October 12, 2019–April 19, 2020
Gateshead Quays
Gateshead NE8 3BA
United Kingdom
Judy Chicago
November 16, 2019–April 19, 2020
Preview: Friday, November 15, 6:30pm
In her 80th birthday year, BALTIC presents the first major survey of pioneering feminist artist, author and educator Judy Chicago. The exhibition spans the artist’s 50-year career, from her early actions in the desert in the 1970s, to her most recent series, The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction (2013–18), which has not been previously shown outside of the US.
This survey explores Chicago’s work from the perspective of the human condition, connecting birth, death and emotions, whilst highlighting the devastating effects of attacks against nature, extinction and climate change. Over the past five decades, Chicago has approached art as a means to affect intellectual and social change for women. Her work has employed media from traditional crafts such as needlework and china painting to deploying pyrotechnics and explosives in her actions, and creating paintings and prints that document personal and environmental narratives over long periods of time. At the heart of her most recent work is a consuming awareness of the environment and the impact of climate change on the natural world.
The exhibition includes a selection of photographs from Chicago’s iconic Atmosphere series (1967–2017), which proposes a feminist approach to land art, intended to transform and soften the landscape—inserting a feminine impulse into the environment. A triptych of photographs from A Purple Poem for Miami (2019) will be seen for the first time in a commission for BALTIC’s entrance area lightbox.
Curated by Irene Aristizábal
Animalesque / Art Across Species and Beings
November 16, 2019–April 19, 2020
Preview: Friday, November 15, 6:30pm
Animalesque / Art Across Species and Beings brings together an outstanding selection of artworks that invite visitors to rethink the human position in the world, its relationship to all other life forms and to the various complex ecologies that bond beings together.
A growing awareness of living on an environmentally fragile planet is leading many of us to reconsider the role of art in responding to what is happening to the world. Many artists have been considering the human impact that has produced changes to the earth’s climate, as well as rethinking the relationship between humans and nature and the ways in which different species are interrelated within a complex cause-effect relationship.
Participating artists: Allora & Calzadilla, Pia Arke, Pierre Bismuth, Marcus Coates, Mary Beth Edelson, Simone Forti, Luca Frei, Pierre Huyghe, Carsten Höller, Joan Jonas, Annika Larsson, Louise Lawler, Britta Marakatt-Labba, Amalia Pica, Ho Tzu Nyen, Chris Watson and Paloma Varga Weisz.
Animalesque has been produced by Bildmuseet, Umeå and is curated by Filipa Ramos
Assisting curators: Anders Jansson, Bildmuseet and Alessandro Vincentelli, BALTIC
Joy Labinjo: Our histories cling to us
October 19, 2019–February 23, 2020
Preview: Friday, October 18, 6:30pm
Joy Labinjo makes large-scale paintings featuring portraits of relatives, friends and people she has discovered in family albums. Drawing on her personal experiences of growing up in the UK with British-Nigerian heritage, Labinjo explores the relationship between identity, race and culture.
The artist’s paintings depict intimate scenes of contemporary family life, capturing the everyday and the domestic. She creates her compositions by fusing different photographs together, instinctively collaging interiors and figures. For her first institutional solo presentation, Labinjo has made a new body of work, including large-scale oil paintings and works on paper, exploring identity, memory, and ideas of belonging.
Curated by Emma Dean
Pippa Hale: Play Rebellion
October 12, 2019–February 23, 2020
Preview: Friday, October 18, 6:30pm
Play Rebellion is an interactive exhibition created by artist Pippa Hale. Audiences are invited to become active participants and get physical with the artwork, creating new possibilities and reconnecting with their inner creativity through play. Visitors are invited to take some time out to reconfigure their world, to make spaces to play, to inspire, to reflect, to relax, to challenge and talk.
Curated by Vicky Sturrs
Events
On October 18, BALTIC launches a new season of Events with a series of talks, workshops, screenings and performances that expand on BALTIC’s programme strands and exhibition themes. Visit baltic.art/events for further details and to book tickets. Selected events between October 2019 and January 2020 include:
Lucy Suggate
Spirit Compass: Where there is movement there is change
Friday-Sunday, October 18–20, 2019
World premiere of Spirit Compass by Lucy Suggate. A live dance installation, an island and a temple of sorts, which you are invited to inhabit and watch the movement go by. Commissioned by CONTINUOUS, a partnership between BALTIC and Siobhan Davies Dance, London
An Evening with Judy Chicago
Saturday, November 16, 6:30pm
Pioneering feminist artist, author and educator Judy Chicago will discuss her career with writer and art historian Frances Borzello.
A Day of screenings and performance
The Animals of Dance and The Elsewhen Series
Saturday, December 7, 10am-6pm
The Animals of Dance is a selection of films, curated by Filipa Ramos, looking at dance as a form of becoming other, becoming animal.
The Elsewhen Series by Theo Clinkard & Leah Marojević
A dance duet will take place throughout the building. The Elsewhen Series are staged as daydreams and escapisms explored through nature and her animals in powerful yearnings of the heart and mind.
Zinzi Minott: WKOSWIB?
Thursday, November 28, 7:30pm
Dance artist Zinzi Minott investigates the consequences of slavery and slave history on the artist. What Kind of Slave Would I be? is a time-travelling dance piece, framed by sound from musical artist Nkisi, images by artist Rohan Ayinde, and film by Minott herself.
Feminist Zine Making Workshop
Saturday, November 30, 10:30am–1pm
Artist Theresa Easton leads a feminist self-publishing workshop to produce a collective zine in response to Judy Chicago's exhibition. An edition of the zine will form part of BALTIC Library's burgeoning zine collection.
In Conversation: Joy Labinjo
Wednesday, January 15, 2020, 6:30pm
Joy Labinjo discusses her work with Elena Crippa, Curator Modern and Contemporary British Art, Tate.
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