EASTBOURNE.- Towner presents Some Are Nights Others Stars, a major exhibition by five internationally renowned artists whose works embody contrasting experiences of displacement and loss with the dynamics of movement and transformation. In interrelated film installations, large-scale sculptural works, paintings and drawings, the exhibition explores contemporary concerns about land, architecture, progress, utopian dreams, inequality, trauma and resistance.
Central to the exhibition, and in its first UK presentation outside London is Isaac Julien’s three-screen film installation Ten Thousand Waves (2010) inspired by the tragic incident at Morecambe Bay in 2004 in which 23 cockle-pickers lost their lives. Revolving around a protagonist spirit guide Mazu, a mythological sea goddess and protector of fishermen played by Maggie Cheung, the film is a poetic melding of contemporary Chinese culture with ancient myths; from the remote Fujian landscapes that were home to the drowned immigrants to the modern highways and skyscrapers of Shanghai. The work links China’s transition into modernity with questions about contemporary labour and the movement of people in global capitalism. Ten Thousand Waves was jointly acquired by Towner Art Gallery and Manchester’s Whitworth Gallery in March 2016 through the Moving Image Fund, which Art Fund launched last year in partnership with Thomas Dane Gallery, and is one of the first works to be acquired through the Fund.
Siobhán Hapaska explores other ideas of displacement, loss, movement and transformation in her site-specific work Intifada (2015-2016). Eleven uprooted olive trees vertically suspended in mid-air continuously vibrate, in a state of ‘shaking off’, to evoke the literal meaning of the work’s title and invite physical immersion in a complex narrative that alludes to rebellion and resistance. A symbol of peace and human resilience and intricately linked to the Mediterranean’s volatile economies, Hapaska’s olive trees become victims shackled in an unnatural environment, but are defiant, magical and hopeful rather than compliant.
An Archaeology Project for Future Remembrance (2013) by Tiffany Chung explores a district in Ho Chi Minh City that was razed to the ground to make way for a redevelopment project modelled on the Pudong financial district in Shanghai. A 3-channel video work showing an evocative montage of sequences filmed during Chung’s excavations in the rubble of the urban ruins, is accompanied by a ‘future relic’ of tiled flooring the artist found on site and cartographic drawings based on urban-planning maps of the city. The drawings expose the pretensions that large-scale master plans impose on the world while also engaging with the creative energies and dream worlds that plans inspire. Nearby are 26 glass plates etched with texts charting the history of urban development in nation-building projects.
A complex arrangement of interconnecting structures, Ruth Claxton’s Specular Spectacular (Cheryl, Jo, Joanne, Elinor, Claire, Anna, Charlotte, Effy) (2013-16) offers up worlds within worlds inhabited by isolated figurines that are themselves swallowed up by the amorphous reflective masks of mirrors. Claxton’s installation is both a dream-like landscape that might be a model of a utopian city and a technological space derived from the geometrical structure of the classic Windows ‘pipes’ screensaver. The vertiginous corridors of reflections suggest the disorientating nature of the networked world, and of being in multiple places at once, yet also draws on ideas of physical presence, materiality and touch.
Inspired by the visual iconography of urban and rural East Africa, Michael Armitage’s paintings weave multiple narratives drawn from historical and current news media, internet gossip, and his recollections of Kenya, his country of birth. Painting in oil on Lubugo, a traditional bark cloth, Armitage creates colourful dream-like imagery of colonial and modern vernacular architecture, advertising hoardings, lush vegetation and animal life. Undermining this apparent idyll is his quiet exposition of Kenya’s politics, social inequalities, violence and the extreme economic disparities. The painting Kariakor (2015) refers to Kenya’s Carrier Corps, a military organisation set-up to provide porters for the British campaign against the German forces in East Africa in World War I, in which over 100,000 East Africans lost their lives after being forcibly conscripted.
