Esther Shalev-Gerz
A Thread
a permanent artwork in public space sited in Glasgow, Scotland,
PUBLIC LAUNCH AND
INAUGRAL WALK:
Saturday 9 September 2006 at 2pm
Castlemilk Environment Trust is pleased to announce the official launch of A Thread, the first permanent artwork in public space to be commissioned in the UK from prominent Paris based artist Esther Shalev-Gerz.
Over three years Shalev-Gerz has developed an intricate matrix of collaboration and communication that has seen her work with the citizens of Castlemilk to develop ten new architectural shelters that weave an imaginary line throughout the Castlemilk Park. Through a process that has activated a community through multiple forms of dialogue, negotiation and collaboration Shalev-Gerz has advanced her long-term investigation into the very notion of participation whilst providing a circumstance that supports citizens to articulate the complexity of their own relationships to their environment.
Castlemilk is a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Glasgow, Scotland that historically has been labelled as a challenging area. Simultaneously, the citizens of Castlemilk have been valued as a self-determined community that has invested in the management of its own change. A Thread has become a complicit element in this process.
By operating as a conduit that has supported citizens not only to design images that are printed on individual canopies but to actively select the site for each shelter, Shalev-Gerz has highlighted the rarity of our capacity to make choices in terms of how public spaces are managed and controlled beyond the means of the average citizen. The future users of each individual shelter will become the recipient of a viewpoint that has been selected for them by the citizens whose access to a complex decision-making process has preceded them.
Esther ShalevGerzs seminal, disappearing Monument Against Fascism, created in collaboration with Jochen Gerz for the city of Hamburg and her permanent video installation First Generation in Sweden and her current installation MenschenDinge at the Buchenwald Memorial are only some examples of her international practice which investigates the relationships between cultural memory, citizenship and public space. For over twenty-five years she has developed works that examine the complex nature of transition in physical and social environments and how this impacts on the transformation of citizens identities and influences history.
A Thread has seen Shalev-Gerz develop new collaborations with the citizens of Castlemilk, the architect Ayelet Shalev, who designed the shelters and student interns from the Departments of Fine Art and Architecture at the Glasgow School of Art.
Commissioned on behalf of the Castlemilk Environment Trust, this project is the first to be completed as part of the Reputations Public Art Programme curated by Jason E. Bowman and Rachel Bradley, the team who were the curators for Scotland at the Venice Biennale 2005.
Reputations has been funded by the Scottish Arts Council National Lottery Fund and Glasgow City Councils Department of Culture and Leisure Services.
Information:
Matthew Finkle, Castlemilk Environment Trust
Tel: 44(0)141 6301919
matthewfinkle@btopenconnect.com
Castlemilk Park is not fully accessible. Suggested routes will be available at the public launch and will be available to download from www.reputations.org.uk
Media Contact:
Jean Cameron
Tel: 44 (0)141 552 5255 info@theartspractice.com
Web:
