Marcus Coates: 'Ape Culture' Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, GER

Image: Marcus Coates, Shared traits of the Hominini (Humans, Bonobos and Chimpanzees), 2015 (detail) Vinyl, 508 x 259 cm (MC0176) Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery, UK Ape Culture Haus der Kulturen der Welt John - Foster- Dulles - Allee 10 10557 Berlin 30th April - 6th July 2015 http://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/2015/ape_culture/ausstellung_4/ausstellung_ape_culture.php   Lene Berg, Marcus Coates, Anja Dornieden & Juan David González Monroy, Ines Doujak, Coco Fusco, Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys, Pierre Huyghe, Louise Lawler, Damián Ortega, Nagisa Oshima, Erik Steinbrecher, Rosemarie Trockel, Klaus Weber, and Frederick Wiseman. Contributions and collaboration: Cord Riechelmann and Christophe Boesch Curators: Anselm Franke and Hila Peleg   The exhibition Ape Culture presents artworks and documents that wittily observe the relationship between humans and other primates.    As a figure poised on the threshold between humans and animals, since antiquity the ape has played a central role in the story of how civilization has "progressed". What was initially a means for Western humanity to define itself has become a test case for how human "nature" might be constructed anew - something that is uncharted territory where subconscious and unconscious notions of social order are revealed.   Ape Culture investigates the hegemonic and subversive potential of how apes are represented and reflects upon the term "culture." In the exhibition, artists such as Ines Doujak, Pierre Huyghe, and Klaus Weber critically examine images of the "great apes" and their role in what Donna Haraway has termed the "primate order." In addition, material taken from the natural sciences and popular culture illustrates how the way we perceive our closest relatives has changed radically. This is exemplified by Frederick Wiseman's 1974 film "Primate," an observation of the daily routine at Yerkes Primate Research Center in Atlanta. While on the surface the film documents the studies carried out by the center into apes' capacity for learning, ability to remember, and sexual behavior, at a deeper level the film scrutinizes and challenges what science actually does: "One set of primates who have power, using it against another who haven't," as the British film critic Derek Malcolm put it. Coco Fusco's "Observations of Predation in Humans: A Lecture by Dr. Zira, Animal Psychologist," which will be shown as a film throughout the exhibition and performed live by the artist in early July, is based on the legendary female chimpanzee Dr. Zira from the film series "Planet of the Apes." After twenty years of research in seclusion, Dr. Zira returns to the public sphere to present her assessment of the special characteristics of human aggression in the twenty-first century. Artist talk: 30th April 2015 Relating to Apes - a system of degrees In the pursuit of defining what is human, the ape presents us with a complex and compelling comparison. Marcus Coates worked with Primatologist Volker Sommer to negotiate and devise a comparative framework. Using examples of past work, performance and recordings of his recent discussions with Sommer, Coates will discuss his own relational research and the collaboration behind the new work - Degreecoordinates for Ape Culture.

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Catherine Bertola: "Invisible Cities" Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, UK

Invisible Cities   Hatton Gallery Newcastle University, UK  23 Apr - 16 May 15 http://www.twmuseums.org.uk/hatton-gallery/whats-on/exhibitions/invisible-cities.html http://cities-ncl.moonfruit.com/home/4588495261   How do we define a city? This is just one of the questions explored in Invisible Cities, which has been organised by students from the MA in Art Curatorship course from the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies at Newcastle University.   To many, cities are much more than just the sum of their physical parts. The urban environment is a thought-provoking place, prompting emotional responses, making us question the use of space and contaning many competing characters.    The project will act as a meeting point for incividual and shared preconceptions of the urban environment as a material and psychological entity. Works on display will include artworks, design objects and architectural drawings from Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums collections as well as work from contemporary practitioners.  image: Catherine Bertola Sad Bones (Clumber Park), 2013 Book Page, Matches 30 x 24.7 cm 11 3/4 x 9 3/4 in (CB0095) Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery, UK

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Cecilia Stenbom: "The Case" Minimalen Short Film Festival, Trondheim, Norway

