The Atlantic Project: a new contemporary art festival for Plymouth

30th August 2018

The Atlantic Project is a pilot for a new biennial festival of contemporary art in Plymouth, taking place from 28 September - 21 October 2018. Across the city international artists will present new commissions in unconventional contexts and outdoor locations, whilst an open platform for artist-led activities will offer opportunities for emerging artists.  

Tom Trevor, Artistic Director and curator of The Atlantic Project says: “The visual arts in Plymouth are undergoing an exciting period of change, in the lead-up to the Mayflower 400 anniversary in 2020. Building on a decade of collaboration between exhibition venues, Horizon is a two-year city-wide development programme which aims to grow the whole of the visual arts ecology. The culmination of this process is The Atlantic Project, launching in close collaboration with the Plymouth Art Weekender, as a pilot for a new international festival of contemporary art in the public realm, which sets out to raise the critical profile of visual arts in the region and to be a highly engaging experience for a wide range of audiences that is relevant and distinctive to the locality.”

 Drawing inspiration from Plymouth’s past and present, artworks will be located across the city, encouraging exploration of the historic coastal city, and the discovery of contemporary art in unexpected locations.

 On Armada Way, the main post-war pedestrian thoroughfare, works by Nilbar Güreş and Tommy Støckel will be exhibited. In a series of photo-billboards made with local participants, Kurdish artist Güreş will playfully explore the experience of being a displaced person in Plymouth (one of five ‘dispersal centres’ for asylum seekers in the UK), along with everyday 'exoticism' and the media image of Muslim women in Europe. Linking to the trans-Atlantic history of Plymouth, Støckel will exhibit a concrete sculpture based upon a 3D-scan he has made of the Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts. Alongside the sculpture a mobile app will allow members of the public to imagine the possible future erosion of the rock, that has become an American icon of freedom.

 In House of Fraser (formerly Dingles) - the first department store to open in the UK after WWII – an ‘Atlantic take-over’ will include six display windows and a large area on the top floor. This will include Liu Chuang’s project, Buying Everything On You, presenting all of an individual’s personal possessions purchased in a single transaction on the street, and then exhibited as a ‘museum of everyday life’. Only previously performed in China, Liu will attempt a new version in Plymouth, reflecting on the personal experience of globalisation today.

 In the modernist-style, Grade II-listed Civic Centre, the former administrative centre for Plymouth City Council, Hito Steyerl will present a video-work exploring how the contemporary status of citizenship, and the civic, have been affected by the rapid development of global communication technologies, with a dramatic impact on our conception of culture, economics and subjectivity. A new installation by Kiluanji Kia Henda, whose work often engages with the colonial past of his home country Angola in a humorous and ironic way, will relate the experience of Soviet-style modernist buildings in Luanda to the post-war civic architecture in Plymouth.

In the Council House, the seat of local government, the late Donald Rodney (May 1961–March 1998) will be present in absentia in the form of an autonomus wheelchair he developed as an artwork Psalms (1997), to attend exhibition openings when he was unable to due to Sickle Cell Anaemia. This will mark the artist’s return to Plymouth following his participation in the seminal public art project TSWA Four Cities in 1990.

 Drakes Island, situated in Plymouth Sound, has been out of bounds to the public since 1995. The 6.5-acre island, visible from The Hoe, will be the location for a site-specific work by the US-based artists collective, Postcommodity. Entitled Repellent Eye, the work connects ‘Old Europe’ to indigenous narratives of cultural self-determination in North America. The 6-metre tethered balloon is an enlarged replica of an agricultural ‘scare eye’ which the artists noticed use indigenous medicine colours and iconography - the same graphic used by indigenous peoples from South America to Canada for thousands of years to repel evil spirits.

 In the disused Millennium Building (formerly The Warehouse nightclub) on Union Street, a pilgrimage destination for clubbers across the UK in the 1980s and 90s, Ryoji Ikeda will present his first major site-specific installation in the UK outside of London. The Radar uses sound, electronic media and digital data to map the cosmos, creating a sense of sublime abstraction in this vast empty dancehall. Referencing the history of Union Street during the early 1990s, Plymouth-based artist, Carl Slater combines site-specific video archives and new moving image as witness to the mass euphoria of collective and embodied club culture.

 SUPERFLEX have been working in collaboration with the Plymouth-based Real Ideas Organisation (RIO), Plymouth City College and local brewers Summerskills, to develop a community-owned brewery in Devonport, one of the city’s most deprived areas. Titled FREE BEER version 6.0 (the Atlantic brew), an ‘open-source’ brew will be available at venues across the city, including The Clipper, a former 24-hour pub on Union Street, now being renovated by the local community as a social enterprise led by Nudge Community Builders.

 Four artists’ projects will be shown in the Royal William Yard, the Royal Navy’s victualling yard for 150 years and the largest collection of Grade 1-listed former military buildings in Europe, currently being redeveloped by Urban Splash. Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll will create Cook’s New Clothes, 250 years after James Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific, marking the occasion when Joseph Banks boarded HMS Endeavour from Plymouth in 1768. University of Plymouth-based artists, Jane Grant and John Matthias will present Fathom (Atlantic), a large-scale sound installation which mixes underwater recordings with live acoustic transmissions from the River Tamar, enabling the audience to ‘climb through the fathom’ 6ft above the ground.

The National Marine Aquarium, the largest aquarium in the UK, will exhibit works by Ursula Biemann and Bryony Gillard. Biemann’s commission Acoustic Ocean, filmed on the Lofoten Islands in Northern Norway, sets out to explore the sonic ecology of marine life in the cold North Atlantic. Its central figure is a Sami biologist-diver whose task is to sense the submarine space for acoustic forms of expression in a quest for a future amphibian life world. Cornish artist, Gillard’s video A cap like water, fluid yet with definite body, takes the work of female modernist poet, Hilda "H.D." Doolittle, and her retreat to the Isles of Scilly in 1919, as a starting point to explore relationships between seascape, women’s writing, jellyfish and subjectivity.

The Atlantic Project will launch in close collaboration with the Plymouth Art Weekender (28-30 September 2018). A number of associated projects will include Shezad Dawood’s Leviathan at The Dome, produced by Plymouth Arts Centre, and the group exhibition, I AM MY OWN PRIMAL PARENT, at KARST. An opening weekend of events and performances will take place across the city.

 Hosted by The Arts Institute at University of Plymouth, The Atlantic Project is part of Horizon, a two-year visual arts development programme (2016-18) led by Plymouth Culture with the financial support of Arts Council England’s Ambition for Excellence fund and Plymouth City Council. Curated by Tom Trevor, the project has been developed as a core partnership between The Box (the multi-million pound redevelopment of Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery) and the University of Plymouth, with the ambition to become a regular biennial festival in the South West of England, to be launched as part of the Mayflower 400 programme in 2020.