Postcard from the North East of England: AV Festival 2014

By George Vasey

Hito Steyerl, Strike, 2010, AV Festival 14 installation view. Photograph: Colin Davison

The North Sea coast is often full of cargo vessels loaded with oil. These ships will wait patiently for the value of their contents to increase and then come ashore to take full advantage. It’s a curious strategy and one that illustrates the logic of modern capital, whereby raw material becomes something far more economically and socially complicated. This anecdote does much to sum up the concerns of this year’s AV festival.

Under the title ‘Extraction’, festival director Rebecca Shatwell has convened a number of strands exploring raw materials, their excavation and transformation, and global trade. Much of the work included is concerned with a thoroughly anthropogenic ecology. Surveying the relationship between industry and community, artists trace the movement of materials and interrogate the complex value systems that we attach to them. The theme feels timely, given the art world’s interest in materialism and the ecological concerns voiced in recent texts by writers such as Jane Bennett and Bruno Latour. Comparisons can also be made with the 2012 installment of Manifesta, ‘The Deep of the Modern’, held in Genk, Belgium, which similarly explored the coal industry.

Founded in 2003, the AV Festival is held biennially and has become the UK’s largest event dedicated to new media, film, and music. As the programme included over 36 film screenings and 10 concerts, my trip over the opening weekend allowed only a partial over-view, but it gave a sense of the festival’s scope and ambition. This year’s edition had international outlook, presenting many UK premieres and including projects from China, Japan and Eastern Europe, to name a few. On a domestic level, it was positive to see a shared energy between the region’s larger public galleries and smaller artist-run initiatives.

Walead Beshty, 20 inch Copper Boxes, installation view as part of ‘Metal’, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. Courtesy: AV Festival; photograph: Colin Davison

Venues across Newcastle were given over to solo projects, while Sunderland’s Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art (NGCA) and Middlesborough Institute of Modern Art (mima) presented two group exhibitions. Both shows, whilst full of good work, felt slightly hampered by constricted thematics. ‘Stone’ at the NGCA brought together 10 artists who working with this as both subject and material. In the gallery, Harun Farocki’s Transmission (2007) was exhibited near a selection of Vanessa Billy’s sculptures. Farocki’s film represents sites of memorial, exploring the symbolic use of stone and accumulated histories, which has little in common with Billy’s playful and understated clay over and above the titular theme. Better and more telling comparisons could be made across venues and throughout the programme. Dennis Oppenheim’s video Rocked Hand (1970) felt like a paradigmatic work. The artist created a jigsaw of pieces of stone on his hand, camouflaging his skin with the ground beneath. Enacting a type of symbolic burial, Oppenheim’s flesh became impounded by the earth. These opposing temporalities – deep ecological time and human endurance – were pervasive metaphors throughout the festival.

Vanessa Billy, installation view as part of ‘Stone’, Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland. Courtesy: AV Festival; photograph: Colin Davison

A corollary exhibition, ‘Metal’, at mima brought together work by Hito Steyerl, Simon Starling, Anja Kirschner & David Panos, Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc and Walead Beshty. Beshty’s 20-inch Copper (2009-ongoing) was representative in tracing the material histories of objects. For a number of years, the artist has been sending his work to exhibitions by FedEx. The sculptures, reminiscent of work by Donald Judd, evidence their transport by way of handprints and scuff marks on their surfaces. Beshty reminds us that behind the abstract figures and economic forecasts, trade remains an interaction between actual people and physical materials.

Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc,An Italian Film (Africa Addio), 2012, film still. Courtesy: the artist and Marcelle Alix, Paris

Back in Newcastle, the Spanish artist Lara Almarcegui’s project The Last Coal Extraction in Newcastle (2013-14), presented at The NewBridge Project, felt like another significant axis for the festival. The gallery was occupied by a large steel mesh borrowed from a local coal mine, which, as the artist explained to me, is used as a type of plug, closing the entrance to an old mine shaft. Looking like a rusted Sol LeWitt grid sculpture, the work felt like a full stop, closing a physical chapter of the city’s history and offering a symbolic foundation for its future.

The Laing Art Gallery provided two solo presentations by Jessica Warboys and Susan Stenger. Warboys’ installation felt anomalous in the context of other works. The artist’s signature large-scale paintings, created by staining raw canvas with pigment and seawater, offered a formal immediacy in contrast to most of the work seen elsewhere. If many of the projects in the festival explored a deep sedimented time, then Warboys’ canvases express a more urgent temporality.

Lara Almarcegui_,The Last Coal Extraction in Newcastle_, 2014, installation view at The NewBridge Project, Newcastle. Courtesy:AV Festival; photograph: Colin Davison

Stenger’s Sound Strata of Coastal Northumberland (2014) combined a sound installation alongside a geological map that served as its musical score. The map itself, made by mining engineer Nicholas Wood in 1830, was wondrous and full of rich detail. The use of local instruments such as fiddles, brass band and Highland pipes suggested an intimate and localised inscription of the monolithic.

Akio Suzuki’s exhibition at Globe Gallery, titled ‘na ge ka ke’ (to cast, to throw) was the Japanese artist’s first solo presentation in the UK. The show, alongside his performance at the Castle Keep on Saturday night, played on a similar fascination for the acoustic potential of the natural environment. Suzuki’s minimal performances involved affecting materials and then allowing the spectator to listen to the reverberations. Whether by banging two stones together, slowly scraping a sheet of cut metal with a pebble or playing a primitive instrument made from tubular perspex, Suzuki displays a keen sensitivity to the acoustic qualities of each material, eliciting an expansive range of sounds from austere means. His performance at the Castle Keep was the standout of the festival for many.

Susan Stenger, Sound Strata of Coastal Northumberland, 2014, installation view at Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle.
Courtesy: AV Festival; photograph: Colin Davison

At The Mining Institute, Anna Molska presented The Weavers (2009). In the video, Molska transposes a 1892 play by German author Gerhart Hauptmann about a rebellion by poor textile workers to the contemporary Polish mining region of Silesia. Sat amongst the dilapidated remains of a once thriving industry, the miners seem utterly devoid of any revolutionary spirit. The location of the exhibition, which comes almost exactly 30 years after the miners’ strikes in the UK, only enhanced the melancholy.

The exhausted worker recurs in Wang Bing’s long-form documentary at Stephenson Works. Screened – with perceptible pertinence – in the building where the steam engine was invented, the 14-hour video Crude Oil (2008) follows a group of oil workers on a daily shift. My visit coincided with their break: slumped down in every available space of a cramped restroom, the workers attempt to grab whatever sleep they can. Upbeat pop music plays on a loop from a sound system and bunting is left over from a previous party. The disjunctive details bring our attention to the overworked body. Molska and Bing foreground the impact of economic precarity on community, as well as the narcotic dimension of our dependence on fossil fuel.

Thomas Sopwith, Sopwith Geological Models. Courtesy:AV Festival; photograph: Colin Davison

This year’s AV festival presented a number of distinct approaches to the natural environment and our place within it. While certain works expressed an ecological anxiety, others attempted to recalibrate a relationship between the body and nature. Expanded and diversified by a programme of screenings and events throughout March – including a week-end dedicated to post-colonial cinema and ‘Digging for Sound’, a series of newly commissioned sound works in response to the Northumberland landscape – the AV festival has cemented itself as an ambitious international platform on the festival circuit.