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3/3/2010

AV Festival 10: Energy

Different venues, Newcastle

The North East based biennial AV Festival is one of the UK's largest international festivals of electronic arts. It returns to NewcastleGateshead, Middlesbrough, and Sunderland, this year (5-14 March), presenting a diverse programme of work including 24 exhibitions, 20 performances, 10 screenings, 14 talks, 4 club nights and 3 symposia, by over 100 visual artists, musicians and filmmakers, and will include 15 World Premieres of new AV Festival commissions.

The theme of this year's Festival is 'energy', which is examined from a variety of different perspectives ranging from kinetic, sound, light and electromagnetic energy, to the spiritual and human.

AV Festival 10 Visual Art & Exhibitions Highlights include:
* A certain distance, endless light, a major exhibition by internationally celebrated Cuban-born American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Irish painter William McKeown at mima, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art.
* Power Game by Liliane Lijn, performance at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead of Lijn's 1974 late night democratic card game.
* all art is, is rhythm, Rhodri Davies, Alec Finlay, Felix Hess, Pe Lang, Liliane Lijn and Charlemagne Palestine at Hatton Gallery: Great North Museum, Newcastle with 3 new commissions, on the theme of energy and sound.
* Heliocentric, new moving image commission about the sun, the source of earth's energy and life by Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt) at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland.
* Sound Seam by Aura Satz, world premiere of a film installation exploring sound and memory at the Great North Museum: Hancock, Newcastle.
* condemned_bulbes by artificiel, installation of dozens of oversized incandescent light bulbs in the darkened Great Hall of the Discovery Museum, Newcastle.
* Films screenings by leading visual artists including: Christian Marclay, Bruce Conner, Johan Grimonprez, plus special guest appearance by Kenneth Anger.
* Gustav Metzger gives lecture at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art

* A CERTAIN DISTANCE, ENDLESS LIGHT – A major exhibition co-curated by AV Festival 10 and mima, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art from Fri 5 March until 4 July 2010 (Tues, Weds, Fri, Sat, 10am-5pm, Thurs 10am-8pm, Sun 12-4pm, FREE)
which brings together work by Cuban-born American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957- 96) and Irish artist William McKeown (b. 1962). Both artists' work answers the Festival theme of 'energy' in different ways, through highly personal pursuits of beauty, happiness and freedom.

As part of the exhibition Felix Gonzalez-Torres billboard project 'Untitled' (Strange Bird), 1993 will be presented on billboards across Middlesbrough, NewcastleGateshead and Sunderland introducing magical imagery into sites usually reserved for commercial advertising.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957-96) is one of the key artists of the 1990s, known for his quiet, minimal installations that explore shifting distinctions between public and private spheres. He is renowned for developing an interactive art that can be taken away by the public including paper stacks, whilst his illuminated light bulb strings create an overwhelming sensory phenomena. His work is known for its formal beauty, sensitivity and openness to interpretation by the viewer. William McKeown is highly regarded for his paintings, drawings and watercolours that express a concern about our relationship with nature. He is interested in the sky and air that moves around us, in particular the emergence of daylight as experienced in the morning hours. With a remarkable refined sense of colour and understanding of natural light, his work is poetic, expansive and captures the essence of a place and time. It strives for openness, acceptance and a new democratic space bridging distances between time and people.

* LILIANE LIJN: POWER GAME – A late night democratic card game and improvised art performance at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead on Fri 5 March (9-11.30pm, Minimum £2 exchanged for chips to enter the casino. FREE to watch on video relay in the BALTIC Café Bar).
Power Game is a dynamic card game and improvised art performance, devised and performed by artist Liliane Lijn. Originally staged in 1974, and restaged at the ICA in London in 2009, it explores the power of words, politics and identity. The BALTIC will be staged as a casino with leafy palms, cocktails, music and cross-dressing croupiers. At the heart of the game are invited players who bet with their own money on the comparative power of two words, which is decided by audience vote. Previous players included film director Derek Jarman, writers Jack Arnott and Hari Kunzru and PR guru Julia Hobsbawm.

* ALL ART IS, IS RHYTHM - Harps played by wind, 16 model wind turbines, 500 paper wind vanes and a medley of 1,500 toy bears feature in the AV Festival curated group exhibition at Hatton Gallery: Great North Museum, Newcastle from Fri 5 March to Sat 22 May (Mon-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 2-5pm, FREE).

