Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum
17th December 2016 - 15th January 2017
Curated by Adam Lockhart & Cooper Gallery, DJCAD
Featuring work by: David Critchley, Stephen Partridge, David Hall, Judith Goddard, Elaine Shemilt, George Barber.
Curated by Cooper Gallery DJCAD, University of Dundee in collaboration with Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum and organised in partnership with the British Council, Phase Two of CURRENT: Contemporary Art from Scotland focuses on the history, development and current conditions of artists’ moving image works to further explore the distinctiveness of contemporary art made in Scotland, its grass-roots spirit and its keen debates with the social and political dimensions of art and culture.
Phase Two of CURRENT: Contemporary Art from Scotland grasps the restless energies of now by means of two contrasting takes on the moving image; REWIND and >>FFWD.
Crashing in and out of focus, cutting and editing time the moving image is the aesthetic medium of the contemporary. Yet as a medium it holds more than just the present moment, its play of film strips and pixels is marked by radical histories. Excavating this radical history encapsulated in seminal artists’ video works from the 1970’s and 80’s REWIND provides an in-depth historical perspective with which to grasp the condition of the ‘contemporary’ as a moving image falling in and out of history. In contrast, >>FFWD seizes the ‘contemporary’ in its full immediacy and impact. Choreographed as a four-week rolling programme of moving image works from Scotland, >>FFWD illuminates a visual lexicon of now.
Drawn from the significant national AHRC research project led by scholars at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee, REWIND is a critical and historical counter-point to the contemporary moving image works presented in >>FFWD.Sampling the visual languages and formal innovations developed by video artists working during the 1970’s and 80’s, REWIND provides a telling account of how the image culture of the ‘contemporary’ is saturated with citations, quotations and references from its near past.