Cecilia Stenbom   The Case   Minimalen Short Film Festival, Trondheim, Norway http://www.minimalen.com The 27th Minimalen Short Film Festival presents 226 films from Wednesday 22nd to Sunday 26th of April 2015. The Case will be screened as part of the Nordic Competition on Friday April 24th at 12:00 at Nova Cinema in Trondheim, Norway. A look at how crime fiction prey and perpetuate anxieties whilst being a source of entertainment. The dialogue and voice over segments in the film are reenactments from a series of transcribed recordings with the general public about perception of crime.   The Case was commissioned by Berwick Visual Arts and Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival. image:   Cecilia Stenbom The Case, 2013 Single Channel HD Film Duration: 8 Minutes 53 Seconds (CS0141) Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery, UK

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Jacob Dahlgren: Preview Friday 24th April at Workpace Gateshead

Jacob Dahlgren, Kung Fu Panda (still), 2015, Single channel HD video 16:9, 28:29 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery, UK. Jacob Dahlgren Kung Fu Panda   Preview: 6pm - 9pm Friday 24th April 2015   Workplace Gallery The Old Post Office 19-21 West Street Gateshead NE8 1AD   Exhibition continues: 25th April - 23rd May 2015 Tuesday - Saturday, 11am - 5pm (or by appointment)   Kung Fu Panda is a new video work by Swedish artist Jacob Dahlgren in which he films the reflected ambient light on an adjacent white wall at home, whilst his children are watching the eponymous animated feature film. Filmed in High Definition from a fixed camera position and projected as a single work in a gallery context Dahlgren's Kung Fu Panda becomes an absorbing and constantly changing digital colourfield painting that manifests a subtlety at odds with the apparent chaos of the original film dubbed in Swedish, and the surrounding scenario as the artist's children watch whilst carrying on their own everyday conversations.   In an adjacent room Dahlgren presents a readymade series entitled When The Sky Is The Limit. Consisting of framed double page spreads from in-flight magazines collected by Dahlgren, each image is selected, isolated, and framed according to its inherent relationship to abstraction.   Dahlgren's work is concerned with a dialogue between the authoritative singularity of pure formal abstraction and its position within a variable, complex and social shared culture. His repetitious collections of ubiquitous and ordinary objects, often domestic, industrially manufactured (and frequently, knowingly Scandinavian); stand in their gestalt form as proxy for High Modernist Abstract Painting and for all of the ideological territory that Twentieth Century Art Theory has staked out for it. The contributing objects, however, signify a collective and human aspect of society, each representing an individual choice, used in a unique way by its consumer. Together these objects stand for the group or community, and as such they become democratic rather than authored. Through endless ingenious amalgams of pattern, abstraction and mass-produced objects, Dahlgren's recent works purposefully inhabit modes of modernist painting, deliberately playing with the inherent autonomy of the source material.   Jacob Dahlgren was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1970. Dahlgren represented Sweden in the Nordic Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale. His work has been exhibited at, KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center/MoMA, New York, USA, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK, and Tramway, Glasgow, UK. He lives and works in Stockholm.   Jacob Dahlgren's solo exhibition Third Uncle is currently showing at Workplace London until 9th May 2015, please visit the website for further information.   Kindly supported by

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Joel Kyack: Preview Friday 24th April at Workpace Gateshead

