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Turner Contemporary Open 2009
Turner Contemporary Project Space
Saturday 27 June-  Sunday 6 September

Linda Aitken, Jim Allchin, Carole Andrews, Tina Atchison-Thomas, Grace Ayson, Dawn Badland, Jonathan Baldock, Daniel Bass, Ben Bird, Duncan Brannan, Mary Butcher, Edward Chell, Adam Chodzko, Darren Coffield, Richard Collett, Matthew de Pulford, Moyra Derby, Roy Eastland, Lesley Featherstone, Vicky Foster, Shelly Goldsmith, Bryan Hawkins, Georgia Hayes, Neil Henderson and Polly Read, Roger Hopgood, Robert Jarvis, Norman Kaghma, Kate Knight, Leo Koivistoinen, Emma Leach, Hannah Lees, Rod Lupton, Garry Martin, Julie Mecoli, Stephen Melton, Jeremy Millar, Nicole Mollett, Roy Oxlade, Andrew Palmer, Mark Parry, Edward Picot, Gareth Polmeer, Jim Robertshaw, Thomas Shedden, Eilidh Short, Ian Peter Smith, Ed Thompson, Julie Westbury, Leise Wilson, Patricia Wilson Smith, Jeanine Woollard, Jonathan Wright, Rose Wylie

The Turner Contemporary Open 2009 was a selected, open submission exhibition that celebrated
the creativity of artists based or trained in Kent. The exhibition, specially selected by a panel of arts professionals, featured emerging and established artists who live and work in the county or who have graduated from a Kent art college since 2000. With a range of work in different media, the Open was a fantastic opportunity to discover the diverse and vibrant approaches to art making in the region.
 
The Turner Contemporary Open 2009 was selected by Martin Clark, Artistic Director, Tate St Ives; Laura Ford, Artist; Sarah Martin, Exhibitions Curator, Turner Contemporary and Hilde Teerlinck, Director, FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais. The exhibition featured a wealth of current painting, from Jim Allchin's striking images based on found photographs and Georgia Hayes' memories of exotic animals encountered on an African safari to Rose Wylie's large-scale paintings recording moments remembered from films. Reflections on landscape appeared in Tina Atchinson-Thomas' colourful abstracts, Edward Chell's delicate paintings of motorway grass verges and Eilidh Short's film of a taxi journey to Bluebell Hill.
 
Roger Hopgood's photographic series Climbing Frames displayed a mini-archive of children's climbing frames from the 1950s and 60s. Dan Bass presented a photographic archive of a different kind: 'happy birthday' posters pinned to lamp posts and traffic bollards in East Kent. Julie Mecoli's simple sculptures in bitumen explored her interest in place and the environment, changing over time as the material slowly slumps, while Stephen Melton's installation of fish species cast in bronze asked questions about our impact on the natural world.
 
Other works displayed an interest in fantasy and theatre, including Jeanine Woollard's photographs depicting her studio as a place of pure escapism, and Jonathon Baldock's uncanny, hand-crafted figures inspired by his interest in anthropology and the grotesque. The exhibition also featured artist films by Adam Chodzco, Neil Henderson and Polly Read and Jeremy Millar whose Human Form in Art documents the painstaking dismantling of display cases by curators at Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum.

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Sound of Music
Turner Contemporary Project Space
Saturday 4 April - Sunday 14 June

Admission free

Art & Language, Robert Barry, Johanna Billing, Black Noise, Manon de Boer, George Brecht, Angela Bulloch, John Cage, Ellen Cantor & John Cussans, Francois Curlet & Michel Francois, Jeremy Deller, Cerith Wyn Evans, Ryan Gander, Babak Ghazi, Pierre Huyghe, Scott King, Vera & Francois Molnar, Laurent Montaron, Dennis Oppenheim, Allen Ruppersberg, Meredyth Sparks, Jan Vercruysse, La Monte Young & Marian Zazeela  

The exhibition Sound of Music explored the links between art, sound and music. Featuring 30 works in a variety of media, artists include John Cage, Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller, Turner Prize nominee Angela Bulloch and Pierre Huyghe, all selected from the collection of the FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais in Dunkirk, the Turner Contemporary Project Space was the the only UK venue to host this exciting multi-media exhibition.

The exhibition included the experiments in sound and composition of key figures such as La Monte Young and John Cage who introduced the idea of chance into musical composition. Language and text came together in Allen Ruppersberg's The Singing Posters (2003-05)  an installation of poetry excerpts and advertisements printed onto brightly-coloured billboards.

