New Acquisitions 2005-2006

Arts Council Collection New Acquisitions 2005—06

Arts Council Collection New Acquisitions 2005—06

Chair of the Acquisitions Committee Susan May The external members of the Acquisitions Committee for 2005–07: Willie Doherty Mustafa Hulusi Polly Staple

Gillian Carnegie Gillian Carnegie often produces work in series. Mono is one of a number of paint­ings showing informally arranged decay­ing flowers. Although Carnegie works with the traditional subjects of still life, the figure, and landscape, she subtly attacks preconceptions about the medium of painting. Using a variety of styles, gener­ally executed in dark, earthy tones, she creates an uneasy tension between subject matter and material, her brush strokes both affirming and contradicting the images they depict.

Mono, 2005 oil on board, 73.3 × 58.7 cm

Phil Collins

dünya dinlemiyor, 2005 Single channel colour video projection with audio, 58 minutes

An engagement with people, place and community is central to Phil Collins’s work. In recent years he has lived, worked and exhibited in locations across the world, from Belfast, Bogotá and Belgrade to Baghdad and Ramallah. His work often originates in areas of conflict, shifting the focus from sensationalist news coverage and the associated cultural stereotyping to revealing unexpected aspects of life in contested territories. Filmed during the 9th International Istanbul Biennial, dűnya dinlemiyor features a karaoke session of Turkish fans singing their favourite tracks from The Smiths’ seminal album ‘The World Won’t Listen’. This is the second part of a trilogy of films that Collins made around the world, each adopting the same format, yet in final form fundamentally distinct in nuance and interpretation.

Ergin çavuŞoĞlu Ergin Çavuşoğlu’s multi-channel video installations explore the boundaries between the public and the private, the visible and the invisible, the legitimate and the contraband. Çavuşoğlu grew up in Bulgaria as a member of the Turkish minority during the Socialist regime, an experience that influenced his interest in issues of migration and surveillance.

In Tahtakale he captures the activities of a group of currency and gold traders on the black market housed in a baroque edifice of Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar. Two of the screens show the daily activities of the market traders, dealing in currency and gold. The third shows the so called ‘Hamals’ (carriers), people who carry goods on their backs to the shops. The

fourth is of scrolling text, depicting ran­dom phrases from their conversation. The traders run deals of questionable legality, but do so in the midst of the market crowds, where the modern exists within the archaic, and currency shifts are acted out in public. The spatial installation itself evokes the feel of the market place, with the traders in the heat of flurried activity.

The name Tahtakale is Turkish, and means ‘Wooden Fortress’. It is also the name of the place where it was filmed within the Grand Bazaar.

Tahtakale, 2004 four screen video installation, 8 minutes

Enrico David

Madrepelage, 2003 mixed media installation, dimensions variable Untitled (puppets: we are the mods), 2003 glass and wood, 85 × 65 × 12 cm

Enrico David’s oeuvre incorporates a vast array of media, comprising hand-crafted objects, film and collaborative live perfor­mance with fellow artists. David’s work frequently carries an element of theatre, and he often creates hallucinatory mise-en-scènes, which invite the viewer to conjure up their own interpretation of the events that may have led to their realisa­tion. Untitled (puppets: we are the mods) was originally conceived to connect with several areas of David’s practice; it was made as the subject of an animated video for a musical performance where the puppets were moved to a score by Mark Leckey. The puppets were due to be filmed burning, but as the video was never completed they survived their planned destruction, and have been preserved in a wooden box, like treasured toys, poised to play their instruments.

Tacita Dean

Bubble House Location Photograph 1999, 2005 colour photograph, 40 × 50 cm

In 1999 Tacita Dean made a film on the island of Cayman Brac in the Caribbean about the tragic story of yachtsman Donald Crowhurst, who dis­appeared at sea. She comments: “While documenting the decayed hull of the Teignmouth Elec­tron, my companion and I drove up the other road on the hurricane coast of the small island and came across the Bubble House.

Deserted and half-complete, it was built by a Frenchman who, according to the people of the island, embezzled money from the American government and was now doing 35 years in Tampa prison for fraud. Both boat and house were welcome neglect on an otherwise pampered island.”

This photograph was made as an affordable edition for the Hayward Gallery to support the touring exhibition An Aside which was curated by the artist.