Joel Kyack, The Very First Day, 2015, plastic bucket, water, dye, pump, plastic finger, hose, tiled plinth, 131cm x 42cm x 39cm, Courtesy of François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, USA Joel Kyack The Very First Day   Preview: 6pm - 9pm Friday 24th April 2015   Workplace Gallery The Old Post Office 19-21 West Street Gateshead NE8 1AD   Exhibition continues: 25th April - 23rd May 2015 Tuesday - Saturday, 11am - 5pm (or by appointment)     Workplace Gallery is proud to present the first UK solo exhibition of Los Angeles based artist Joel Kyack. For this exhibition Kyack will present a new body of sculpture and painting shown here for the first time.   Joel Kyack brings together a combination of unlikely components purchased from hardware stores, health care industries and Hollywood prop-houses to create surreal, darkly humorous objects and paintings that evince a dysfunctional and chaotic social context as their origin. Kyack maintains a Dadaist anti-bourgeois position rejecting 'taste' and traditional aesthetic sensibilities. He instead finds pragmatic yet subversive relationships between functional objects to achieve an outcome that relates back to the body and to the abject absurdity of the individual in relation to a disturbing and complex social world, always with the potential for violence and the grotesque.   The Very First Day is a continuation of Kyack's fountain series, comprised of a jet of black water springing from the tip of a plastic finger set in the centre of a pool at the bottom of a white industrial bucket atop a black tiled plinth. Simulating a divine moment of creation, the work is talismanic - functioning both as origin myth and as omen of ill-portent - a figure eerily emerging from the unfathomable dark depths, or a Michelangelo-esque finger of God conferring Genesis unto Man. The Comeback is an expanded painting made from an underarm crutch leant against the wall, supporting both the wall and a plaid dress-shirted fake arm bought from a Los Angeles prop-shop. Functioning as a device for recuperation and healing, this work implicates the gallery wall, and by extension the institution of Art as deficient or degenerate. As We Go Up We Go Down is the latest in a series of kinetic sculptures employing a record deck and suspended aluminium spring that seemingly traps cheap party balloons in a state of perpetual ascension, when in reality they are going nowhere.   Kyack's work in this exhibition operates in a territory between threat and jest; functioning as visible manifestation of cruel intent or as the result of a transgressed moral or physical boundary, coercing us to shift from our normal patterns of behavior. Humour is employed by Kyack to articulate an uncanny brutality, which as with the jokes and play of children, often pertains to extreme violence or death. The black humour in Kyack's work creates a third position, beyond artist and viewer, wherein existential anxieties can be addressed.   Joel Kyack was born in Born in 1972 in Pennsylvania, USA. He received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1995, studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine in 2004, and received his MFA from the University of Southern California in 2008. Recent solo projects include Old Sailors Never Die and Escape to Shit Mountain at François Ghebaly, Los Angeles; Point at the Thing That's Furthest Away at Praz-Delavallade, Paris; Superclogger, a public project produced in collaboration with LA><ART and The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; and The Knife Shop at Kunsthalle - LA in Los Angeles. Recent performances include Portrait That May Look Like You (public) in Los Angeles; Buy What I Say, FIAC, Paris; Growing Pains Leave Stains, Kaleidoscope ARENA, Macro Testaccio, Rome, Italy; and Wattis Up with this Guy?, Wattis Institute, San Francisco, CA. He is represented by François Ghebaly in Los Angeles and Praz-Delavallade in Paris. He lives and works in Los Angeles, California.   Kindly supported by

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Final week: Marcus Coates, Workplace Gateshead

