David Claerbout / Rachel Maclean: Spite Your Face

Talbot Rice Gallery proudly opens two new exhibitions. With very different artistic approaches, David Claerbout and Spite Your Face—Rachel Maclean’s Scotland+Venice commission—both explore a shifting landscape of image-production in a digital, data-driven age.

David Claerbout offers a rich forest of images, windows and sounds, leading us through the artworks of one of the most complex artists working with moving images today. Over two floors at Talbot Rice Gallery, the Belgian artist’s central motivating axis of time and space unravels, becoming tricky and even provocative as the images he is working with are shown to be malleable, seductive and potentially untrustworthy.

Featuring camera-less images, constructed scenarios and a remaking of The Jungle Book, Claerbout shows us how digital technologies are shifting the fabric of reality, giving us a momentary glimpse of where those changes might be taking us. The exhibition is designed to loop back on itself, with screens appearing in the corner of your eye, beckoning you in and colonising the whole experience for a brief moment.

Curated by Tessa Giblin. Read an essay about the exhibition by James Clegg here.
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Rachel Maclean’s Spite Your Face advances a powerful social critique, exploring underlying fears and desires that characterise the contemporary zeitgeist. Set across two worlds—with a glittering, materialistic and celebrity-obsessed upper world, and a dark, dank and impoverished lower world—the lure of wealth and adoration entices a destitute young boy into the shimmering riches of the kingdom above. Shown as a perpetual 37-minute loop with no definitive beginning or end, Spite Your Face (2017) references the classic Italian folk-tale The Adventures of Pinocchio, and raises issues including the abuse of patriarchal power, capitalist deception, and the destructive trappings of wealth and fame.

Originally made for Chiesa di Santa Caterina in Venice for the 57th Venice Biennale, the work has been reframed within the iconic interior of the Georgian Gallery. Viewers are invited to enter the space through the gold curtain and sit, lie and reflect in the light of the monumental screen.

Curated for Talbot Rice Gallery by Stuart Fallon. Read an interview with the artist here.
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Spite Your Face (2017) was originally commissioned and curated for Scotland + Venice by Alchemy Film and Arts, in partnership with Talbot Rice Gallery and the University of Edinburgh. Scotland + Venice is a partnership between Creative Scotland, the National Galleries of Scotland and the British Council Scotland.

Talbot Rice Gallery is the art gallery of the University of Edinburgh, supported by funding from Creative Scotland.
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