdisciplinary and research based works have been exhibited widely including at: The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, UCL, London, UK (2018); SPACE, London; V&A, London; Guest Projects, London and with Invisible Dust and the Humber Museums Partnership for Hull 2017 City of Culture (all 2017); RIBA, London; Site Gallery, Sheffield; and SPACE, London (2016); Whitstable Biennial (2014); Camden Arts Centre, London and Turner Contemporary, Margate (2013); and W139, Amsterdam and De Warande, Turnhout, Belgium (2012). She is a Syllabus II artist (2016/17), was the UK Associate Artist in residence at Delfina Foundation, London in 2016; and the recipient of the Winston Churchill Memorial Travel Fellowship in 2011. She is currently developing new commissions in 2018 with Kettles Yard and the Gurdon Institute, Cambridge and with Block Universe at the British Museum, London.
About the East Contemporary Visual Arts Network (ECVAN)
ECVAN delivers collaborative projects with visual arts organisations, artists and curators from across the eastern region. It explores new ways of working together to build on the region’s diverse and exciting range of activity, delivering projects that support artists and the arts infrastructure. To date, ECVAN has achieved a successful programme of exhibitions, events, public talks, training workshops, staff development opportunities, knowledge sharing events, and the production of a print portfolio, Eastern Pavilions, in 2011 supported by a network of patrons and region wide events. The ECVAN steering committee for New Geographies of the East currently includes: Art Exchange, University of Essex, Colchester; Bedford Creative Arts; Black Barn Project Space, Norfolk; Deborah Smith Projects; East GalleryNUA, Norwich University of the Arts; Firstsite, Colchester; Focal Point Gallery, Southend; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery; Outpost, Norwich; originalprojects;, Great Yarmouth; The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich; Smiths Row, Bury St Edmunds UH Arts, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield & St Albans; Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge; freelance curators Lynda Morris and Kath Wood; and artists Sarah Evans and David Kefford (Aid & Abet). The ECVAN network has recently been exploring opportunities to develop collaborations with artists and institutions in the Netherlands. Its aim is to establish long-term partnerships and develop collaboration and co-commissioning opportunities.
About New Geographies
New Geographies is financed by a £600,000 grant from Arts Council England’s Ambition for Excellence fund, which was established to stimulate and support ambition, talent and excellence across the arts sector in England. It is administered by ECVAN and is being developed with nine galleries, museums and academic institutions in the region: Art Exchange, University of Essex Colchester; East GalleryNUA, Norwich University of the Arts; Firstsite, Colchester; Focal Point Gallery, Southend; Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge; Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery, originalprojects; Great Yarmouth; UH Arts, University of Hertfordshire; and Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge.
Art Exchange
Placing the artist at its core, Art Exchange is a space where art, artists and audiences can meet. Their programme of exhibitions, talks and events creates a platform for ideas to be exchanged and connections to be made. Since 1989 they have been showing international contemporary art by established and emerging artists, historic figures who continue to inspire, and group shows relevant to current debate. Sited at the University of Essex in Colchester, Art Exchange are inspired by an intellectually curious audience, while the research and study around them feeds into the programme of talks, films and debate. Combined with family days, workshops with schools and outreach activity, they offer ways for everyone to get involved and enjoy great art.
East Gallery NUA
East GalleryNUA is an exciting contemporary exhibition space in Norwich city centre, funded by Norwich University of the Arts. The gallery hosts a range of exhibitions with a focus on contemporary art, design, architecture and media practice that broadly reflect the taught specialisms of the University. Shows range from major national touring exhibitions such as the British Art Show 8, to shows originated by the University. The gallery has a wide range of national and international partners including commercial galleries, trusts and foundations. Norwich University of the Arts has developed and held the influential show, East International from 1991 onwards.
Firstsite
Founded in 1994, Firstsite is a public contemporary art gallery in Colchester, Essex. Over the last fifteen years it has gained a strong reputation, presenting ambitious work to new audiences in the East of England and beyond. Situated in Colchester’s ‘cultural quarter,’ the present building was designed by Uruguayan architect Rafael Viñoly, and opened in 2011. Firstsite is a partner of Plus Tate, which uses Tate’s resources to contribute to a network of arts organisations across the country, and to increase public access to the national collection of British and international modern and contemporary art.
Focal Point Gallery
Focal Point Gallery is south Essex’s gallery for contemporary visual art, promoting and commissioning major solo exhibitions, group and thematic shows, a programme of events including performances, film screenings and talks, as well as offsite projects and temporary public artworks. The organisation currently produces up to seven gallery exhibitions each year, in which artists and curators are given a platform to make new work in response to the gallery’s unique location on the ground floor of the town’s new library and learning facility, The Forum.
Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery
Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery was built by the Normans as a Royal Palace over 900 years ago. It is now a museum and art gallery and home to some of the most outstanding collections of fine and decorative arts, archaeology and natural history, not only in the region but the country. Norwich Castle has an established reputation for staging innovative and engaging contemporary art exhibitions of national significance that have enabled regional audiences access to art of the highest quality. Artists based regionally, nationally and internationally have been showcased via partnership exhibitions, ambitious new commissions, international residencies as well as smaller scale events and discussions. Over the next few years, major investment from the Heritage Lottery Fund is set to transform the Castles iconic Keep into a world-class visitor experience.
originalprojects;
originalprojects; began work in Norwich in 2002 as an amorphous group of artists working to deliver a range of projects that provided opportunities for artists and the public to present and share ideas. The organisation has just undertaken Eastern Prospects, a 6-month research project supported by public funding from the National Lottery through Arts Council England, Norfolk County, with additional support from Great Yarmouth Borough Council and Great Yarmouth Preservation Trust. Building relationships with local stakeholders, originalprojects; are currently formalising their organisation and obtaining premises in Great Yarmouth that will act as a social space for hosting and presentation, and a base to deliver their work, collaborating with artists, local communities, industries and heritage in order to produce extraordinary outcomes.
UH Arts
UH Arts is a department of the University of Hertfordshire and operates as a de facto independent contemporary art gallery delivering a programme led by the most innovative developments in contemporary visual arts, design and the crafts across two public gallery spaces in St Albans (currently under construction as the New Museum and Art Gallery) and Hatfield. Having operated for over 20 years, UH Arts is also a major contributor to the landscape of touring exhibitions in the English regions and has successfully collaborated with numerous nationally significant galleries in the realisation of major projects and accompanying publications with emerging British and international artists.
Wysing Arts Centre
Wysing Arts Centre is a registered charity that provides a range of programmes for artistic research, experimentation, discovery and production, out of which emerges an ongoing programme of exhibitions, public events, activity for young people, families and schools. Our large rural site near Cambridge includes a gallery, educational facilities, artists’ studios, a ceramics studio and recording studio, project spaces, a 17th century farmhouse, outdoor sculptures and an on-site cafe. Wysing is a member of the prestigious Plus Tate network, and deliver the project The Syllabus alongside five other UK arts organisations, and is chair and coordinator of the East Contemporary Visual Arts Network.
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