Art From Elsewhere

Towner Art Gallery, Carlisle Road, Eastbourne, Saturday, January 23, to Sunday, April 3

IN 2007 Art Fund International awarded five regional art galleries a £4 million pot to build collections of contemporary art from around the world.

Now Art From Elsewhere is displaying some of the pieces purchased by the Birmingham, Bristol, Glasgow and Middlesborough galleries under the scheme, alongside some of Towner’s own purchases.

“Contemporary art being made in China and the former Eastern Bloc is still under-represented in museums and art galleries,” says Brian Cass, head of exhibitions at Towner.

“This is an incredible opportunity to get a range of voices from around the globe together. The Art Fund was a visionary idea at a time when museums are struggling to find money to even show their own collections.”

Each of the five galleries in the Art Fund scheme are showing their own unique exhibition selected by curator David Elliott from more than newly purchased 130 works.

The majority were created post-2000, showing different takes on the world following 9/11 and the global economic crisis.

Among Cass’s highlights in the 50-strong Towner exhibition, which opens tomorrow, is a work from Polish video pioneer Jozef Robakowski.

The View From My Window 1978 To 1999 focuses on the square the artist looked out on over a 21-year period.

“You see the claustrophobic and confined conditions that he was making work in,” says Cass.

“The work was created in response to the restrictions placed upon him. The voice over by the artist talks about the habits of his neighbours as they go about their daily lives, and becomes remarkable as it documents the changes in Poland with the rise of the Solidarity movement, the changes to the Eastern Bloc and the rise of Poland in the EU.”

With a certain amount of humour the film ends with the artist’s view being blocked by a slowly rising hotel – a symbol of capitalism’s arrival.

“With the exhibition a lot of the artists are addressing living under regimes, governments, or conflict zones, new capitalist economies and failed utopias,” says Cass.

It is by no means all negative though.

A humorous work examining the Chinese economy is Yang Zhenzhong’s multi-channel video Let’s Puff!

On one screen is a young woman taking in deep breaths and puffing them out again. On the second screen a busy shopping street in China moves in rhythm to her breaths.

“It becomes frenetic and crazy,” says Cass. “It’s an absurd thing to watch. It’s about boom and bust, and the financial world China is emerging into.”

There is a range of other media in the exhibition too – which encompasses painting, photography, installation, sculpture and a series of conceptual drawings from the 1960s and 1970s by artists including Nancy Spero and Robert Smithson.

One 1991 collage of different drawn images, Eugenio Dittborn’s The 13th History Of The Human Face, has a stunning story of its own – having been smuggled out of Pinochet’s Chile in a series of envelopes, which are also on display.

Other pieces bear repeat viewings, such as Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi’s miniature paintings inspired by the skills of 16th and 17th century artists.

“The work is born out of witnessing the aftermath of a terrorist explosion in Lahore,” says Cass. “From a distance you see vivid red smears which are quite visceral. But when you get closer you see a delicate plant growing and taking root.”

The sense of a world changing under outside conditions is reflected by the second Towner exhibition opening next month: Recording Britain.

It features selections from a project instigated by Sir Kenneth Clark at the beginning of the Second World War to document a country which was about to change completely.

“These were places and buildings under threat from bombs and modernity,” says Cass.

“There is a nice relationship between the two shows. The Recording Britain images are very traditional, but behind them there’s an awareness that things are changing. Nothing was going to be the same again.

“It reflects how contemporary artists on a global scale are trying to address what is happening today.”

*Recording Britain is at Towner from Saturday, February 6, to Monday, May 2, entry is free.

Open Tues to Sun 10am to 5pm, free. Call 01323 434670 or visit www.townereastbourne.org.uk/