Sharing Not Hoarding
Sharing Not Hoarding is a temporary public art project utilising the hoardings surrounding Plot 10 in Dundee’s Waterfront Development. The project launched in August 2015 with the aim of opening up the Waterfront Development to wider public participation.
Initially negotiated by OSP for use during the Dundee Commons Festival, Sharing Not Hoarding – in keeping with its name – soon became a collaboration with the artists Owen Daily and David McCulloch, co-founders of Nomas*Projects.
The project has two main aims: to encourage critical thinking about Dundee’s Waterfront Development and to make Slessor Gardens a more vibrant community space.
Each exhibition consists of 18 framed 4-sheet posters. When time and budget allow we encourage a more participatory approach to creating the artwork and opening up the conversation.
If you’d like to propose an exhibition please send an email to jb4change[at]gmail.com. All enquiries are welcome.
CURRENT
Xerox’s Paradox
John Butler – in collaboration with NEoN 2018
6th November – 31st December 2018
Responding to the NeoN festival’s ‘Lifespans’ theme this exhibition offers the young people of today an ‘Extrapolated Reality’ view of the future of work, though the medium of ‘Interrogative Fashion’.
In a world where automation, robotics and AI do all the meaningful tasks, how do humans outside the investor class justify their continued existence?
Once, increased leisure time was promised, but in a world where everyone is busier than ever, it seems the moralists have won. The most likely outcome will be a regime of ‘Symbolic Labour’ to prevent the organic surplus from sliding into idleness and depression.
Xerox’s Paradox is a collection of ‘Workwear for Workfare’, exhibited in close proximity to the new V&A design museum. Xerox’s Paradox is technology’s inverse effect. Fearful of a paperless future, the research at Xerox Parc led to, among other things, the Graphic User Interface, which in turn led to a massive increase in the production of printed matter.
Artist’s statement.
I class myself as a Futurological Artist, who uses the medium of 3D graphics.
My work is about Human Utility in an age of Artificial Indifference and is the result of my continuous argument with the medium.
I hope the exhibition might help people reflect on technology’s broken promises.
For more examples of John’s work see here.
PAST
Sculpture in the City
Menzieshill Photography Group working in collaboration with David Oudney and the University of Dundee Museum Services.
18th September – 5th November 2018
Celebrating Public Art in Dundee
This exhibition features photographs of public sculpture in Dundee, taken by members of the Menzieshill Photography Group and other volunteers. The photography is part of a major public art recording project led by the University of Dundee Museum Services in association with Art UK and Scotland’s Urban Past.
Dundee has an excellent collection of over 400 pieces of public art, including murals, mosaics, stained glass and street furniture. Nearly half of these works are sculptures, which are currently being catalogued as part of a UK-wide project, Art UK Sculpture.
For more information about Menzieshill Photography Group’s plans to document every piece of public art in the city see here.
If you’d like to get involved in the project please contact Matthew Jarron, Curator of University of Dundee Museum Services, on museum[at]dundee.ac.uk.
For further information see, www.facebook.com/publicartdundee.
Urban Lounge
Anna Reid in collaboration with young people from Hot Chocolate Trust
6th July – 7th September 2018
Documentation of a design process exploring public space and what it means for young people in Dundee.
This project introduces a reinterpretation of Slessor Gardens in the form of an expressive outdoor gathering space. The imaginative installation – comprised of a playful collection of moveable tires, chalkboards and books – begs for interaction, reactivating the area and enhancing the connection to the urban landscape.
Designed by artist Anna Reid, in collaboration with young people from Hot Chocolate Trust, a youth group in Dundee, the pop-up installation demonstrates the potential of reclaiming public space.
The posters share the design process and act as documentation for the ephemeral outcome itself.
More than half of the world’s children live in cities today. It is here that they learn, play, work and contribute in a multitude of ways to the making of places. Far from being just a ‘context’ for these young people’s lives, cities are significantly shaped by their activities and by the need to reflect their presence in the social organisation of life. (Horschelmann and van Blerk)
The pop-up installation will take place on 18th July, 2 – 6pm.
For more information about Anna Reid, Hot Chocolate Trust and Urban Lounge just click on the links.