Image courtesy Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris

Dee Ferris Dee Ferris’s work is concerned with ques­tions of romance and escapism. Her sources are as diverse as Rococo painting and contemporary advertisements with ‘their promises of fulfilment and aspira­tion’.

In Ideal Homes (this is the begining of forever) she cites property and jewellery advertisements as sources. Her fantasy landscapes explore unobtainable models of love, friendship, country bliss and faraway adventure. They are richly stained with oil and often shimmer with glitter, and their visions of heightened artifici­ality seem to suggest anxiety as much as relaxed leisure.

Ideal Homes (this is the beginning of forever), 2005 oil on canvas, 170 × 230 cm

Ryan Gander

The First Grand National is an installation designed to highlight, and unpick the familiar adage that a picture tells a thousand words. In a small, darkened room, an array of coloured light plays on one wall, created by the test screen on a retro television set. While the obscured screen shifts through the spectrum, the viewer hears the voice of an elderly lady, Gander’s late great aunt Deva, relating how she visualises theatrical performances heard on the radio, and imagines the coast of the British Isles when she listens to the daily shipping forecast, and how particular smells evoke memories from decades ago. In an age where media is able to rapidly conjure an image for every possible thought, The First Grand National encourages the viewer to use their own imagination.

The First Grand National, 2003 DVD and audio installation, 21 minutes 10 seconds

Marine Hugonnier A long-standing interest in anthropology has informed many of Marine Hugonnier’s films and photographs. Her work explores locations where a colonialist past strongly determines the way in which they are perceived. The Territory works were made for the exhibition of the same title at the Bezalel Academy in Tel Aviv, and they respond to a series of events organised around the opening of the exhibition.

Territory II (the kissing point), a col­lab­oration with the Israeli architect Eyal Weizman, was made during a bus tour around the West Bank. Looking at both a Jewish settlement and a Palestin­ian town, it observes the complexity of the geography of warfare, which is re­flected through architecture in both places. It reveals how landscape is constructed to embrace

political ends, and how the logic of appropriation manifests itself when traditional Arab architects inspire settler-builders, and Palestinian towns in turn mimic Modernist architecture.

Territory I, II, III, 2004 16mm film, 23 minutes 50 seconds

Roger Hiorns Roger Hiorns is perhaps best known for sculptures made by dipping various ob­jects into copper sulphate solution to encrust their surfaces with glittering blue crystals. In Nunhead, two BMW engines have been transformed using this process to create a sculpture of jewel-like beauty. According to the artist, Nunhead re­pre­sents the “crystal­lisation and trans­for­mation of an abstract idea of power; the title references the quiet streets around a South-East London cemetery where youths gather to show off their cars.”

Nunhead, 2004 steel, aluminium, plastics, rubber, copper sulphate, 170 × 141.5 × 122 cm

Runa Islam Runa Islam’s work has developed out of her interest in methods of film making, in particular narrative sequences and the illusory nature of the medium. Intense observation underpins much of her work, and in Stare Out (Blink) a young woman gazes intently at the viewer before she suddenly disappears, leaving her imprint on the viewer’s retina. This positive/ negative image can be related to the methods in which film materialises its immaterial sources.

Stare Out (Blink), 1998 16 mm film, 3 minutes

Gareth Jones The standard gallery plinth has become an object of scrutiny for Gareth Jones.

Through dissecting and reconfiguring a plinth into a number of different forms, Jones invites the viewer to reconsider its function and status. Sliced Cube is more intricate in construction than many of his other plinth works. It features a diamondshaped cube that sits on top of a simple wooden stand. The cube is made up of eighty-one black-and-white card­board blocks, each made by hand. Sliced Cube reveals Jones’s precise manipulation of inexpensive materials and his subtle, playful subversion of established forms of abstraction and minimalism.

Sliced Cube, 2000 card, tape, Fablon, wooden stand, 90 × 30 × 30 cm

Phillip L ai

Untitled, 2005 super 8 film transferred to 16mm, 1 minutes 7 seconds Financially assisted by Chelsea College of Art and Design

Diverse and wide-ranging, Phillip Lai’s practice defies straightforward catego­risation. Untitled is a short film, just over a minute in length. It was shot on super-8 and features a municipal park where the grass has been scorched dry after a long hot summer. The artist assumes the role of a vagrant, and the film provides a flickering observation of the vagrant’s dirty hands fidgeting repeatedly. Lai perceives Untitled not so much as a performance but more as an exploration of a “meandering or con­tinuously immediate movement”.

