This spring, Nottingham Contemporary presents two ambitious exhibitions: FELT TIP by Elizabeth Price, and the first major UK solo show of Daniel Steegmann Mangrané.
Price’s exhibition is her most ambitious to date. At its core are two new commissioned video installations: KOHL and FELT TIP (both 2018). The Turner Prize-winning British artist combines archival materials, live-action footage, motion graphics and CGI, using rhythmic edits of music and image. Her richly layered narratives explore social histories and the shifting terrain of analogue and digital cultures.
KOHL is a synchronised four-channel video, in which a chorus describes ghostly presences that are said to be emerging from abandoned mines in the north of England. The liquid flowing between subterranean locations is presented as the inky shadow of coal, freighted with collective memories, and symbolising the dense body of materials generated by the mining industry. Also exploring different eras of industry, FELT TIP is a six-metre-high, two-channel projection that uses the simple necktie as a motif for social and technological change within the workplace. Price uses tie fabric designs from the late 1970s as the foundation for a series of departures to tell a story of dramatic social change. The exhibition also includes a series of pinhole photographs, each four metres high, made by manipulating images sourced from fashion magazines to leave only a floating garment, hovering in a dream-like haze.
Daniel Steegmann Mangrané presents a range of new and existing works. Through a new immersive installation, architectural interventions, a 16mm film and a virtual reality work, the Rio-based Catalan artist conveys aspects of the Mata Atlântica, a biodiverse and geopolitically dense rainforest stretching along the Atlantic coast of Brazil. Through employing diverse mediums and technologies, Steegmann Mangrané provides a study into how environments can be portrayed, and in doing so, highlights the impossibilities of representation.
The exhibition presents two new commissions, including a sculptural installation filling the entirety of one gallery, which brings epiphytes, or air plants, from the rainforest into the space. Another new site-specific installation modifies the gallery’s ceiling to imitate the glints of light penetrating the forest canopy. The exhibition features existing work, including the video work 16mm (2009–11), in which a camera tracks into the depths of the rainforest at the same pace as the footage roll, linking the film and the rainforest both mechanically and conceptually. Phantom (kingdom of all the animals and all the beasts is my name) (2015) offers an immersive experience of the Mata Atlântica, through a VR experience in the gallery, where visitors can explore the rendered environment through their invisible body. Looking to indigenous cultures and the radical anthropology of the Brazilian scholar Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Steegmann Mangrané is interested in collapsing the distinction between nature and culture.