Dundee Birds
11th May – 6th July 2018
A photographic exhibition showing 36 bird eggs local to Dundee – sourced from the archives of the Natural History Unity at Perth Museum.
In Dundee and the surrounding districts we are fortunate in sharing our habitat with a diverse population of birds. Different species are drawn to distinctive contexts, small skittish birds live fast dynamic lives in our gardens and parks where they have found unique feeding opportunities.
The Dighty Burn and the River Tay attract waders, dippers and shore birds, whilst the mouth of the estuary often hosts unexpected visitors, as well as birds that live far out at sea and only make an inland appearance during the summer months to breed.
A world-class experience can be had by a visit to Fowlsheugh, further up the coast: like a sort of Tokyo for birds. Here 130,000 seabirds converge between March and August to breed and rear their young on the precarious ledges and niches afforded by the sites unique exposed geology. Wildly differing species coexist on the cliffs, displaying exuberant, highly evolved and economic lifestyles. A cacophony of guttural accents can be heard and territorial squabbles, coquettish preening, stoic incubation, frenzied feeding and beguiling parenting techniques observed.
The eggs depicted here represent a small selection of birds that can be seen locally if attention and patience are practiced. It should be noted however that they are not portrayed in scale or proportion to each other. The eggs themselves are from the archives of the Natural History Unit at Perth Museum.
Taking eggs from live nests was rightly made illegal in 1954, but not until custodial sentences were imposed in 2001 did the practice significantly decrease. As a result, many of the eggs photographed here are significantly old, some taken before the First World War, others during it.
Tentsmuir, June 1911 / Blair Atholl, May 1914 / Forthingham, March 1917 / Liff, June 1927 / Barry, July 1931 / Balmossie, May 1947
The young birds that might have been are long since, yet today these eggs still stand as a powerful totem for our fragile future.
For more information about Dalziel and Scullion see www.dalzielscullion.com
My Silence Will Never Protect Me
Janice Aitken
9th March – 11th May 2018
A photographic exhibition of 17 women staged in collaboration with Dundee Women’s Festival.
The portraits are shot in a dark studio with the women wearing black and lit stylistically. Asked to utilise coloured fabrics as a way of exercising autonomy over their image, the fabric serves as veil or net curtain behind which domestic life is enacted (for better or worse); a shield against the male gaze, a flag to signal presence or a means of creative expression.
Artist Janice Aitken said, ‘when I was first approached by Sharing Not Hoarding project I was really excited to be given the opportunity to create work as part of Dundee Women’s Festival. A lot of my work is designed to be accessible by people who wouldn’t necessarily visit a gallery and I love the idea of using these public spaces to exhibit art. I am also very interested in subverting the way that women are often portrayed in public spaces like billboards.
The starting point for the work was the way in which women’s voices are often not listened to and the title was inspired by a quote from poet Audre Lorde. The project enabled me to create work that celebrates women in all their diverse glory. The youngest is 15 and the oldest is in her seventies and all were gracious, imaginative and entered into the process of being photographed with great humour. I consider the photographs to be a collaboration between the subjects and me.’
The photographic work is complemented by an event on 13th March in DCA at 7.00pm as part of Dundee Women’s Festival. The event will feature readings of stories from many of the women’s lives in the exhibition as well as other contributors.
Tickets and info: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/my-silence-will-never-protect-me-tickets-43833674701
You can hear Janice speaking about the exhibition here.
Other Spaces
Tin Roof & See You on Sunday – organising artist, Joanna Helfer
19th January – 9th March 2018
Other Spaces is an international collaborative project featuring the work of eight artists. Connected by their involvement in two artist-led groups, Tin Roof in Dundee and See You on Sunday in Trinidad and Tobago. Each artist has responded individually to an invitation to explore the concept of ‘Hetrotopia’ as described by Michel Foucault. Having spent three months on a residency in Trinidad Joanna Helfer was struck by the underlying tensions and connections existing between Scotland and the Caribbean and wanted an opportunity to explore this further.