Sculptural works by George Brecht, Angela Bulloch and Pierre Huyghe encouraged active participation. Visitors were invited to play the 200 chimes suspended that made up Huyghe's work which was based on a musical score written by John Cage.

Aspects of popular culture were explored in Turner Prize-winner Jeremy Deller's blackboard drawing History of the World (1996) and Ellen Cantor and John Cussan's documentary-style video Whitby Weekender Dance Lesson (2006). Other artworks in the exhibition share an interest in myth-making, fan culture and the mechanics of the star system such as Scott King's series of prints in which historic moments in the mythologies of rock bands were reduced to pure graphics.

Johanna Billing's video installation Magical World (2005) was the result of a collaboration between the artist and a group of children at an after-school music club in Dubrava, Croatia, who were shown rehearsing Sidney Barnes' 1968 song of the same title, presenting a poignant glimpse of a country in transition.

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Crossroads
David Blandy
Turner Contemporary Project Space
Saturday 4 April - Sunday 14 June

Admission free

Alongside Sound of Music, Turner Contemporary presented Crossroads (2009), an installation by David Blandy whose work was recently seen in the exhibition Far West. 

Crossroads began as an investigation into the mythology surrounding the legendary Robert Johnson, a bluesman with three gravestones, 29 recorded songs and only two known photographs, who reputedly sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads. Filmed in the heat of the Mississippi Delta, Crossroads was in part a portrait of a landscape still deeply, though not officially, segregated. The film followed a man with a guitar, the Blues Legend, on his journey to the Crossroads to recover his lost soul. The figure roams the landscape looking for a genuine Blues experience, picking guitar on porches and walking dusty roads, to a haunting soundtrack of slide guitar music. Undermining this romantic vision was the appearance of an inverted Minstrel, an alter-ego who haunts the journey. In this quest for the authentic, the search for the Blues becomes a wider search for self, one man's search for reconciliation with a plundered culture.

Crossroads was an Arts Council England National
Touring Commission initiated by Spike Island and
supported by 176, Zabludowicz Collection.

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Superabundant: A Celebration of Pattern

Turner Contemporary Project Space
Droit House
Saturday 24 January - Sunday 22 March 2009
Admission free

Jacob Dahlgren, Wim Delvoye, Jim Drain, Lesley Halliwell, Paul Moss, Henna Nadeem, Jacqueline Poncelet, Daniel Sturgis, Richard Woods

Superabundant was an exhibition that created a sense of celebration, of joy and delight through the power of pattern. The exhibition featured work by nine artists who made use of pattern and decoration in very different ways, some adopting a systems approach to pattern whilst others were more fluid and organic. For this exhibition, many of the artists created new and sometimes site specific work especially for the Turner Contemporary Project Space.

The use of decorative designs and patterns has always been central to the fine and applied arts from Roman mosaics and the intricate motifs of Islamic art to the innovative wallpaper and textiles of AWN Pugin and William Morris. In the twentieth century, excessive ornamentation was dismissed as decadent by the Modernist architects and designers of the Bauhaus: decoration for its own sake was replaced by abstraction and truth to materials.

In this exhibition, the tension between decoration and abstraction was explored in Lesley Halliwell's intricate, large-scale Spirograph drawings and Daniel Sturgis' series of paintings with their vocabulary of colour, repetition and pattern.

A number of works played directly with the external and internal surfaces of the Turner Contemporary Project Space, a former department store on Margate High Street: Richard Woods created a new decorative facade for the building while Jacqueline Poncelet installed a forest of pillars covered with a dizzying 'push-me-pull-you' motif.  Architectural simulation of a different kind featured in Wim Delvoye's photograph of a marble floor created entirely out of salami.

Jacob Dahlgren is fascinated by the surface of things and our everyday encounters with pattern and abstraction, from striped t-shirts photographed on the street to the curves that a stack of coloured plastic cups makes. Heaven is a place on earth was an installation made up of red, white and blue bathroom scales arranged on the floor like an interactive, modernist grid.

Pattern is often associated with feelings of pleasure. Paul Moss' Danger Paintings however, with their disorientating zig-zags of red and white hazard tape, signaled an unspecified warning and functioned as both paintings and architectural screens. These paintings, like many of the works in the exhibition, were complex and labour intensive. Jim Drain's over the top, colourful sculptures made of wool, cloth and other found materials, combined a handmade aesthetic and an interest in non-Western traditions of art making with references to 60's Op art and psychedelia.

