Happy Halloween from our Exhibition Archives
To mark this spooky time of year, we’ve looked back through our archives to find artists and exhibitions exploring ideas of death, horror, or the supernatural…
We have artworks, videos, VR scans and fully-immersive VR experiences for you to relive some of our past shows.
Elizabeth Price: FELT TIP
16 Feb 2019 – 6 May 2019
Scanned by V21 Artspace.
Last year, we exhibited two multi-screen video works FELT TIP and KOHL (both 2018) by the Turner-prize winning artist, Elizabeth Price. Her work explores the histories of labour and technology, taking the form of a ghost story or sci-fi tale. KOHL, a four-channel video, tells of ghostly presences, the Visitants, which are said to be emerging from abandoned coal mines in the north of England. Spreading through tunnels, an inky liquid, bubbles through the foundations of subterranean spaces of recent urban developments. The substance transmits stories, songs, spit, tears, connecting various sites to a single network.
Alongside the video works, in THE GOVERNING BODY (2019), Price manipulates images sourced from 1970s fashion magazines, re-photographing them with a pinhole camera, to produce a chorus of ghostly and bodiless mysterious figures, plastered in large-scale across the gallery walls. Stripped of their context of luxurious advertising and transformed into something sorrowful, these images, in a sense, are possessed.
Read more about the exhibition.
Thanks to Artangel, you can now watch Elizabeth Price’s video work trilogy, SLOW DANS (including KOHL and FELT TIP), online and for free, until 12 Nov. Watch now.
The House of Fame: Convened by Linder
24 Mar 2018 – 24 Jun 2018
The House of Fame exhibition was conceived by the British artist and musician, Linder – best known for her iconic photomontages questioning ideas of gender, commodity and display. It brought together more than 40 years of her work, alongside around 200 works by some 30 artists selected by Linder.
One of the galleries, The House of Rest, was a spectral display of mourning and melancholy. It housed death masks, memento moris, and other objects concerning the rituals of remembering. Spiritualist photographs, taken at séances during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, show lace used as ectoplasm. These were exhibited alongside Mike Kelley’s The Poltergeist series (1979) depicting Kelley with ectoplasm-like cotton wool spewing out of his nose and mouth, as though possessed or in a trance state. Linder’s own veiled face appears in a trio of photographs from her 1981 series She/She. This chapter of the exhibition leads on to ‘The House of Unrest’ - a space for transformation and transcendence; of spiritualism and mediums, surrealism and political agitation.
If you missed the exhibition, or just want to revisit it, you can view the exhibition in VR (above), scanned by V21 Artspace. The House of Rest is in Gallery 2.
Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance
Act 1: 27 October 2018 – 27 January 2019, Nottingham Contemporary
Our Still I Rise exhibition explored the role that women have played in the history of resistance movements and alternative forms of living, spanning the past century and across the globe.
Gallery two, titled ‘A Spell: Feminism Beyond Humanism’ concerned rituals and reinvention as strategies of resistance - examining and redefining social constructs of gender, sexuality, and race. It explored the way that artists draw from ancient practices of ritual and witchcraft in order to imagine and create new realities. This includes Linda Stupart’s spells against male violence, which you can use at home, while Chiara Fumai positions herself as a kind of medium in order to summon the voices of marginalised women from the past. For many, individual and collective ritual offers the possibility of creating spaces of power and collaboration away from those patriarchal structures that constrain our thinking and being.
You can view the exhibition in VR as a scan (see above). Created by V21 Artspace.