29 June 2017
This month we will be visiting Interview Room 11, an artist-run gallery and project space set up in 2013 and housed in the Ocean Terminal retail complex. The gallery is run by committee of artists and curators, with an interest in promoting emerging and early career local and international artists.
We will be discussing Galician artist Carme Nogueira’s new video work Leith Walk: Our Share of the Profits with the curator and committee members. The artist has explored Leith’s history focusing on the strike that took place by dock workers in the Port of Leith in 1913. Three people connected with Edinburgh’s artistic community have been chosen to read texts relating to the history of the neighbourhood in this portrait of the story of Leith told from our present.
27 October 2016
For October’s Spin event we will be visiting the Centre for Research Collections in the University of Edinburgh’s main library to view the colourful fragments of Eduardo Paolozzi’s mosaics, originally made in 1984 for Tottenham Court Road underground station in London. As part of the recent Crossrail development of the tube station, the arches of the mosaics were removed from the walls, and these sections have now been transported to Paolozzi’s home town of Edinburgh. We will discuss the mosaics, and the University’s plans for their future conservation and display, with Olivia Laumenech, Public Art Officer at the Centre for Research Collections at the University of Edinburgh.
As well as viewing Paolozzi’s mosaics, we will also get a chance to see some of the highlights of the modern and contemporary art collection held by the University of Edinburgh, including works by such artists as David Batchelor and Jonathan Owen.
25 February 2016
For our February Spin event, we will be meeting in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery to discuss current our exhibition The UNTITLED: Bad Entertainment. Over the last two years, our colleagues in the National Galleries’ Outreach Team have invited ‘the next generation’ to make the kind of art that they would want to see, inspired by the work of contemporary artists. Working in response to the 2014 GENERATION: 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland programme of exhibitions and events, young people from Alloa, Irvine and Edinburgh have made artworks and films that show their lives caught between the actuality of everyday experience and the fantasy world of media culture. Join us and Richie Cumming, NGS Outreach Officer, for what promises to be a lively discussion.
25 April 2013, 6-7.30pm
For our April Spin event, we will be visiting Summerhall, the new arts venue in the former Royal Dick Vet School building at the edge of The Meadows. It is the first major new arts venue to have opened in Edinburgh for many years and houses several gallery spaces, performance spaces, artists’ studios and the Demarco Collection among numerous other activities. Curator Paul Robertson will join us in discussing two exhibitions: The Beautiful Book and Flickering Lights: Rachel McLean and Ryan Gander and the broader aims for the new venue.
The Beautiful Book is an exhibition of one artwork by filmmaker, photographer and gay icon Jack Smith. In 1962, Smith made one of the most famous of photographic art books – that book was called The Beautiful Book. It was the only autonomous collection of his photographs that appeared before his death in 1989.
Presented as part of the Flickering Lights programme at Summerhall, Lolcatz is a film by up-and-coming Edinburgh-trained artist Rachel Maclean. Her films are always garish and chaotic comprising mash-up pop culture, television hype and Scottish identity. Lolzcatz is an ornate mix of Egyptian cat worship, the Tower of Babel, a Starbucks-like trading symbol and internet memes.
Finally, we will look at Ryan Gander’s film work As It Presents Itself – Somewhere Vague. Made in claymation, it brings together characters based on Spike Milligan, curator Matthew Higgs, Mrs Frances Gander (the artist’s mother), the Lumière Brothers, Auguste and Louis. Written by Gander, the voiceover is provided by actor Richard Briers.
