Back in October we visited the Rapheal Hefti and Agnieszka Polska exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary.
I wanted the group to see and discuss some Contemporary Art work in order to give them the chance to articulate and debate their views and opinions on art in readiness for our judging of the Castle OPEN in December.
My hope was that by exposing the group to lots of different types of art and talking about it, we might come up with some interesting reasons for selecting our Prize.
Sian Taylor, one of the Associate Artists at Contemporary lead the group.
We had the chance to look round and then discuss the work. Polska's work "Future days" caused the most debate, some loved it and some hated it or just thought it was weird. Sian explained the ideas behind the piece which made it make alot more sense to us, although we would never had worked it out ourselves from the video or interpretation. In the film a group of masked characters wander expressionless and aimlessly around an island, is it a strange zombie film? a weird crime drama? No, the characters are all dead artists living in an imagined heaven. Each artist is connected in that they all, at sometime, discredited their role as "artist" or disappeared from the art world, in the film, they live without purpose or creativity in this strange, imagined space.
Future Days: Polska
A section of the film can be found here
We then spent time planning our own piece of artwork, we were giving a genre ( photography/Installation etc) and choose a couple of the exhibitions themes as a starting point, we were given an imaginary endless budget to plan with.
We came up with all sorts of fantastical and ambitious ideas, a time based sand installation which filled an entire room, the recreation of a domestic room complete with coffee mugs. We came away excited and inspired and with a desire to find alot of funding to see our ideas come to fruition.