Final week: Marcus Coates 7 March - 18 April 2015 Workplace Gateshead Marcus Coates The Sounds of Others: A Biophonic Line, 2014 4 synchronised LED displays and 4 audio channel installation 2x 170 cm x 33 cm 2x 170 cm x 40 cm 66 7/8 x 13 in 66 7/8 x 15 3/4 in (MC0173)   Co-comissioned by Cape Farewell and Museum of Science and Industry Manchester, MOSI as part of the first Lovelock Art Commission Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery, UK Photograph David Lawson   Workplace Gallery is delighted to present our fourth solo exhibition at our gallery in Gateshead of new work by Marcus Coates. For this exhibition Coates presents three new works that set out the scope of a wider enquiry. Central to this is the re-animation of our intersubjectivity with natural kinds.   The Sounds of Others, 2014 is an audiovisual installation, a comparative study of diverse animal vocalisation including humans. These sounds range from blue whale calls to insect stridulations. The voice of a species is slowed down or sped up which transforms its pitch and duration. Large custom built LED displays show the name of the animal and the changing speed of its sound. The blue whale starts at normal speed and then increases to 115x this speed until it sounds very similar to the next species played at normal speed – a spotted redshank (bird), which in turn speeds up to sound similar to a bush cricket, which slowed down sounds like a common tree frog and so on. The installation moves from one species to another finding points of resemblance between their songs and calls, drawing a relative line of connection between 24 species. For Coates this represents a new taxonomy based on sound, where a gibbon is closely related to a canary and a shrew to a curlew. He suggests that revealing and occupying many more points of identification are possible and even advisable, as our physical capacity (sensory range) as well as our cultural means for knowing and relating to the non human world are limited.   Relatives (agitated water) 1997-2015 is a large scale photograph. An image of flat water taken from above has formed ripples and patterns caused by the disturbance of its surface. The print is high contrast, creating extreme tonal values suggesting an appearance of solidity to reveal forms, that with increasing scrutiny appear like human faces, not unlike cartoons or early gothic contortions. The anthropomorphic gaze suggests that this frozen moment exposes an inhabited entity. As we recognise our compulsion to see our human likeness in the inanimate, we are arguing with rationalism. We might not call these illusions our relatives or spirits, but at some level this recognition invites belief. The photograph is a celebration of this, a re-animation and investment in the life of an inanimate natural kind.   In Questions & Answers 2015, a single channel HD video work. We see Coates running a weeklong workshop for 6 members of the public. The aim is to learn skills that will enable the group to find insight or even answer the questions we all struggle with, the sort of questions we carry around with us and never seem to get answered. The process involves committing oneself to inhabiting a world that makes itself in your imagination, in an attempt to acquire information that you can rationally use to pragmatic ends. The group consult a variety of ‘clients’ including people they approach on the street, community members and the Mayor’s office, City Hall, London.   A new publication A Practical Guide to Unconscious Reasoning by Marcus Coates accompanies this exhibition. Co-published by book Works and Create London, Distributed by Book Works. Marcus Coates Our relatives (agitated water) #1, 2015 Pigment print 69.4 x 53 cm 27 3/8 x 20 7/8 in edition of 5 plus 1 artist's proofs (MC0174) Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery, UK Marcus Coates Questions & Answers, 2015 Single channel HD video Duration 33:15 minutes (MC0175) Commissioned by Create, London Co produced by Create and NOMAD and funded by Bank of America Merril Lynch Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery, UK Workplace Gallery The Old Post Office 19 - 21 West Street Gateshead, NE8 1AD tel: + 44 (0)191 4772200 (open Tues - Saturday 11am - 5pm, and by appointment)   Workplace London 61 Conduit Street Mayfair London, W1S 2GB tel: +44 (0)207 434 1985 (open Friday - Saturday 10 am - 6pm, and by appointment)   web: http://www.workplacegallery.co.uk/ twitter: @_workplace_ facebook: @workplacegallery instagram: @workplacegallery

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Dallas Art Fair 2015 Booth D10

