GATESHEAD.- BALTIC announced the 16 artists, 11 exhibitions over 5 weeks selected for BALTIC 39 | FIGURE ONE (in alphabetical order are):

ARKA Group (Ben Jeans Houghton & Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau) • Darren Banks
• Graeme Durant • Ella Finer • Andrea Jespersen • Andrew Lacon • Ben Sansbury • Andro Semeiko • The Walser Cycle (Paul Becker, Nadia Hebson and Tess Denman-Cleaver) • Eleanor Wright & Sam Watson • Kate Liston & Dan Wilde

The 11 exhibitions are to be held in the project space at BALTIC 39 from 4 September – 6 October. BALTIC 39 | FIGURE ONE is an opportunity for artists to test works and ideas, or to develop works in progress within a public context.

Summary of exhibitions in date order:

Ella Finer
O
Wednesday 4 September – Sunday 6 October 2013
O is a sound installation charting the breakdown and deterioration of a voice on record and will be installed at the entrance of BALTIC 39 for the duration of BALTIC 39 | FIGURE ONE.

Ben Sansbury
0 Gravity
Wednesday 4 September – Sunday 8 September 2013
0 Gravity is an installation, experiment and dialogue between, art, science & myth, offering a rare opportunity to experience zero gravity.

Graeme Durant
The Gate of The Kiss
Wednesday 4 September – Sunday 8 September 2013
A replica of Brancusi’s The Gate of The Kiss will be installed then dismantled and dissected to understand and cognise the choices and reasons for creating new objects and assemblages. Its component parts will be reconstituted as new work, making phrases from the patched vocabulary of new and old ideas.

Andrew Lacon
Wednesday 11 September – Sunday 15 September 2013
An exhibition of 14 new works concerned with the act of looking and the role of the image within contemporary art.

ARKA Group (Ben Jeans Houghton & Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau)
Rapid Eye Movement (Paradoxical Sleep)
Wednesday 11 September – Sunday 15 September 2013
Rapid Eye Movement (Paradoxical Sleep) is a sleep activated installation consisting of 150 airbeds, and an ever expanding audio narrative taken from remembered dreams. Visitors are invited to sleep and dream during gallery hours and submit accounts of their dreams to be recorded.

Andro Semeiko
Wednesday 18 September – Sunday 22 September 2013
An installation of drawings and multi-layered painterly compositions using narratives through performance, exploring how emotion can be read in an artwork and whether its historical context can be retrieved.

Eleanor Wright and Sam Watson: Tuned Cities
Wednesday 18 September – Sunday 22 September 2013
Tuned Cities presents, among other works and a symposium with The Department of Things to Come, a series of artist films that explore themes of architecture and transformation. The selected works explore this through allegorical representations of architecture, and the built environment operating as an expression of social and political ideals. The symposium will address the importance of visualising and critiquing imagined worlds in order to better understand realities of the present.

Kate Liston & Dan Wilde

Wednesday 25 September – 29 September 2013
is an installation of three videos, that draw upon situations in which a person is instructed to be attentive, including TV intro sequences, call centre ‘on hold’ music, public information posters and guided meditation videos. Questioning the implicit gesturing of architectural and interior design, the means by which we are told to adopt a certain behaviour is examined.

Darren Banks
The Object Echo
Wednesday 25 September – Sunday 29 September 2013
The Object Echo is a series of films focusing on the life and work of Churton Fairman (AKA Mike Raven, 1924-1997) a sculptor and horror film actor. New works will explore Fairman’s complex and multifaceted history.

Andrea Jespersen
Mind Circles
Wednesday 2 October – Sunday 6 October 2013
Mind Circles is an installation where the gallery space becomes a laboratory in which artworks are in flux for the duration of the exhibition. Raw materials - photographs and film -are ‘sculpted’ and re-appropriated into geometric objects by Jespersen, changing our ‘knowledge’ of and the relationship to the object.

The Walser Cycle (Paul Becker, Nadia Hebson and Tess Denman-Cleaver)
Wednesday 2 October – Sunday 6 October 2013
The Walser Cycle is a public, collaborative, developmental performance of three short plays by Modernist writer Robert Walser: The Pond, The Good for Nothing and Thorn Rose. The five day public staging negotiates Walser's texts through public rehearsals and collaborative performance.

Launched in April 2012, BALTIC’s project space was conceived primarily as a location for artists to try new projects and take risks within a supportive environment and to facilitate discussion around the production of new work. This new exhibition strand aims to encourage and support artists to develop their practice beyond the studio through short-term projects and experiments.