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19/10/2005

Zoo Art Fair 2005

London Zoo, London

New Zoo Art Fair Commissions, Talks Programme and the John Jones Art Prize

Zoo Art Fair has become one of the UK's most important forums for emerging contemporary art talent and will be showcasing twenty-eight of the most exciting under four year old project spaces, galleries, artist collectives, curatorial groups and publications that colour the contemporary UK scene.

Zoo Art Fair 2005 will also feature a number of stimulating new initiatives that further demonstrate its ambition to support emergent talent. There will be a new art prize backed by John Jones, two site-specific commissions in collaboration with London Zoo and a challenging talks programme featuring luminaries from the UK’s art scene. The first ZOO Portfolio, curated by David Thorp, has also been produced in collaboration with sponsors Archeus (a separate press release is available on request).

The John Jones Art on Paper Acquisition & Award

John Jones has supported and advised countless emerging artists and galleries on the presentation and protection of art work over the last thirty years. In support of the emerging artists showing at Zoo Art Fair, John Jones will present a new award for work on paper. The selected work will be acquired for the John Jones Contemporary Collection and a sum of £1,000 awarded to the artist to support them in developing future work. John Jones will also consult with the artist to develop a protective presentation solution for the work, which will then be exhibited in John Jones’ exhibition space. Selectors include Danny Rolph, Mary Doyle, Kate and Matt Jones.

Zoo Art Fair Commissions

Zoo Art Fair has commissioned two artists to make site-specific works in London Zoo, thereby bringing a contemporary art presence to an institution already renowned for its exceptional architectural commissions. Both artists have created works that relate in some way to the activities and aims of the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), parent charity of London Zoo, a serious research centre as well as a place popular with children and their parents. The artists have had a unique opportunity to engage with the debates surrounding social and environmental change.

Simon Faithfull’s commission, The Penguin Repopulation Project, will return the missing penguins to Lubetkin's Modernist masterpiece, the Penguin Pool. Using drawings made on his recent two-month journey through Antarctica, Faithfull’s installation will present a paradoxical collision between a Modernist simulation of the polar regions and Faithfull’s eye witness account of an Antarctica under threat from climate change. Twenty-eight line-drawings of individual penguins will be transferred onto freestanding boards and placed around the former penguin enclosure. A diorama will be created on the curving back wall with further line drawings of an Antarctic vista. Pixilated snowflakes will fall over the scene, created by a theatrical lighting effect.

Oswaldo Maciá’s Diversion End is a site-specific sound work, a symphony that engages with notions of diversion at every level. Through the use of animal calls, it refers to the interference and interruption of the natural evolutionary process caused by humans. The audience will be distracted away from the entrance to the Fair, and onto the patio opposite the Prince Albert Suite, enticed by a musical diversion‚ a cacophony of vertical sound that ascends a tower of speakers and then gradually diminishes. The symphony has been created from the calls of a hundred animals taken from wild life sound archives and selected from the list of the 4,859 animals that inhabit the London Zoo.

A long banner, with a reproduction of a hand-coloured eighteenth century engraving of the Fall, depicting Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden will hang down from the tower, with a familiar road sign saying ‘Diversion Ends’ at the bottom. A variety of interpretations are possible through the associations between the sound of the animals ‘in the wild’, the lost paradise, and the road sign.

Zoo Art Fair Talks – Forty Years in London

For the past forty years the contemporary art scene in London has expanded dramatically in both private and public sectors and has been the subject of increasing international attention - from the organisations and artists that emerged in the 1960s, to those that sprung up in the 80s and 90s to the millennium generation that flourishes now. There now exists a layered and complex art scene where emergent and established exist in parallel and sometimes come together.

Key figures from the London art scene will help to set the context for the Zoo Art Fair with entertaining anecdotes and enlightening accounts of innovative art practice over the last forty years.

Speakers to include JJ Charlesworth, Sacha Craddock, Emma Dexter, Martin Herbert, Nicholas Logsdail, Susan May, Norman Rosenthal and David Thorp.

To be held in the Huxley Meeting Rooms. Friday 21 / Saturday 22 October 6.30-8pm

Zoo Art Fair is a non-profit enterprise made possible by the generous sponsorship of private collectors, established galleries, arts businesses and public funders.

Zoo Art Fair Staff
Soraya Rodriguez, Director
Sigrid Williams, Head of Development
David Risley, Head of Exhibitions
Vivien Ashley, Head of Projects
Alec Steadman, Exhibitions Manager
Crosby Brooke, Fair Manager
Isa Tharin, Assistant Manager

Zoo Art Fair
London Zoo, Prince Albert Gate
Outer Circle, Regent’s Park
Opening Times: 10am-5.30pm
Tickets: £ 7.50

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