28 January 2016
The year starts with a visit to a pop-up artist-run gallery Bargain Spot Project Space to talk about their new group exhibition Objects from the Temperate Palm House.
Bargain Spot curators Lydia Honeybone and Abigail Webster will discuss the work in the exhibition and their plans for the space. Objects from the Temperate Palm House is a group exhibition presenting new, existing and commissioned work by eleven artists from Scotland, the UK and Europe. The exhibition presents their work alongside artefacts from the archive of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Borrowing the aesthetic of the renaissance ‘wunderkammer’ (cabinet of curiosities) the exhibition seeks to call into question how artworks are displayed and the act of looking in the gallery. The exhibition is curated by Chloe Reith and Kirsty White.
29 January 2015
For our first event, we will be discussing Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse’s Ponte City exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. We will be joined by Anne Lydon, International Photography Curator at the NGS and co-curator of the exhibition.
Rising 54 storeys high, Ponte Tower has punctuated the Johannesburg skyline since 1975. Originally offering cosmopolitan living for white South Africa, in the post-apartheid years, it has become home for immigrants from other African countries. In 2007 developers planned a major refurbishment of the block; although the renovation began it was never completed, leaving the structure semi-derelict while some tenants still occupied flats in the block.
Over the next five years the tower became the subject of a creative collaboration between South African photographer, Mikhael Subotzky and British artist, Patrick Waterhouse. They returned repeatedly to document the building: photographing every door and the view from every window; archiving the lives of the residents, from capturing what they were watching on TV to gathering discarded belongings.
The work in this exhibition provides a cross-section of an iconic South African landmark that continues to symbolize the hopes and fears of the country’s most populous city, and in turn, the post-apartheid nation.
15 February 2012 at 6.30pm
A visit to Transmission Gallery to discuss the work of Anja Kirschner and David Panos. There will also be an opportunity to see the newly established Transmission Gallery Resource Room which houses an incredible archive, collected and collated by the gallery, through the years.
Athens-based artists Anja Kirschner and David Panos present a new multi-channel video installation entitled Living Truthfully under Imaginary Circumstances. The work considers the acting techniques developed by Sanford Meisner, which remain highly influential on American theatre and Hollywood cinema. Based on a set of persuasive assumptions about the ‘true’ nature of human behavior, the Meisner Technique paradoxically combines an unnatural training routine of intense repetition and observational feedback with the prospect of authentic experience and emotion in performance.
The installation combines footage of young actors working with Meisners exercises and material from the history of theatre and cinema. Kirschner and Panos aim to interrogate the assumptions of post-modern naturalism and its blurring of the distinction between dramatic artifice and seemingly primal, human impulses.
28 October 2010 at 6pm
Our Spin event will be split over the two modern art galleries to see the work of Turner prize winner Richard Wright who was commissioned by The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art to make a major wall-painting in one of the public stairwells of the Dean Gallery; and Part 3 of the rehang What you see is where you’re at featuring the work of Luke Fowler.
Glasgow-based artist Richard Wright is best known for painting on walls, where the context and architecture of the space are the content of the work. Believing that ‘there’s already too much stuff in the world’ Wright describes his work as having similar qualities to a musical performance in that it exists in the memory of the creator and the audience, but can’t be owned, sold, or carried around.
The title of the rehang What you see is where you’re at comes from the film on display by award winning Glasgow-based artist Luke Fowler. Fowler’s film documents and explores the Kingsley Hall social experiment carried out in the 60s by the Scottish psychiatrist and writer R. D. Laing and is part of his ongoing investigation into radical thinkers and those responsible for the development of progressive ideas.
We look forward to you joining us in discussion to uncover how the Dean building’s architecture, history and present function have all informed Richard Wright’s work and how the medium of film has provided Luke Fowler with the unique ability to facilitate access to such a sensitive subject. This will also be a chance for us to see some of the new contemporary works on display as part of the re-hang including Robert Therrien and Gilbert and George.
