Celebrating 20 Years of Baltic
BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead
Photo: V21 Artspace
V21 Artspace look back at the 3D Virtual Exhibition Tours they have produced for BALTIC, an organisation which creates and produces exhibitions, activities and opportunities that explore understanding of the world through diverse contemporary art by artists from across the world. Located on Gateshead quayside, they have 2,600 square metres of exhibition space dedicated to the art and artists of today and tomorrow.
3D Virtual Exhibition Tour View: Huma Bhabha Against Time. Courtesy the Artist and BALTIC.
Huma Bhabha Against Time
For her first major survey exhibition in Europe, Huma Bhabha presents a selection of sculptures comprising cork, Styrofoam, clay and found materials such as wood, plastic, chicken wire and rubber tyres, alongside photographs, prints and expressive works on paper.
Mainly focusing on the figure, Bhabha’s work addresses themes of colonialism, war, displacement and memories of home. Her influences are wide ranging, from ancient Egyptian statuary, African art, Classicism, Cubism and German Expressionism to science fiction and horror films.
This exhibition spans the last two decades of Bhabha’s work, bringing together an impressive cast of characters that seem otherworldly and alien; time-travellers from a distant past or an imagined future.
Supported by the Henry Moore Foundation.
3D Virtual Exhibition Tour View: Abel Rodríguez. Courtesy the Artist and BALTIC.
Abel Rodríguez
Abel Rodríguez (Mogaje Guihu) is an elder from the Nonuya ethnic group, native to the Cahuinarí river in the Colombian Amazon. Rodríguez’s work is grounded in his ancestral knowledge of the indigenous plants of the region, which was passed to him by his uncle.
In the 1990s, the Colombian armed conflict and the exploitation of natural resources in the rainforest displaced Rodríguez and his family from his native land and they moved to Bogota, the country’s capital.
As a way to preserve his knowledge and memory of his region, Rodríguez creates detailed paintings and drawings that depict the ecosystem of the rainforest in the Nonuya region with intricate details of the flora and fauna. His knowledge is highly valued by western botanists, and has gained international recognition over the past five years within the visual arts.
3D Virtual Exhibition Tour View: The Making of Husbands. Courtesy the Artists and BALTIC.
The Making of Husbands
The Making of Husbands: Christina Ramberg in Dialogue is a major exhibition that brings together works by Christina Ramberg (1946–1995), her contemporaries and younger artists to explore the urgency with which her work speaks to contemporary debate around gender and identity.
Artists include: Alexandra Bircken, Sara Deraedt, Gaylen Gerber, Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, Konrad Klapheck, Ghislaine Leung, Senga Nengudi, Ana Pellicer, Howardena Pindell, Christina Ramberg, Richard Rezac, Diane Simpson, Kathleen White.
Ramberg emerged as one of the most intriguing painters of a generation known as Chicago Imagists, and left a remarkable body of comic, formally elegant, erotically sinister paintings. She once described the drawings of corsets in her sketchbooks as ‘Containing, restraining, re-forming, hurting, compressing, binding, transforming a lumpy shape into a clean smooth line’. The Making of Husbands: Christina Ramberg in Dialogue explores Ramberg’s understanding of the body as deeply intertwined with its surroundings, shaped by corsets, bandages and hairdos, as well as by behavioural conventions.
The Making of Husbands: Christina Ramberg in Dialogue is produced by KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin and curated by Anna Gritz (Curator, KW). The exhibition will travel to 49 nord 6 est - Frac Lorraine, Metz from February to May 2020 before travelling to BALTIC. The exhibition is made possible through support from the Capital Cultural Fund and Terra Foundation for American Art.
v21artspace.com/the-making-of-husbands
3D Virtual Exhibition Tour View: Pakui Hardware Virtual Care. Courtesy the Artists and BALTIC.
Pakui Hardware Virtual Care
For their first solo exhibition in the UK, Pakui Hardware (artists Neringa Cerniauskaite and Ugnius Gelguda) will present a newly devised commission created specially for BALTIC’s level 2 gallery space, exploring the subject of robotic and virtual care at a particularly significant moment when we find ourselves more concerned than ever with the quality and accessibility of healthcare.
Pakui Hardware’s work considers the movement of capital through bodies, technology and materials and how it shapes our realities. Reminiscent of futuristic or biological settings, their hybrid sculptures and installations use materials such as glass, artificial fur, textiles, leather, chia seeds, soil, silicone, metal and plastics. In recent years, their work has explored questions around contemporary medicine, imagining possible futures where material limitations are transcended by fragmenting, multiplying and recreating human and non-human bodies.
For their new installation at BALTIC, the space will be transformed into an environment that resembles a clinical surgery room where human presence – with the exception of the visitor themselves – is replaced by technology. Glass objects affixed to a hanging surgical lamp sculpture will create a sense of warmth and care, in contrast to the alienated coolness of its steel arms that make anthropomorphic reference to surgeon’s hands. Suspended between physical and virtual, bodily and digital, transparent thermoformed or resin ‘bodies’ will be abstracted into sculptural biomorphic shapes that are both present and erased at the same time. Partially inspired by paintings by Lithuanian artist Teresė Rožanskaitė from the 1970s and 80s, these ‘bodies’ are traces, shells of ‘flesh’, dominated by technology.
3D Virtual Exhibition Tour View: Baltic Open Submission 2020. Courtesy the Artists and BALTIC.
Baltic Open Submission 2020
BALTIC received over 540 submissions through an open-call application process announced in the summer whilst the gallery was closed during lockdown. All entries were selected by a panel of three artists based in the North East: Richard Bliss, Lady Kitt and Padma Rao, and Katie Hickman, Curator (Performance and Public Programme) at BALTIC.
BALTIC Open Submission celebrates creativity in the North East; the vast number of entries and the works included in the exhibition highlight the variety and high quality of arts practice across the North East. The exhibition presents works by artists who have been making throughout their lifetime to those just beginning; from people who work collectively, to those who create alone; those who have studied fine art, to self-taught creatives who have only ever made work in their private homes.
The exhibition will include a wide range of media including painting, drawing, print, sculpture, ceramic, installation, video and sound works. BALTIC Open Submission seeks to give visibility to arts practice from individuals and collectives that may not previously have been seen by a public audience.
3D Virtual Exhibition Tour View: Phyllis Christopher. Contacts. Courtesy the Artists and BALTIC.
Phyllis Christopher. Contacts
Contacts is an intimate glimpse at lesbian community in San Francisco in the ‘90s through the archive of photographer Phyllis Christopher. Belonging to a politicised tradition of documentary photography, Christopher’s handprinted and tinted images reflect how the camera participated in the performance of queer identities and feminist politics in the club and in the streets.
Amid the connected crises of HIV/AIDS and gentrification, Christopher and her collaborators answered the historic absence of representations of lesbian life with an abundance of images showing acts of sexual intimacy and public protest – a community defiantly taking up space and taking care of their own. An ethic of consent frames Christopher’s images as photographer and subject negotiate what it means to be shown and seen as lesbian, both then and now.
The exhibition coincides with the publication of Christopher’s first monograph Dark Room: San Francisco Sex and Protest, 1988-2003 by Bookworks.
Contacts is curated by Laura Guy. The exhibition at BALTIC coincides with Christopher’s solo exhibition at Grand Union in Birmingham and together they represent the artist’s first major retrospective.