Trial of Former Leader, 2003–2005 metal, paint, pig blood, wood, acrylic sheet, lighting, 50 × 145 × 50 cm

Mark Leckey

Parade, 2003 DVD projection, 32 minutes Part funded by Film and Video Umbrella

Mark Leckey’s films and performances draw upon a range of urban cultural refer­ences, including fashion, dance, music, architecture and art. In Parade, a contin­uous passage of images moves across a screen in front of which the artist is posi­tioned; the shots vary from close-ups of fashion models, snaps of electrical goods stores and pawnshops to sumptuous emporia and other signifiers of conspic­uous con­sumption. Parade mixes the sensuous with the mundane as a means of making sense of life in the city.

Mark Leckey writes: “Parade arose out of a desire to compose a self-portrait, where the self is constructed from devices, surfaces and exteriorities, adopted and adapted contrivances that are controlled, self conscious, and manipulated. In es­sence an examination of the notion of the Dandy as a self-producer.”

Peter Peri Peter Peri’s work primarily focuses on two ways of working: intricately detailed, time inten­sive drawings and densely worked and re­work­ed black, geometric paintings.

In his drawings, Peri examines the minute details of forms, and translates them, using obsessive graphite lines, into highly detailed drawings. Precise shading gives the shapes body and depth, actualising his subjects.

Peri’s emphasis on draftsmanship is also evident in his abstract paintings. His can­vases are divided into geometric sections with coloured lines, bolts and spheres escaping through the black and silver surfaces, creating distorted mappings of unknown surroundings.

Projection 1, 2003 graphite on chinese parcel paper 45 cm diameter Pageant, 2005 mixed media on canvas 102 × 76.5 cm Vermiform, 2004 graphite on unbleached paper 33.8 × 52.5 cm

Melanie Smith Melanie Smith was born in Poole, Dorset, but has been living and working in Mexico City since 1989; consequently much of her work deals with contemporary Mexican issues. Parres is a small town outside Mexico City in the hinterland between city and countryside, with little sense of community or identity. Most of its in­habitants commute to Mexico City, and Smith’s view shows it devoid of human life. She further communicates its sense of dis­location with smooth blurred paint and a muted palette, leaving the town lan­guishing between the soft brown foreground and pale sky.

Parres (No. 2), 2005 acrylic enamel on acrylic sheet, mounted on aluminium, 130.5 × 200 × 4.2 cm

Alison Wilding

In 1998 Alison Wilding was commissioned by an anonymous donor to make a series of sculptures based on the sixteen scenes of The Passion of Christ, once the most familiar story of the Western world. She has described it as a challenge to make sculpture that represented each event on a human scale and embody the emotive nature of the narrative. Seal corresponds to The Entombment, Inversion to The Betrayal and Disposition to Christ before Pilate. Wilding comments, “The Passion continually surprises by its contemporary references.”

Seal, 1990 sandstone, polypropylene, 184 × 210 × 150 cm Inversion, 2000 oak, painted copper, 155 × 490 × 60 cm Disposition, 1999 concrete, silicone rubber, 182 × 288 × 252cm All works presented by the Contemporary Art Society and The Henry Moore Foundation, courtesy of an anonymous donor, 2006. Photo: Roderick Coyne.

Image courtesy The Henry Moore Foundation.

Cathy Wilkes Cathy Wilkes positions, presents and arranges objects drawn from domestic and industrial environments, and studies the language and iconography of such items in their new-found order. She ex­plores human agency and labour, and her large assemblages mainly reference the feminine body and mind. Banal, every­day objects assume a greater collective identity as they are positioned in a seem­ingly chaotic arrangement, echoing the concept of the ‘ready-mades’, where existing objects were adopted to reflect and critique human endeavour.

Untitled, 2005 oil and mixed media on canvas, 20 x 25 cm She’s Pregnant Again, 2005 mixed media, dimensions variable

Installation view: Scoletta San Rocco, Venice, Venice Biennale, 2005. Image courtesy the artist and Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow

Images Š the artist

Cover: Cathy Wilkes She’s Pregnant Again, 2005

Design: Catherine Nippe, www.cnippe.com

The Arts Council Collection is based at Southbank Centre, London and at Longside, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield.

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To enquire about borrowing work from the Arts Council Collection, email loans@southbankcentre.co.uk