Independent on Sunday review 25 January 2009

Saturday 4 October 2008 - Sunday 4 January 2009
Turner Contemporary Project Space

Xu Bing; David Blandy; Liu Ding; Cao Fei; Gunilla Klingberg; Surasi Kusolwong; Michael Lin; Maverick Press; Yoko Ono; Janek Simon; SOI Project; Support Structure; Seven Samurai

Far West explored the consumer and cultural relationships and the effect of globalisation on aspects of popular culture. Combining elements of a gallery, shop, factory and market, the exhibition transformed the Turner Contemporary Project Space, a former retail venue, into an interactive concept store featuring work by artists from China, Japan, Taiwan and Thailand, as well as Europe and the US.

The idea of the so-called 'experience economy' - in which commercial companies sell experiences as well as goods - has gained increasing currency in recent years. Inspired by this idea, as well as parallel debates in art and commerce around participation, individualism, authorship and productivity, Far West invited you to take part in the production process or purchase one of a range of goods, from cheap, mass produced items to unique artist-designed objects.

Issues of participation and exchange were brought to the fore in SOI projects' Fruits, in which paper fruit patterns could be assembled and added to the exhibition display in exchange for actual fruit, and Yoko Ono's Mend Piece for Merry England - an invitation to donate and assemble broken crockery fragments in exchange for a symbolic gift. The trade in goods between East and West was highlighted in Surasi Kusolwong's 1 Pound Shop in which kitsch, mass produced items sourced from Thai market stalls were available for purchase at the flat rate of £1 each. In from the Bank of Hell, by Maverick Press with artist Melanie Jackson, a Hong Kong Joss shop displayed beautifully crafted paper replicas of everyday consumer objects designed to be burnt with incense as offerings for ancestors.

Artists were involved in many aspects of the exhibition's theatrical design, from Xu Bing's Far West logo, to Michael Lin's decorative wallpaper and Gunilla Klingberg's hallucinogenic pattern of supermarket logos which covered the entrance windows. The exhibition furniture was specially designed by Miessen & Ploughfield Architects.

Funded by The Arts Council England - Grants for The Arts and The British Council - Connections Through Culture. Far West was produced in partnership with Arnolfini, Bristol and the Long March, Beijing. www.farwest.cn

An Arnolfini project.

On the Threshold of a Dream
Friday 13 June - Sunday 14 September 2008
Turner Contemporary Project Space

The art projects of Zoe Walker and Neil Bromwich probe 'in between' states and places. Working together since 1999, Walker and Bromwich's performances, sculptures and videos often encourage the participation of the audience and are both playful and utopian in their exploration of art's ability to overcome boundaries.

On the Threshold of a Dream further extended the duo's preoccupation with the zone between fact and fiction, dreams and reality, land and sea. It comprised two parts: an exhibition in the Turner Contemporary Project Space and the touring, off-site project Celestial Radio, which Turner Contemporary brought to East Kent for the first time .

The exhibition featured Walker and Bromwich's inflatable sculptures and video work in the Turner Contemporary Project Space. The centerpiece of the exhibition was Friendly Frontier No. 1, a large inflatable mountain range complete with emergency slide, offering a simple, child-like solution to the complicated problem of international border control. The peace-loving message continued in a pair of works from the Siege Weapons of Love series of inflatable 'missile' prototypes, while the mesmerising video installation Limbo-Land presented an attempt at lunar exploration which remains caught between land and sky, never quite achieving lift-off. Finally, a video of Celestial Radio in previous locations put the project within a wider context.

Generate
Thursday 31 July - Sunday 31 August 2008
Turner Contemporary Droit House

Can children and their parents learn from each others creativity? Can children's creativity influence their parents' artistic practice? These were some of the big questions that artists explored with their children in the Generate project. The exhibition in Droit House featured the work that came out of their collaboration.
The Generate artists welcomed families to take part in the project by attending one or more of the workshops. The workshops were free to all children with an accompanying adult and were based on the Generate principles of co-learning and learning through creativity.

Shared Vision
Cultural Ambassadors 2008
Thursday 26 June - Sunday 20 July
Turner Contemporary Droit House

Shared Vision presented the creative output of the 2008 Cultural Ambassadors programme, reflecting time spent by participants looking at and thinking about art and regeneration, and working with professional artists. The programme aimed to help participants develop the confidence and ambition to take up courses in further or higher education, as well as helping people take part directly in the regeneration of the local area.

Cultural Ambassadors is a partnership project between the University College for the Creative Arts at Canterbury, Epsom, Farnham, Maidstone and Rochester and Turner Contemporary. Funded by Aimhigher Kent and Medway.

