Me and the Missus are in Newcastle for a mini music festival and we're out and about exploring and, first up, is the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Arts.
The venue itself is amazing: an art gallery over the six floors of a converted dockside warehouse alongside the Tyne. It has a high deck that offers fantastic views of the city and amazing glass lifts. The venue itself would be worth a visit without the great stuff it houses.
The three exhibitions when we visited included an installation by a Norwegian artist called Ida Ekblad. Her installation was a sort of carnival of junk that provided the set for a stage play. It was interesting because her process involves rummaging through scrapyards and creating found works from what she recovers. From these scrapyard trips, she creates mini monuments of meaning from discarded junk. They're playful, poignant and a little bit sad.
The second artist was a painter and a sort of collage creator called Tony Swain. He creates canvases of old newspapers then paints over them. I wasn't massively keen on his stuff. I just didn't connect with it.
My favourite of the three artists on display, though, was an Indonesian artist called Fiona Tan. She now lives in Amsterdam and two of the three works we saw by her were film installations. The first, Disorient, involved two different films playing simultaneously on separate screens at the opposite ends of one room.
One screen (see picture above) showed a sort of storehouse of Asian artefacts, both ancient and modern, while the other screen showed modern city scapes that have been economically impacted by globalisation. The vocal soundtrack that played over both was an actor reading from an account by Marco Polo about the different countries he visited and his impression of their cultures and riches. As a meditation on identity and cultural heritage, it was an amazing piece of work.
The second work by Tan was called Inventory, which was filmed at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, and offers a reflection on collecting and the sort of process of acquisition and cataloguing that takes place when museums take from one culture and bring them back and translate them for another.
The third work was Depot, which re-imagined and recreated a 76ft truck that used to take the preserved carcass of a huge whale across Europe so people could see it. Inside the truck was no whale but a cabinet of curiosities and a small cinema. The film again discusses cataloguing and collecting items, but this time natural history.
Tan's work is ambitious in scale and idea and incredibly thought-provoking. It's wonderful stuff.
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