Joanna says, “I was reading Foucault and came across his concept of Hetrotopia: ‘the heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incomplete’. Foucault references gardens as being an example of Hetrotopias as they try to condense multiple real spaces into one idea of space. As the exhibition is situated at the Slessor gardens in Dundee – a highly charged public space far from the pseudo-neutral gallery space – I felt it would be interesting to explore this directly in the work. I proposed to the artists that we each submit a photograph of ourselves engaging in a space within our own context which relates to the idea of Hetreotopia. I also thought this could be an interesting way to present the complexity which relates to the idea of Heterotopia. I also thought this could be an interesting way to present the complexity of attempting to communicate across our very different spaces. By sitting still and simply observing the space we acknowledge the challenge of walking in and trying to know each other’s spaces. There’s something powerful about inertia, and being still. Also, I like the idea of reversing the gaze. Here the public viewing the work are the subject of the artist’s gaze – there is an attempt at a discussion of power; what does it mean to be seen in a space you cannot see? In addition, I asked each artist to create a map of the space they are occupying, to be displayed alongside the photograph.”
The participant artists are:
From SYoS: Alex Kelly, Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago / Luis Vasquez La Roche, Krefeld, Germany / Nikolai Noel, Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago / Wasia Ward, Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago
From Tin Roof: Charlotte Lodge, North Aberdeenshire, Scotland / Joanna Helfer, Dundee, Scotland / Kirsty Dalton, Dalat Pongour, Vietnam / Lucie Rachel, Los Angeles, USA
Digital D’Arcy
North East of North – Dr Caroline Erolin
7th November 2017 – 11th January 2018
Using micro CT and surface scans to create 3D digital models of museum objects, Caroline has collaborated with the D’Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum to create digital assets of key specimens and objects in the collection. The 3D objects shown in 2D on these posters are created by Caroline scanning the objects with a micro CT scanner or hand-held structured light scanner and using software such as ZBrush to process the scans and sometimes add colour to the model.
These are not photographs of the real thing, but created digital replicas. The digital files of the models are available online on the University’s website for you to manipulate and download.
When visiting the exhibition you can scan the QR codes on each poster. Alternatively you visit sketchfab.com/uod_museums. With access to a 3D printer, you can print out the models.
The models are available under a creative commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
For access to 3D printers, visit the Dundee Maker Space.
For more information about NEoN’s Media Archaeology programme and NEoN Digital Arts Festival see www.northeastofnorth.com.
Notes on a Changing Place
The Museum of Loss and Renewal – Tracy Mackenna & Edwin Janssen
8th September – 6th November 2017
Public event: Tuesday 31 October, 6pm (doors open at 5.30pm) at The McManus
Taking the ideas that underpin The Museum of Loss of Renewal as their starting point and using a wide range of historical and personal references, the artists, Tracy Mackenna & Edwin Janssen, who live and work in Dundee, have combined drawing, photography and collage techniques to produce a series of posters offering an idiosyncratic view of Dundee and its continual reinvention. The work celebrates Dundee and its inhabitants by questioning preconceived ideas.
The Museum of Loss and Renewal is a mobile discursive platform that creates space for sharing experiences to further the understanding of the challenges we face in our individual and communal lives.
Merging production, education and research The Museum of Loss and Renewal manifests itself in multiple forms such as exhibitions, public studios, screenings, residencies and publications. These activities often incorporate interdisciplinary public gatherings.
The curators of this autarchic museum, Tracy Mackenna & Edwin Janssen, who also teach at DJCAD, develop in collaboration with others art projects that address issues of societal concern such as wellbeing, end of life and sustainability. Key questions evolve around social relationships, the way places are inhabited and how personal objects reflect who we are.
Public event: Tuesday 31 October, 6pm (doors open at 5.30pm)
Reflecting Sharing Not Hoarding and The Museum of Loss and Renewal’s joint ambition to reach a variety of audiences, the posters will be used as conversation pieces during a public engagement event at The McManus that will explore the arts’ reflective and critical role against the backdrop of Dundee’s reimagining – in collaboration with Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (DJCAD) Masters students on the MFA Art, Society & Publics course.
“She’s Game Boys”
4th August – 31st August 2017
Artist talk and discussion, 20th August, 1.30pm at the hoardings
Mary Slessor is regarded as a heroine in both Scotland and Nigeria. But how are her achievements interpreted in relation to constant value changes over the decades and specifically in our own time? What does it mean for the people of Dundee to have a new civic space named after Mary Slessor and how is she understood today?