Nature is a Workshop
Selected from the Arts Council Collection
Thursday 28 February - Sunday 1 June
Turner Contemporary Project Space, 53-57 High Street Margate
Droit House Stone Pier, Margate
Tuesday-Sunday 10.00-17.00
Admission free

Including: Keith Arnatt / David Batchelor / Ian Dawson / John Isaacs / Janice Kerbel / Richard Long / Mike Nelson / Kathy Prendergast / Jem Southam / Mark Titchner / Toby Ziegler

Nature is a Workshop, the first exhibition in Turner Contemporary's new Project Space on Margate High Street, presented contemporary artworks selected from the prestigious Arts Council Collection. The exhibition, also in Droit House on the Stone Pier, featured works made over the past thirty years by some of the UK's leading artists in a range of media including sculpture, installation, photography and sound.
Artists have always recorded and responded to nature in their work, from the earliest painted depictions of landscape to Land Art of the 1960s and 70s, whilst highly topical subjects such as the recycling and reuse of materials have long been explored by contemporary artists in different ways.  Coinciding with Margate's contemporary art festival 'Margate Rocks' (3-11 May) on the theme of Art and Ecology, the artworks selected for Nature is a Workshop shared a concern with our relationship to the environment, whether natural or manmade, and with those things that we collect or construct in an attempt to make sense of the world.
Richard Long has been working directly with nature since the 1960s, making maps, drawings, texts and sculptures based on his walks in the landscape, often using stones as markers of time or distance. His sculpture Fourteen Stones (1977) is one of the first stone circles that Long made for installation in a gallery and is made up of 14 stones gathered by the artist from a beach near the Bristol Channel, arranged in a circle on the ground. It is shown in Droit House alongside landscape photographer Jem Southam's images of coastal erosion (Birling Gap, 2000) which document the slow erosion of materials over time along a stretch of coast near Beachy Head - the longest natural exposure of chalk cliffs in Europe.
In other works shown in the Turner Contemporary Project Space, materials are recycled or transformed as in Ian Dawson's 171 Elements (1998): a large sculpture in which a tower of coloured plastic crates appears on the point of collapse, the result of intense heat which the artist has applied to these ubiquitous mass produced objects. Toby Ziegler's sculptures combine the hi-tech with the handmade, as in Portrait of C.L (2006) an oversized sculpture of a pineapple, made using computer aided drawings which were worked up by the artist into a three dimensional form of interlocking planes of plywood. 
In the dystopian sci-fi film The Planet of the Apes, the central character Taylor lands on a planet which turns out be the earth in a post-human future, dashing his initial hopes of finding a new, improved world. Two sculptural installations in the exhibition appear to provide forms of shelter in potentially hostile environments. Kathy Prendergast's Land (1990) is part tent, part landmass while Mike Nelson's life-raft Taylor (1994), with its references to the aforementioned film, alludes to the possibility of survival on another planet.
Janice Kerbel's recent radio play Nick Silver Can't Sleep is a love story, narrated by the actor Rufus Sewell, about the impossibility of love between two botanically incompatible plant species and combines botanical research gathered by the artist with material gleaned from interviews with insomnia sufferers. Finally, the logical conclusion of this failure to propagate 'extinction' is embodied in John Isaac's arresting sculpture Dodo ,1994. 

Letters from Margate
Gallery on the Square, Cecil Square, Margate
Thursday 10 April - Sunday 27 April 2008
Monday-Friday, 9.00-18.00
Thursday 9.00-20.00
Saturday 9.00-17.00

Letters from Margate was the latest collaboration between Turner Contemporary and University for the Creative Arts at Canterbury. Students studying for a BTEC National Diploma in Art and Design used words describing Margate as the inspiration for new pieces of work to be displayed in the public realm.

The students  researched the past, present and future potential for Margate through interviewing local people and creating sketch books of drawings and photographs of the area. The students met residents in the arcades, Margate Museum, Old Town, Arlington House and the Walpole Bay Hotel, who were asked their opinions on Margate, including what it is like to live here, the changes they have seen over the years and what they would like to see in the future.

The resulting pieces of work were returned to the streets of Margate in the form of public artworks in the exhibition Letters from Margate at sites in Regal Walk shopping centre. The students' research and information about the completed artworks was displayed at the Gallery on the Square at Margate Gateway Plus in Cecil Square.

