Cross Currents
Curated by Dr Amanda Geitner and Craig Barber
This event is free for everybody
Event Details
This exhibition brings together a group of artists working nationally and internationally who use lens-based practices to capture imagined, provocative or simply unexpected encounters with water. These encounters encompass identity, observation, memory and uncertainty.
Open Late: Thursday September 10, 18:00-20:00
Artists in conversation: Sunday 13 September, 15:00
Closing event: Sunday 13 September , 17:00
Rachel Fijalkowska, Sophie Michael, Louis Nixon, Esther Teichmann, Madinah Farhannah Thompson, Suok-Won Yoon
Cross Currents brings together six artists working nationally and internationally who use lens-based practices to explore water as a site of imagination, memory, identity and uncertainty. Through photography and moving image, they reveal encounters with water that are provocative, poetic and unexpected.
Esther Teichmann makes unabashedly beautiful installations, combining photography, textile and sculptural elements to cast viewers into waters that are seductive and romantic. Her female figures – mothers, sisters, friends – languish in the liquid spaces of caves, swamps and shorelines, evoking legend and myth.
Taking a more documentary approach, Sophie Michael filmed the historic Water Show Extravaganza. This attraction at Watermouth Castle in Devon was originally made for the 1951 Festival of Britain. The attraction continues in the present, out of time and a little out of tune. Michael’s layered film slips between humour, nostalgia and the bizarre.
Rachel Fijalkowska’s images are similarly ambiguous. Photographs that seem straightforward are complicated by our inability to locate them or to understand their purpose. Although depicting scenes of water, the images feel washed out and almost barren, increasing their haunting quality and creating an uncanny viewing experience.
Where Fijalkowska’s images unsettle through ambiguity, Suok-Won Yoon’s images are not only uncanny but also disorientating. They invite us to imagine impossible spaces. A real fish and real domestic interiors were photographed by the artist, but their surreal combinations are enabled by digital wizardry, producing works that challenge both the method of their making and what the viewer sees.
Over many years Louis Nixon has captured images of sea, rivers, creeks or puddles. These often chance encounters are brought together in a multi-screen installation, creating a sequence of shifting surfaces across which our thoughts might drift.
Madinah Farhannah Thompson’s work, Call When You Reach, is a poignant reflection on the artist’s lived experience. The film’s protagonist labours with a mannequin across a Norfolk beach, prompting reflection on the politics and reality of Black experience amidst the whiteness of rural England.
Together, the works in Cross Currents move between the seductive, the uncanny, the documentary and the political, showing water as a shifting presence through which different histories, bodies and ideas come into view.
Cross Currents is curated by Craig Barber, Associate Programme Director of Art, Design and Architecture at Norwich University of the Arts and Dr Amanda Geitner, Director of the East Anglia Art Fund. We are grateful to Norwich University of the Arts for research funding support.
The artists will be present at 3pm on Sunday 13th September for a conversation about their work. Everyone is welcome to this event
Image: Louis Nixon, Sea States