Workplace Gallery Dallas Art Fair Booth D10 10th - 12th April 2015 Preview gala: Thursday 9th April 6 - 10pm   Laura Lancaster Rachel Lancaster   For six weeks during February and March 2015 twin sisters Laura Lancaster and Rachel Lancaster were artists in residence in the former home and studio of artist Elaine De Kooning in East Hampton, New York. For both painters, who currently live and work in Newcastle upon Tyne in the North East of England, the residency provided a unique opportunity to develop a significant new body of work in a historic context. The resulting paintings are presented at Dallas Art Fair for the first time.   Laura Lancaster untitled, 2015, oil on canvas, 130 x 260 cm (51 1/8 x 102 3/8 in) Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery.   Laura Lancaster's work to date is extracted from an archive of anonymous photographs procured from thrift stores and flea markets. Mediated through painting, her work transposes the forgotten and discarded snap-shots of strangers' lives into an ambiguous territory between abstraction and figuration. Divorcing her subjects from their specific context and time, Lancaster relocates them to a place of collective memory and experience that resonates with our own. Laura Lancaster's work oscillates between the nostalgic sentimentality of the celebratory moment, and the melancholic poignancy of the past.   This new group of paintings is based upon my collection of found anonymous home movies. Incorporating the moving image into the painting process is a significant departure, which provides new areas of exploration into how my work can deal with ideas of the cinematic and the temporal, as well as open up the painting process itself. It allows for a deeper investigation into the mechanics of images, and the way in which the are created and consumed. In all the works, evidence of the film as an object is visible, in the sprocket holes and marks left on the film, referring to its mechanical, functional characteristics. These elements disrupt the coherence of the images highlighting their constructed nature. These devices also force the abstract and the figurative to exist on the same picture plane and allow for this dialogue to take place more overtly within my practice. Laura Lancaster 2015.   Rachel Lancaster untitled, 2015, Oil on canvas, 154 x 183 cm (60 5/8 x 72 1/8 in) Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery.   Rachel Lancaster's new works are derived from her interest in the intersections between Music, Film, and Photography, their respective transitions from analogue to digital.   The images in these paintings are from photographs I've taken directly of the TV screen, mostly stills from 1970's b movies, 1980's horror, obscure, rubbish films on YouTube. Some of the details I've included in the paintings hint at the origin such as the black bands and the backlit/glow of the screen in the paint. I try to use films less identifiable so the paintings become about film-photo-paint rather than being caught up in a specific narrative. I took over 300 stills in the process of making this series selecting just a few to paint. I have focused on overlooked, split seconds held and frozen in the paint, images that have an uneasy feel, eluding to what is outside of the frame or before and after the moment. Rachel Lancaster 2015   The cult film and television images that Lancaster captures evade the typical themes with which these movies are associated. Instead Lancaster is drawn to seemingly insignificant passing shots and extreme close- ups of inanimate objects, and commonplace domestic interiors. The resulting, often blurred or pixelated, photographs are then used as the source material for her work. Mediated by the poor resolution of technology and divorced physically from their position within a narrative structure these paintings become abstract and ambiguous. Yet instead of diminishing their meaning, Lancaster's fetishisation of these images enables them to accrue status and power whilst signifying the unknown event that precedes or follows. In this way Lancaster's work is 'Uncanny' through the psychological charge of the selected image compounded by its cinematic monumentality, the reproduction or doubling of an image in common cultural parlance, and in the subliminal evocations dependent on our familiarity with the language and conventions of Hollywood.   For more information please contact Paul Moss paul@workplacegallery.co.uk

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Marcus Coates: 'Dawn Chorus' FABRICA, Brighton, UK

Image: Marcus Coates, Dawn Chorus, 2007, 14 Channel HD Video Installation, Commissioned by Picture This, UK and funded by Wellcome Trust. Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery, UK. Installation view Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, Photo: Colin Davison Dawn Chorus Marcus Coates   FABRICA 3 April - 25 May Preview 2 April, 6-9pm   Fabrica, 40 Duke Street, Brighton, UK BN1 1AG   http://fabrica.org.uk/exhibitions/dawn-chorus/ Dawn Chorus is an immersive multi-screen film installation that uses unique digital methods to explore the relationship between birdsong and the human voice, and similarities between bird and human behaviour.    Nineteen individual singers uncannily recreate birdsong and bird movement. Together they form a chorus that accurately simulates the sounds and timings of a natural dawn chorus. With each singer depicted in an everyday location: an underground car park, an osteopathic clinic, a bedroom, a bathtub, Dawn Chorus is as much a portrait of British people and their daily habits as it is of the natural world.   Artist Marcus Coates worked with scientist Peter McGregor who specialises in birdsong and animal behaviour, and notable birdsong expert and wildlife sound recordist Geoff Sample. To record the dawn chorus they used a unique method to capture the individual birdsongs and their inter-species song timings. By predicting where individual birds would sing and through trial and error they recorded 14 individual songs simultaneously. Thereby creating an accurate document of which species of birds sing in relation to others at what time in the morning. They recorded at three different sites in Northumberland between 3am and 9am over seven days using a 24 track digital recorder.   Dawn Chorus was originally commissioned and produced by Picture This in 2007, premiered at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead and was financially supported by the Wellcome Trust. It is part of the Arts Council Collection at Southbank, who have kindly loaned the work.   This exhibition of the work is being co-presented with Brighton Festival 2015.   Birdsong represents this other world, this other world of nature that we're always looking for the key to unlock, and birdsong for me is a way into this other world, this non-human world that we feel like we don't understand. -Marcus Coates

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