#mark sladen

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Monuments

Lismore Castle Arts, Lismore, Ireland / April-September 2013

Monuments at Lismore Castle Arts featured five artists whose work addresses the role that monuments and memorials play in our society. The exhibition featured sculpture, works on paper, video and performance; and notable pieces included large fragments of a reconstruction of the Statue of Liberty by Danh Vō, as well as a major installation created especially for the castle’s garden by Pablo Bronstein.

Lismore Castle is a site rich in monuments, and one reference point for the exhibition was the role of stately homes and gardens in memorialising their creators. The role of vanity and propaganda in generating monuments can make them an easy target for satire, but the artists in this exhibition also suggested ways in which the monumental tradition can be co-opted, brought up to date or used to express new collective identities.

Artists: Pablo Bronstein, Iman Issa, Aleksandra Mir, Yorgos Sapountzis and Danh Vō. Curator: Mark Sladen. Publication: edited by Mark Sladen and Eamonn Maxwell; published by Lismore Castle Arts and Mousse Publishing; available here. Image above: Pablo Bronstein, Pavilion, 2013.

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Turner Prize 2012

Tate Britain, London / October 2012 – January 2013

The Turner Prize was set up in 1984 to celebrate new developments in contemporary art. It is awarded each year to ‘a British artist under fifty for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation of their work in the twelve months preceding’. Over its history the Turner Prize has played a significant role in British cultural life, provoking debate about the visual arts and helping to develop public interest in British contemporary art in particular. It has become widely recognised as one of the most important and prestigious awards for the visual arts in Europe.

Image above: Elizabeth Price, The Woolworths Choir of 1979, 2012.

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Ruth Ewan

Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen / August-December 2012

Ewan has often explored the role of music within alternative culture, and this was reflected in the utopian orchestra that was assembled for the project, and which staged a number of performances using instruments from the archive – instruments that were subsequently sunk into a lake, in an echo of a prehistoric burial. Ewan’s research for the exhibition was informed by the work of the music archeologist Kajsa S. Lund. The artist also conducted research in Christiania − the free town situated within Copenhagen − and the exhibition featured posters that were created in collaboration with children from this famous alternative community.

Curator: Rhea Dall. Publication: edited by Rhea Dall, Graham Domke and Kirstine Scheiss Højmose; co-published with Dundee Contemporary Arts; distributed by Motto. Image above: Casja S. Lund performance at Loppen, Copenhagen, 2012 (photo by Morten Aasgaard Krogh).

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Joachim Koester: If One Thing Moves, Everything Moves

Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen / August-December 2012

Koester’s exhibition, entitled If One Thing Moves, Everything Moves, featured a dramatic staging that was conceived in collaboration with the artist. The installation took the form of a darkened and immersive environment that included a number of large wooden structures, transforming the grand gallery spaces in Charlottenborg’s south wing. The result had a strong experiential character, and one which emphasised the artist’s preoccupation with the body and performance – and with the hidden knowledge that might reside in the body.

Curators: Mark Sladen with Stine Hebert. Publication: Charlottenborg collaborated with a number of other institutions to publish a book on Koester’s work, co-published with Mousse Publishing in 2014. Image above: Joachim Koester, Numerous Incidents of Indefinite Outcome, 2007 (installation at Charlottenborg, 2012, photo by Anders Sune Berg).

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Christina Mackie: Painting the Weights

Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen / May-August 2012

Mackie’s exhibition was conceived as a single installation in two main parts. In the first galleries a host of found and crafted objects were arranged on makeshift tables and shelves, reflecting the artist’s studio environment. This sequence followed a principle of repetition and morphosis that runs through Mackie’s work as a whole. The second part of the exhibition, displayed in the last gallery, contained a fretwork of steel bars that supported photographs depicting solitary figures looking at computer screens − alluding to the virtual connections between apparently isolated individuals.

Organising partners: Chisenhale Gallery, London and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen. Publication: edited by Rhea Dall; published by Motto. Image above: Christina Mackie, The Judges II, 2012 (detail, photo by Anders Sune Berg).

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Thomas Kilpper

Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen / May-August 2012

The floor panels of Kilpper’s pavilion were designed to also function as woodcut printing blocks, and the artist has subsequently been using them to produce a variety of prints: in both fabric and paper; including single portraits and larger groups. The exhibition at Charlottenborg featured the entire floor from Venice, as well as a wide variety of prints – many of which were created in situ in the gallery. Other elements included a megaphone, which the artist made so that visitors in Venice could exercise their freedom of speech, while an 18 metre-wide banner printed from the floor was hung on Charlottenborg’s Nyhavn facade.

Curators: Mark Sladen with Stine Hebert. Image above: Thomas Kilpper, Pavilion for Revolutionary Free Speech, Danish Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2011.

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Nina Beier

Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen / October 2011-January 2012

One piece was a large-scale triptych which consisted of secondhand clothes – made from leopard-skin prints and other animal patterns – held within picture frames. The work could be understood to offer a commentary on the systems of exchange between the developed and developing worlds; or on the circulation of art, and its relation to consumerism, fashion and obsolescence. Other works in the exhibition involved posters, including a new group of poster-sculptures. A final piece – entitled Tragedy – featured a Persian rug scattered with dog hair, the latter stemming from a repeated performance in which a dog owner asked their pet to ‘play dead’ on the rug. Beier is interested in how, in this process, the living animal can be at once itself and its own ‘image’.

Curator: Rhea Dall. Publication: edited by Rhea Dall; distributed by Motto. Image above: installation view, Charlottenborg, 2011 (photo by Anders Sune Berg).

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Simon Starling

Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen / October 2011 – January 2012

The exhibition also featured an installation, Project for a Masquerade (Hiroshima), 2011, which centres on a group of Japanese-style masks which represent the characters in a play. The scenario is based on an ancient Japanese story, but Starling has peopled this tale with figures from a Cold War saga based around the British sculptor Henry Moore. The piece tells the story of a sculpture that Moore was commissioned to make in Chicago to mark the site of some of the earliest nuclear experiments, a work that was beset by political pressures and which also attracted controversy when a version of it travelled to Hiroshima.

Curator: Mark Sladen. Publication: edited by Pernille Albrethsen; distributed by Motto. Image above: Simon Starling, The Expedition, 2011 (photo by Anders Sune Berg).