CURRENT: Contemporary Art from Scotland

Exhibition programme:

REWIND: British Video Art in the ’70s & ’80s
George Barber, David Critchley, Judith Goddard, David Hall, Stephen Partridge, Elaine Shemilt

>>FFWD: Artists’ Moving Image from Scotland
Anne Colvin, Anne-Marie Copestake, Karen Cunningham, Kate Davis, Katy Dove, Kathryn Elkin, Sarah Forrest, Allison Gibbs, Michelle Hannah, Elín Jacobsdottir, Mairi Lafferty, Adam Lewis Jacob, Lyndsay Mann, Duncan Marquiss, Oliver Mezger, Rosalind Nashashibi, Bobby Niven, Hardeep Pandhal, Ross Sinclair, Lucy Skaer, Pernille Spence, Corin Sworn, Tom Varley, Dominic Watson

Organised by Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum, Cooper Gallery DJCAD University of Dundee, in partnership with the British Council.
 

Following the successful 2015 debut in China, CURRENT: Contemporary Art from Scotland programme will move into Phase Two at Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum in December 2016.

Curated by Cooper Gallery DJCAD, University of Dundee in collaboration with Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum and organised in partnership with the British Council, Phase Two of CURRENT: Contemporary Art from Scotland focuses on the history, development and current conditions of artists’ moving image works to further explore the distinctiveness of contemporary art made in Scotland, its grass-roots spirit and its keen debates with the social and political dimensions of art and culture.

Phase One of CURRENT noted that the present is “the only moment that ever matters.” Phase Two sustains this observation with the caveat that the “contemporary” is nothing but the shadow of this very moment.

Transfixed in the immediate passage of a recurring now, the contemporary captures and projects only it’s own image. This is its currency, its irredeemable value, the unique quality of being simultaneously both what is watched and the means of watching. But the now of the contemporary is inherently unstable and indefinite. Without permanency or stability, it smoulders in a closed loop, ceaselessly rewinding and leaping forward, an image always moving ahead and falling back upon itself.

Marking and making time, the contemporary inscribes itself within a technical universe composed of images in constant flux. Faced with this temporal apparition that oscillates between high definition close-ups and impossible wide angle panoramas, Phase Two of CURRENT: Contemporary Art from Scotland grasps the restless energies of now by means of two contrasting takes on the moving image; REWIND and >>FFWD. 

Crashing in and out of focus, cutting and editing time, the moving image is the aesthetic medium of the contemporary. Yet as a medium it holds more than just the present moment, its play of film strips and pixels is marked by radical histories. Excavating this radical history encapsulated in seminal artists’ video works from the 1970s and ’80s, REWIND provides an in-depth historical perspective with which to grasp the condition of the contemporary as a moving image falling in and out of history. In contrast, >>FFWD seizes the contemporary in its full immediacy and impact. Choreographed as a four-week rolling programme of moving image works from Scotland, >>FFWD illuminates a visual lexicon of now.

>>FFWD: Artists’ Moving Image from Scotland
Featuring works by 24 artists, >>FFWD captures the evocative light of contemporary moving image works from four distinct angles. Indexed by questions of the body, history, narrative and time, >>FFWD unrolls the moving image as a medium irrevocably defined by the urgencies of our contemporary moment. The selection of >>FFWD is supported by Modern Edinburgh Film School.

REWIND: British Video Art in the ’70s & ’80s
Drawn from the significant national AHRC research project led by scholars at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee, REWIND is a critical and historical counterpoint to the contemporary moving image works presented in >>FFWD. Sampling the visual languages and formal innovations developed by video artists working during the 1970s and ’80s, REWIND provides a telling account of how the image culture of the contemporary is saturated with citations, quotations and references from its near past.

Fast-forwarding to yesterday and rewinding today, Phase Two of CURRENT: Contemporary Art from Scotland throws light on the shadow we call the contemporary. Replete with radical aesthetics and artistic passions, >>FFWD and REWIND bring into startling focus the moving images that give the contemporary its fiction of permanency.

Hubs and Fictions: On Current Art and Imported Nearness
Shanghai Forum Series #2
“Characters: The Problem of Figure-Ground Relationships”
Speakers: Tobias Berger, JJ Charlesworth, Carol Yinghua Lu
November 13, 2016, Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum

Located at a critical intersection of European and Chinese perspectives, the CURRENT exhibition programme is refracted through the Hubs and Fictions Shanghai Forum Series, co-curated by Sophia Hao and Edgar Schmitz. As a prelude for Phase Two of CURRENT: Contemporary Art from Scotland, #2 in the forum series was successfully delivered during the 11th Shanghai Biennale opening weekend.

Phase Two of CURRENT: Contemporary Art from Scotland is a collaboration between Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum and Cooper Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee and organised in partnership with the British Council. 

CURRENT: Contemporary Art from Scotland is kindly supported by the British Council, China-UK Connections through Culture, The National Lottery through Creative Scotland, Scottish Government, Shanghai International Culture Association, Goldsmiths College, University of London and LUX Scotland. CURRENT is a direct result of a Research and Development Trip (January 2014) funded by Creative Scotland.