Event type: Exhibition

Deity is a digital performance that combines live motion capture with physical movement.

The work invites you to interact with a virtual avatar of the artist which has been digitally enhanced using a filter app. The avatar is dressed in attire inspired by fantasy video game characters. Imagined as a shrine to the digital self, the installation replicates the multi-angle surround of a dressing table mirror, each screen gripped by tentacles.

The screens replicate the dark, reflective surface that is left when our phones or tablets aren’t activated. Reacting to your movements via an interactive motion-capture camera, the avatar submerges and emerges from the inky liquid that is the ‘black mirror’ of the screens. This repetitive engulfing of the body explores our deep connections to our virtual selves, whilst referencing obsidian mirrors, often used in shamanism to create portals into other dimensions. The mirror acts as a space for ritual and spirituality, evoking a simultaneous moment of worship and observation of our digital reflection.

The digital avatar attempts to keep up with the complex movements of its human audience but its lack of precision demonstrates the fragmented relationship between the digital and the physical. The work pulls this relationship apart to expose the disconnection between the two realities.

An exhibition of posters created with statements from local people. NEW SOCIETY seeks to reimagine the way we think about power; who inherits it, who takes it and who we give it to.

A broken manifesto for a more hopeful future – for tomorrow, for next week, for next year, for now!

This event is part of Take Over 2022.

Tickets and access information: https://www.heartofglass.org.uk/project-and-events/events/take-over-new-society

Tate Liverpool will unveil an exhibition of work by the four artists nominated for the Turner Prize 2022: Heather Phillipson, Ingrid Pollard, Veronica Ryan and Sin Wai Kin. One of the world’s best-known prizes for the visual arts, the Turner Prize aims to promote public debate around new developments in contemporary British art.

The prize is returning to Liverpool for the first time in 15 years having helped launch the city’s year as European Capital of Culture. The winner will be announced on 7 December at an award ceremony at St George’s Hall, Liverpool.

HEATHER PHILLIPSON presents RUPTURE NO 6: biting the blowtorched peach, 2022. Reimagining her 2020 Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries commission, Phillipson conjures what she calls ‘a maladapted ecosystem, an insistent atmosphere.’ Charged with colour, video and kinetic sculpture, and augmented with a brand-new audio composition, Phillipson proposes her space at Tate Liverpool as alive and happening in a parallel time-zone. It is, she says, ‘a whole new season’. Phillipson’s audacious and wide-ranging practice often involves collisions of wildly different materials, media and gestures in what she describes as ‘quantum thought experiments’.

INGRID POLLARD works primarily in photography, but also sculpture, film and sound to question our relationship with the natural world and interrogate ideas such as Britishness, race and sexuality. For the Turner Prize, Pollard presents Seventeen of Sixty Eight 2018, developed from decades of research into racist depictions of ‘the African’ on pub signs, ephemeral objects, within literature and in surrounding landscapes. Bow Down and Very Low – 123 2021 includes a trio of kinetic sculptures using everyday objects to reference power dynamics though their gestures, while the photo series DENY: IMAGINE: ATTACK 1991 and SILENCE 2019 look at the language of power, both emotional and physical.

VERONICA RYAN presents cast forms in clay and bronze; sewn and tea-stained fabrics; and bright neon crocheted fishing line pouches filled with a variety of seeds, fruit stones and skins to reference displacement, fragmentation and alienation. Rather than having fixed meanings, Ryan’s work is typically open to a wide variety of readings, as implied by titles such as Multiple Conversations 2019–21 or Along a Spectrum 2021. Made during a residency at Spike Island, the forms she creates take recognisable elements and materials – such as fruit, takeaway food containers, feathers, or paper – and reconfigure them, exploring ecology, history and dislocation, as well as the psychological impact of the pandemic.

SIN WAI KIN brings fantasy to life through storytelling in performance, moving image, and ephemera. Their work realises fictional narratives to describe lived realities of desire, identification, and consciousness. For the Turner Prize, Sin presents three films, including A Dream of Wholeness in Parts 2021 in which traditional Chinese philosophy and dramaturgy intersects with contemporary drag, music and poetry; In It’s Always You 2021 the artist adopts the roles of four boyband members, striving to take on the multiplicity of identities that transcend constructed binaries, while Today’s Top Stories, sees Sin playing the character of The Storyteller, posing as a news anchor who recites philosophical propositions on existence, consciousness, naming and identity.

