Contemporary art is geographically radiating out of London, and, as globalisation takes a firm grip on the arts, an East Midlands’ light industrial town is creating a gallery that will play with the big boys. Nottingham Contemporary Art is due to open in Autumn 2009, and is nominated for the Conde Nast Design and Innovation award in the culture group. Britain must look outside London for some of the best future emerging exhibitions.
The building
The vast metallic building is situated oddly in the city’s Lace Market, where a century ago women sat stitching lace and textiles for distribution all over the country. Now sits an imposing construction, boldly built on a hill overlooking the neighbouring trendy bars and empty factories to the south. The tramline runs directly past the building bringing residents from the northern districts, and crosses the paths of buses from the south. But is this just another gallery to offer the privileged art world a utopia away from the public’s grubby view?
No. Nottingham Contemporary’s director, Alex Farquharson’s previous exhibitions seem to speak out to the diverse culture of the Midlands, as well as nation-wide. Five off-site exhibitions have been held over 2008-9, at historical landmarks including Nottingham Castle, Newstead Abbey, Wollaton Hall, Galleries of Justice, and the village of Laxton. Here, contemporary art is displaced from the trendy and frankly just too bloody cool East End right down to a small village north-east of Nottingham’s city centre – where Britain’s last remaining agricultural arrangement of the open field system, dating back to the Middle Ages, is still alive and working. The exhibitions present the contemporary art world in these historical contexts.
The Lord Byron exhibition flyer
A personal favourite of the recent exhibitions has to be That Beautiful Pale Face is my Fate (For Lord Byron) held in the old family home of the romantic poet. The press release introduced ghostly connections to Byron, and the notion of supernatural creation of artwork. The exhibition dealt with ideas of the wide-ranging phenomenon of celebrity, freedom and hybrdity of sexualities and the inklings of a feminist position. The work brilliantly combined Byron’s iconic status and the freedom of an artist in the twenty-first century. For example, Linder’s translation of the famous portrait of Byron is superimposed with an un-naturally large flower, whose petals reaches across and obscures Byron’s delicate features. This play with identity and symbols of femininity and masculinity complies with the recent thematic trends. This exhibition, like the other four created in the run up for the opening, provided the public with an interesting and innovative slant on contemporary art.
National newspapers are stirring interest in the direction of the Nottingham Contemporary, with reviews in The Guardian. The opening will boast café designs by Matthew Brannon and Pablo Bronstein, including a cabinet of curiosities in the study centre. This hybrid of the contemporary and the historical is an inventive direction for a contemporary art gallery, and no doubt will be worth the train ticket to Nottingham for upcoming exhibitions.
Opening is planned for Autumn 2009. For more information see www.nottinghamcontemporary.org
Meghan Goodeve
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After this you can then continue North to Wakey in West Yorkshire for its Chipperfield designed gallery The Hepworth Wakefield opening Spring 2011. No trams though, but we’ve got the Brontes rather than Byron.
Funny how Brighton never got it together for a major contemporary art gallery to be built. There was once talk of a Serpentine 2 at the end of one of the piers.
this new gallery should be brilliant for nottingham! nice article.