Cooper Gallery at DJCAD in Dundee opened their major international project CURRENT | 不合时宜: Contemporary Art from Scotland this Saturday at Shanghai Himalayas Museum, marking the launch of an 18-month collaboration between Cooper Gallery and the Museum.
CURRENT| 不合时宜: Contemporary Art from Scotland, Shanghai Himalayas Museum.
CURRENT demonstrates the excellence and distinctiveness of contemporary art made in Scotland for the first time in China, its grassroots spirit and its keen engagement with social and political debates. The programme will showcase new and existing works by artists including Bruce McLean, Poster Club, Edgar Schmitz, Ross Sinclair, Lucy Skaer and Corin Sworn.
Over its 18 months, 50 artists will be presented in 8 exhibitions, 4 artists’ and writers’ residencies will run alongside and international speakers forums with 12 speakers from Scotland and around the world will discuss the contemporary and transnational global aspects of the arts today.
Cooper Gallery curator Sophia Hao speaks at the launch of CURRENT| 不合时宜: Contemporary Art from Scotland at Shanghai Himalayas Museum.
CURRENT: Contemporary Art from Scotland launched Phase One last weekend with exhibitions by artists’ collaborative group Poster Club and German artist Edgar Schmitz.
Edgar Schmitz’s exhibition Surplus Cameo Decor: Sindanao 2 sees the artist reconfigure a body of works first conceived for Cooper Gallery in Dundee in 2012 with a new set of sculptural works, sound pieces and architectural interventions interspersed with live cameo appearances by art world protagonists developed for its new context at Shanghai Himalayas Museum. Surplus Cameo Decor is an ongoing episodic series of ambient backdrops and cameo appearances which animate gallery settings as semi-fictional hubs for cinematic plots and atmospheres. Recasting the debris of arthouse cinema, future infrastructures and derelict resort architectures, Schmitz’ works populate galleries with the sprawling motifs of conjured-up remoteness and projected ‘elsewheres’.
The artist Edgar Schmitz photographing his work as part of CURRENT| 不合时宜: Contemporary Art from Scotland at Shanghai Himalayas Museum.
Award winning film director Zhao Da Yong making a cameo appearance of himself for Edgar Schmitz’s exhibition Surplus Cameo Decor: Sindanao 2, 2015, CURRENT: Contemporary Art from Scotland, Shanghai Himalayas Museum.
Edgar Schmitz is an artist who is interested in the relationships between contemporary art and cinematic productions. He uses images, storylines as well as soundtracks from films in order to produce installations in art gallery spaces that are over-saturated with the promises of the multiple invoked elsewhere. His works operate as backdrops which turn the gallery into a film set for movies always yet to be made, and investigate how to best withdraw from the here and now of the present.
Poster Club’s exhibition Wheat, Mud, Machine presents a new body of work in the form of posters, stickers and garments. The title quite literally references the material properties of the objects represented in the works on exhibition, but also more obliquely to the digital and analogue technologies employed in Poster Club’s production of their art works. At the heart of Poster Club’s practice is a particular relationship with the manual and mechanic processes of screen-printing, block printing and digital print. Artist Peter Philips who was employed by Poster Club for an exhibition in 2011 (Eastside Projects, UK) succinctly captured this relationship when he declared, “I don’t want to be a machine like Warhol, but I like the idea of using one”.
Installation view, Poster Club, Wheat, Mud, Machine, 2015, CURRENT| 不合时宜: Contemporary Art from Scotland, Shanghai Himalayas Museum.
Poster Club is a group of artists who collaborate on designing and printing posters. Using the poster format as an open-ended starting point for their projects, Poster Club’s primary interest is in using the medium of print as a site for experimental collaborative practice. Poster Club are Anne-Marie Copestake, Charlie Hammond, Tom O’Sullivan, Nicolas Party, Ciara Phillips and Michael Stumpf.
Poster Club are Artists in Residence for CURRENT| 不合时宜: Contemporary Art from Scotland at Shanghai Himalayas Museum’s residency venue Zhujiajiao Art Museum located at Zhujiajiao town.
Poster Club are currently undertaking a residency at Shanghai Himalayas Museum’s Residency Venue Zhujiajiao Art Museum located at Zhujiajiao town, a picturesque watertown in the southeast of Shanghai. Following on from Poster Club’s residency, Glasgow-based artist Anne-Marie Copestake will be in residence throughout July developing her work with local musicians in Shanghai, then from 15 – 31 July, art writer and member of Cooper Gallery’s Group Critical Writing initiative, Frances Davis will be the Art Writer in Residence, reflecting and annotating upon CURRENT |不合时宜 in Shanghai.
Panel Discussion at Hubs and Fictions: On Current Art and Imported Nearness Shanghai Forum Series #1, part of CURRENT| 不合时宜: Contemporary Art from Scotland at Shanghai Himalayas Museum.
The launch also saw the return of Cooper Gallery’s Hubs & Fictions with On Current Art & Imported Nearness, Shanghai Forum Series #1 with speakers including National Gallery of Modern Art Director Simon Groom, esteemed writer and theorist Terry Smith, the influential Shanghai-based artist and critic Wang Nanming and curatorial collective What, How & for Whom/WHW.
This project has been a long-time in the making and comes from 3 years of collaboration and development between Cooper Gallery and Shanghai Himalayas Museum. Find our more about the development of the project on the Cooper Gallery Notes blog here.
CURRENT |不合时宜: Contemporary Art from Scotland will take place at Shanghai Himalayas Museum in China. Keep updated on the Cooper Gallery website here.
All images courtesy of Shanghai Himalayas Museum and Cooper Gallery DJCAD.
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