Alex Farquharson, Director of Tate Britain and Co-chair of the Turner Prize 2022 jury, said: “15 years since Turner Prize ventured out of London for the first time to Liverpool, it’s fantastic to see the prize back in the city. This year’s shortlisted artists have delivered a visually exciting, thought-provoking, and wide ranging exhibition, and I encourage art-lovers from across the country to come and see it for themselves.”

Helen Legg, Director of Tate Liverpool and Co-chair of the Turner Prize 2022 jury, said: “I’m excited to be unveiling work by these four outstanding artists at Tate Liverpool for this year’s Turner Prize. This is a diverse group of artists, each with a singular vision, who are all dealing with important issues facing our society today and together their work combines to create a fascinating and vibrant exhibition.”

The Turner Prize was established in 1984 and is awarded each year to a British artist for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation of their work. The Turner Prize award is £55,000 with £25,000 going to the winner and £10,000 each for the other shortlisted artists.

The members of the Turner Prize 2022 jury are Irene Aristizábal, Head of Curatorial and Public Practice, BALTIC; Christine Eyene, Research Fellow, School of Arts and Media, UCLan; Robert Leckie, Director, Spike Island; and Anthony Spira, Director, MK Gallery.

The Turner Prize 2022 is curated by Sarah James, Senior Curator, Tate Liverpool, and Matthew Watts, Assistant Curator, Tate Liverpool.

 

TRS Studio members and long term collaborators, Cos Ahmet and Gary Finnegan, have come together to present a new film and sound installation, entitled ’they say everyone has to start somewhere….’

For their show at The Royal Standard, the duo’s new work places a demand on the moving image and questions the conventions of staging. In contrast to the generic presentation of films projected on walls or large screens, the duo treat the ‘video screen’ like sculpture.

In the process of making the films, Ahmet and Finnegan take the approachof ‘blind chance’ as a starting point. By not disclosing what the other will present, brings with it a certain amount of trust and instinct, but also the element of surprise to what the ‘not knowing’ may conjure up.

On an unconscious level, parallels and cross-over in themes and imagery emerge between their films. The duo may work in a collaborative manner, this doesn’t however, compromise each artist in retaining the characteristics that their own work and individual practices hold.

The exhibition will open on Friday 28th October 6-9pm,

The Atkinson in Southport is working with guest curator and artist Nahem Shoa to present The Unselfish Selfie.

Alongside historic self-portraits, the exhibition shines a light on self-portraits by contemporary artists, who traditionally have not been given an equal voice and remained largely invisible, particularly women artists and artists of colour.

Nahem Shoa explained his approach to the exhibition as follows:

“We live in an age where social media has taken over people’s everyday life. We ‘share’ our lives with ‘friends’, most of whom we have never met, knowing these ‘friends’ around the world only through their posts and carefully composed self-images.

 The billions of selfies made every day reveal almost nothing about the person who has taken then, as each person uses a set of clichéd poses, copied from fashion, TV and gossip magazines. From America to China you will see people taking almost exactly the same kind of stylized photo of themselves. In fact the modern selfie is a form of group vanity that has never been seen on this scale in the history of the world.”

In contrast the artists in The Unselfish Selfie don’t use clichéd poses. They are caught in the process of self-examination, confronting their own frailties and their own mortality. Others use their own image to explore the big issues of today, such as identity, diversity and gender.

Throughout the history of art numerous artists have made self-portraits. Originally many of these represented the artist in the act of painting. They were a means of advertising the artist’s skill.  The Unselfish Selfie charts the development of the self-portrait as a much more expressive medium, employed by artists to explore the human condition, painting themselves with unflattering honesty and creating images that evoke a sense of our shared humanity.

The Unselfish Selfie is supported by the Ruth Borchard Collection, a unique collection of 100 self-portraits.