Saturday 17 June 2017

I remember most what never happened - BxNU MFA Graduate Exhibition, Baltic 39

"I Remember Most What Never Happened is currently on display at BALTIC 39 and brings together work by 10 artists graduating from Northumbria this summer. The BxNU MFA is a unique two-year course, run by Northumbria in partnership with BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and based in the vibrant studio culture at BALTIC 39 on High Bridge, Newcastle.





This year, the graduating artists have made work that ranges and shifts across performance, video, photography, sculpture, installation and intervention. The exhibition utilises the project space on the top floor of BALTIC 39, which provides an ideal platform for their ideas to unfold, with artwork also spilling out into the public spaces of the building.

Northumbria Senior Lecturer in Fine Art, Sandra Johnston, who teaches on the BxNU MFA, said: “Throughout the programme, the artists are encouraged to self-direct a rich spectrum of experimentation, guided by their own curiosity and interests. A distinctive feature of the course is how these individual trajectories then also coalesce into collective exhibition making – a process that is simultaneously demanding, enlivening and revealing.



“I Remember Most What Never Happened, conceived by the third graduating cohort of the BxNU MFA, proposes a zeitgeist born of indulgence, suggestion, and invention.”

Meanwhile on the first floor at BALTIC 39, the mid-point exhibition by the first year BxNU MFA students is also on display. In Games We Create Worlds highlights the choreography of objects, and the ways in which control is suggested through the construction of space."



The exhibition featured a performance by Sister Shrill, who spent an ambitious 5.5 hours attempting to converse with each other while their mouths were full of water. Their struggle, perseverance and determinism perhaps comments on their experience of completing the 2 year MFA programme.

The installation of the work is, as ever, professional, and the exhibition seems rather coherent given that the work has originated from a collection of students who share the experience of being on the MFA programme as opposed to a thematic connection.

http://www.baltic39.com/i-remember-most-what-never-happened/

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