As stated by Kurt Schwitters in 1928, "art is nothing more than rhythm". This group exhibition presents six leading contemporary artists including 3 new commissions on the theme of energy and sound. It features: Rhodri Davies's 'Room Harp', a series of harp sculptures played by mechanical fans, which turn the harps into musical wind machines; 'Sky-Wheels' is a new work by Alec Finlay, a field of sixteen model wind turbines featuring poems by the artist on their kinetic blades; 'It's in the Air' by artist and physicist Felix Hess is an installation of 500 floor-based small paper vanes that respond to fluctuating air pressure in the room; in Pe Lang's thermocromatic paintings an input of thermal energy to the canvas alters its molecular structure and slowly changes its colour; Liliane Lijn's installations made from copper wire create moving lines of light, while her drawings of wind turbines from 1970 predict a future of renewable energy, and Charlemagne Palestine's debut UK installation 'beardemonium tintinnabulum' will feature his signature motif of soft toy bears.

* HELIOCENTRIC - A new commission by artist duo, Semiconductor (aka Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt) at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland. (Fri 5 March–Sat 1 May. Mon & Weds 9.30am-7.30pm, Tues, Thurs & Fri 9.30am–5pm, Sat 9.30am–4pm, FREE).
Heliocentric is a new commission by Brighton based artists Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt, which features a soundtrack by musician BJ Nilsen. Their multi-screen moving image installation tracks the sun from dawn to dusk across several distinct landscapes including Kielder Forest in Northumberland. It debunks the misconception that the sun is in motion across the sky, when in fact it is the earth that is rotating. The exhibition also includes work made as a result of their residency at the NASA Space Sciences Lab in California in 2005-6.

* AURA SATZ WITH ALEKS KOLKOWSKI: SOUND SEAM - World premiere of a film installation which explores sound and memory at the Great North Museum: Hancock, Newcastle. (Fri 5-Sun 14 March, Mon-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 2-5pm, FREE).
Aura Satz's mesmeric film uses microscopic close-ups of gramophone grooves and the anatomy of the ear, and is accompanied by music composed by Aleks Kolkowski featuring eerie wax cylinder recordings. Described as a 'forensic love story' the film draws on the German poet Rilke's 1919 suggestion to play the groove-like line of a skull with a gramophone needle. The soundtrack is listened to through a theatrical array of horns and ear trumpets.

* ARTIFICIEL: CONDEMNED_BULBES – An exhibition of dozens of oversized incandescent light bulbs in the blackened Great Hall at the Discovery Museum, Newcastle from Fri 5 to Sun 14 March (Mon-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 2-5pm, FREE).
The English premiere of a new work by Montreal-based digital artists artificiel (Alexandre Burton, Jimmy Lakatos and Julien Roy). A series of incandescent light bulbs hang in grid formation, and as electricity passes through a special dimmer, the bulb coils come to life and become audible. The result is a spectacular electric chorus and flashing light display. Presented in collaboration with Newcastle ScienceFest, it marks the invention of the incandescent light bulb by Sunderland-born Joseph Swan, a replica of which can be seen in Discovery Museum.

* Film Screenings by leading international visual artists including: CHRISTIAN MARCLAY, BRUCE CONNER, JOHAN GRIMONPREZ and special guest appearance by KENNETH ANGER (Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle, various times).
These four special screenings are all created using archive footage or found film.
'CROSSROADS' by seminal US artist Bruce Conner (1933-2008) is a dramatic montage of declassified US Government footage of the first underwater atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll in 1946. Christian Marclay's only feature length film collages together Antonioni's masterpiece 'Blow Up' with the soundtrack of Brian De Palma's thriller 'Blow Out'! Belgian artist Johan Grimonprez uses an assemblage of footage to muse on Alfred Hitchcock's career against 1960s bomb-era political anxiety. And legendary filmmaker and Hollywood gossip writer Kenneth Anger makes a special guest appearance to talk and screen his work from the 1940s to the present day.

* Lecture by leading UK artist and activist GUSTAV METZGER at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (Wed 10 March, 6.30-7.30pm, FREE)
In a career spanning over 60 years, this lecture will reflect Metzger's life-long exploration of politics, ecology and the destructive powers of 20th Century society. In 1959 he published his first auto-destructive manifesto. Metzger was ahead of his time in his concern for environmental issues and continues to influence new generations of artists and thinkers.

Informations:
AV Festival 10: Energy
c/o Tyneside Cinema 10 Pilgrim Street Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Tel: +44(0)191 227 5512 Email: info@avfestival.co.uk

Press enquiries please contact:
Nicky Harrison, White Hot Communications
T: 0191 2808020 / 07824 390826 E: nicky@whitehotcomms.co.uk
Clare Wilford PR
T: 020 77296751 / 075 45756462 E: clarewilford@o2.co.uk

Exhibition previews in Middlesbrough Thursday 4 March, NewcastleGateshead Friday 5 March, and Sunderland Tuesday 9 March (times vary, see the website for full details).

Newcastle, Gateshead, Sunderland and Middlesbrough, various venues

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