This artwork responds to the naming of the gardens after the Christian missionary Mary Slessor. It reimagines the figure of Mary Slessor through the visual trope of a sliding puzzle game.
The exhibition title references a stained glass memorial window in the McManus Gallery. It refers to a story about how one night in Dundee, a gang surrounded Slessor in the street. The leader swung a heavy lead weight on a cord threateningly close to Slessor’s head. As it shaved her brow she stood her ground. The leader smiled and exclaimed: ‘She’s game, boys!’ The work acknowledges the way we read words, history, beliefs and tradition by giving them renewed meaning in the present.
The exhibition is part of a series of work made by Cully as part of his MFA show in Art, Society and Publics. The show is open from August 19–27th.
Other works can be seen at Nomas* Projects, 9a Ward Road and in the Cooper Gallery at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design.
Gingers of Dundee
1st June – 1st August 2017
Ginger is a Scottish colloquial term of what is popularly called ‘red hair’. Scotland has the highest proportion of gingers in the world yet it remains uncommon with only 13% expressing the hair type and is a cliche of Scottish identity abroad.
Concept
This new portrait series seeks to forge physical and cultural links between the everyday Dundonian and the new V&A development and wider Waterfront Development and challenges us to reconsider superficial assumptions. The photographs depict residents of Dundee and allows them to inhabit the space between two realms, the past and the future, acting as the city’s representatives within the new landscape. The use of a visual minority to represent a whole city raises questions of representation and perception. Does the Waterfront Development reflect the views of the everyday resident and if so which ones? There is a hidden complexity even among the supposed uniformity of this group. Through interview excerpts with the sitters, the viewer is invited to consider the deeper unseen complexities of supposedly simple issues. The Waterfront Development represents a complex meeting point of many Dundee voices each projecting their own personal assumptions upon the external environment that deserves greater interrogation.
The visual language references a rich seam within art history, one that can be explored within the V&A online archives.The hair colour has held a deeply significant role in art history, most notably, but not limited to, the Renaissance and pre-Raphaelites period where central characters, often divine in nature, were red-haired. Yet it is also a type of Scottish identity, one that is familiar in a collection brought from ‘outside’.
This is a new chapter in an ongoing body of work called ‘Gingers’ that has been published globally and exhibited in the Hermitage in St Petersburg. These portraits will contribute to Kieran Dodds’ first book, planned for publication in 2018.
To find out more about Kieran Dodds see here.
All Welcome Here
10th April – 1st June 2017
Design agency O Street have created a bold and colourful exhibition that incorporates badges people can wear or display to show a sign of openness to all, and celebrate diversity in Dundee and beyond.
With the aim of creating a sign that works across language barriers and is simple to draw and understand, O Street settled on a design derived from a smile and two people joining hands.
The installation spells out ALL WELCOME HERE and includes 3000 removable pin badges. The installation is a vibrant, challenging message of inclusivity. But it’s also a question to ourselves and the city. Are we ALL really WELCOME HERE? Are there limits to our openness? What would a truly open city look like?
Beyond the physical installation, O Street will be working with Making Dundee Home to generate conversation around the exhibition and gather thoughts about what values and behaviours the symbol represents.
The badges will be installed and available to the public from 3pm on the 10th April 2017.
If you’d like to lend a hand and help install the badges you’d ALL be WELCOME HERE at 11am.
For a Vimeo link of the install see here.
Dundee Publics: Past, Present and Future Subversions
3rd February – 7th April 2017
This exhibition shows work by 10 artists from Dundee Print Collective: Lucia Gomez, Andrea Sayers, Kieran Milne, Tom Carlile, Sarah Burt, Fraser MacDonald, Bobby Sinclair, Annis Fitzhugh, Jonny Lyons, and Thomas Woodcock.
Dundee Print Collective formed in 2013 following the IMPACT 8 International Printmaking Festival Conference in Dundee. The unique aspect of Dundee Print Collective is that it is open to everyone. Over 100 individuals have been involved with Dundee Print Collective and many of these individuals have had no prior artistic training.
