Preview: BALTIC is 10!
By Claire Dupree on June 15, 2012 in Art & Design, NARC.
The BALTIC Centre For Contemporary Art first opened its doors on 13th July 2002. Since then it’s seen a huge range of contemporary art grace its hallowed halls and hosted a range of events, not least the Turner Prize – the first time the prestigious exhibition had ever been seen outside a Tate gallery.
Rather than dwelling on what’s past at BALTIC though, the ever forward-thinking gallery wish to celebrate their legacy of commissioning new work. Their celebrations include a re-staging of Janet Cardiff’s The Forty Part Motet and will present two new commissions by 2007 Turner Prize winner Mark Wallinger and Newcastle-based artist Richard Rigg.
Janet Cardiff: The Forty Part Motet – Saturday 16th June until Sunday 14th October.
Consisting of forty separately recorded voices played back through forty individual speakers in eight choirs of five, this is a reworking of Spem in Alium Nunquam habui 1573 by Thomas Tallis. As the audience moves through the space the voices weave in and out of each other, exchange back and forth between one choir and another, and can be heard all together in overwhelming waves of textured sound. Allowing the audience to move around freely enables them to create their own unique experience.
Mark Wallinger: SITE – Friday 22nd June until Sunday 14th October.
Nominated twice for the Turner Prize, once in 1995 and again in 2007 when he won, Wallinger is one of the best known figures in the British art world. For SITE, the artist’s largest exhibition in the UK for over a decade, Wallinger will realise three new commissions. It will also mark the UK premiere of his recent film Construction Site 2011. Systemising the randomness of nature, 10000000000000000 2012 catalogues and compares 65,536 found stones. Each stone, roughly uniform in size, occupies its own square on a vastly extended checkerboard.
The Other Wall, in contrast, sees randomness contained in the form of a brick wall. Each of the many thousand bricks used to create it is numbered sequentially by hand prior to construction and then distributed with no order. SELF PORTRAIT (Times New Roman) 2012 comprises the letter ‘I’ written in black in the ubiquitous font. Construction Site records three professional scaffolders erecting and then dismantling a structure on a beach.
Richard Rigg: Lacuna – Until Monday 27th August.
For his exhibition Lacuna at BALTIC, Rigg has produced his most ambitious work to date – the major new commission A Clearing. In the exhibition space visitors will find a mountain cabin, invited inside they will discover its interior to be a mountain landscape alive with plants. Ambiguous in its meaning, the audience is invited into Rigg’s creative world.
There’s also a summer season of talks and events including a fascinating insight into the workings of the building and exhibition space on Friday 13th July entitled The Founder, The Architect & The Director – a conversation between founding director Sune Nordgren, Dominic Williams, the original architect and Godfrey Worsdale, BALTIC Director. For more talks and events, visit the website.
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