Scott Hudson said, “We’re delighted to be collaborating on our first public arts project. Previously Dundee Print Collective have only exhibited in a gallery environment. Being part of the Sharing Not Hoarding project opens the door for our artists to convey their message and artwork to a wider audience in Dundee. We’re looking forward to hearing the response.”
Dundee Print Collective continue to promote printmaking as a creative, social and educational method for anyone to express themselves visually. They encourage individuals to engage with future Dundee Print Collective projects.
To find out more about Dundee Print Collective see www.facebook.com/dundeeprintcollective.
Viewfinder
Monica Studer and Christoph van den Berg – in collaboration with NEoN Digital Arts Festival
9th November 2016 – 2nd January 2017
Working in collaboration with NEoN Digital Arts Festival Studer and van den Berg created images comprising an imaginary park. The panorama, compiled from landscapes taken from their recent installation works, was composed of digitally generated images, without any photographic elements. Most of Studer and van de Berg’s projects comment on the relationship between digital imagery and the physical space we live in.
The exhibition was inspired by the artists’ earlier livecam installations, where visitors walk up to an outdoor viewfinder to see themselves superimposed into an artificial space in real time. For this work, the artists borrowed the image of the viewfinder to rethink a well known motif: a person peeking through a gap in the hoardings. Here the hoardings were formed by an ‘impossible landscape’, in contrast to the ‘public space’ developing on the other side.
Visitors were asked to take photos of people looking through the central viewfinder and then send the image to viewing@sharingnothoarding.org or tweet to @weareneon.
For more information about Studer and van den Berg’s work for NEoN see, http://www.northeastofnorth.com/event/passage-park-4-hotspot-shack/.
The Substance of Things Unseen
Robert Orchardson
15th August to 16th October 2016
The Substance of Things Unseen imagined a series of modernist facades based on Le Corbusier’s drawings to calculate the ‘golden section’ – a seemingly “perfect” ratio, or divine proportion.
Here the ‘golden section’ was obscured by a series of curtains and flags that subtly interrupted Le Corbusier’s modernist ideal by bringing the viewer back to a potential that exists in the here and now, of Slessor Gardens.
For more information about Robert Orchardson see here.
What does regeneration mean for you?
Mhairi Anderson, Sue Beveridge, Jonathan Liddell, and Hayley Whelan – students on DJCAD’s MFA course, Art, Society and Publics
16th November – 28th December 2015
This exhibition was developed by students from DJCAD’s MFA course, Arts, Society and Publics. Showing a series of photographs depicting different aspects of Dundee’s ongoing development, the artists used social media to generate a dialogue around two questions: ‘what does regeneration mean for you?’ and ‘what does regeneration mean for the city?’
Over the course of the exhibition the artists pasted facebook and twitter responses to these questions on their original photographs, thus making an online dialogue visible within the Waterfront Development.
Shadow Work
Jonathan Baxter and Sarah Gittins – aka Dundee Urban Orchard
1st October to 16th November 2015
This exhibition took place at a key moment in Dundee’s Waterfront Development, when Dundee Urban Orchard were beginning to lose faith that the Waterfront Development would include any edible planting within Slessor Gardens – this despite years of ongoing negotiation. The exhibition, Shadow Work, drew on the writings of Ivan Illich to draw attention to the voluntary labour that supports environmental projects in the city. It depicted a group of school children from Braeview Academy walking with spades and forks aloft to plant an orchard in Slessor Gardens. Significantly, the familiar DUO apple tree had been removed from the image.
Since installing the exhibition DUO are pleased to announce that a ‘temporary’ edible garden and orchard have now been planted in Slessor Gardens. See here for details.
Owen Daily – in association with PACE and If the City were a Commons
26th August – 1st October 2015
Owen Daily’s posters drew upon his teaching experience with PACE projects and young people from Dundee’s peripheral housing schemes. Using public domain images, Daily’s posters reflected on experiences of disenfranchised young people through the established visual languages of power – including heraldry, land ownership and the city’s rich naval history.
The exhibition asks us to imagine how the city’s public history and personal voice could be used to generate new narratives and understanding for Dundee. It does so by opening up conversation about shared space, place and belonging in the city.
If you’d like to know more about opportunities to exhibit in the context of Sharing Not Hoarding please contact OSP.
On Site Projects 