Passage (passacaille)
Droit House, Stone Pier, Margate
Wednesday 13 - Sunday 17 February 2008
10.00 - 16.00
Admission free, screenings every hour from 10.30 until 15.30
running time 26 minutes)
The new high speed rail link across Kent was the inspiration for Passage (passacaille), an artist's film screened by Turner Contemporary at Droit House, Margate on 14-17 February 2008.

The film Passage by artist Andrew Cross was commissioned to mark the opening of St Pancras International and the high-speed rail link. A slow moving voyage through time, place and history, it offers an alternative view to the more common perceptions of modern day high speed travel. The film features many aspects of the Kent landscape, often focusing on underground passages in transportation from early canal tunnels to the Channel Tunnel. Locations directly above tunnels, such as Shakespeare Cliff in Dover, or below bridges like the Medway Viaduct, are plotted along the route of High Speed 1 as it passes from the English Channel through Kent and North London to St Pancras. An accompanying narrative, spoken in French, describes early public attitudes to railway tunnels.

The music of George Frederick Handel is heard throughout the film, and the Handel House Museum in London is also featured to indicate the cultural relationship between London and continental Europe that has been in existence for many hundreds of years. The music finally evolves into a haunting piece for solo electric guitar that is a contemporary interpretation of Handel's passacaille suite by acclaimed composer David Lang.

This was the first time that Andrew Cross had produced a film combining image, music and voice and the artist describes the style of the film as 'somewhere between Jean Luc Godard and a British Transport Film documentary'.

In conjunction with this presentation, The Theatre Royal Margate screened Brief Encounter, David Lean's 1945 black and white classic, on Saturday 16 February.

Rag and Bone: New Work by Laura Ford
6 October - 2 December
Wednesday-Sunday, 10.00-16.00
Droit House, Margate
Admission Free

During Autumn 2007, Turner Contemporary presented an exhibition of new sculptures by Laura Ford:

Typically human in scale or slightly larger than life-sized, Ford's socially and politically charged figures exist somewhere between the realms of fantasy and reality, childhood and adulthood.

Ford works with a variety of materials, often using what is to hand, from fabric and found objects, to more traditional materials such as bronze and plaster. For this exhibition, she has created a group of sculptures and drawings based on the children's stories of Beatrix Potter, for the inside and exterior of Droit House in Margate.

Laura Ford has commented on the parallel worlds that exist in our towns and cities between the shiny spaces of consumerism and the homeless and disenfranchised who often exist on the margins of these spaces, living off the discarded materials that, in our throwaway culture are no longer deemed useful.  'This led me to think about the animals that come into the city after dark and our attitude to them as sometimes cute and sentimental and sometimes as vermin.' By casting these characters from Edwardian children's tales in distinctly contemporary, urban situations, the sentimentality of Potter's original stories is overshadowed by a darker undercurrent.

This exhibition was presented in collaboration with Houldsworth Gallery, the Contemporary Art Society and The Economist Group.

Arrivals: Art from the New Europe
Droit House, Stone Pier, Margate
12-30 September
Wednesday-Sunday, 10.00-17.00

View a short film on the project, TURN. to colour, ARRIVALS>MALTA, 2007

Turner Contemporary and Modern Art Oxford  launched the publication Arrivals>Art from the New Europe on Wednesday 12 September 2007, 18.15 at Droit House, Margate, Kent.

The publication marked the end of a two-year collaboration between Turner Contemporary and Modern Art Oxford introducing the work of artists from the expanded European Union.

The series of ten exhibitions provided Turner Contemporary with the opportunity to develop international, national and local networks between artists, critics and audiences. As part of the research for Arrivals>Hungary and Estonia local artists Chris Yates and Peter Hofer joined curators from Turner Contemporary and Modern Art Oxford on research trips, visiting galleries and meeting with artists and curators. Exhibitions such as Arrivals>Slovakia provided a platform for exciting collaborations between members of Margate's local community and artists. Experimenting with new sites such as billboards and the harbour wall has allowed the local community to engage with the artists' work whilst making visible contributions to the area.

The publication covers the ten Arrivals countries: Poland, Slovenia, Lithuania, Latvia, Czech Republic, Cyprus, Slovakia, Estonia, Hungary and Malta and includes images of the artists' works, installation shots from the exhibitions, behind the scenes photographs and specially commissioned essays by gallery directors, curators, critics and art historians from across the EU.

Stage C Designs for Turner Contemporary, by David Chipperfield Architects Ltd
Droit House, Stone Pier, Margate
Open 22 June - 2 September

An opportunity to view the plans that represent the overall design direction of the gallery and respond to the progress to date.  

Generate
Droit House, Stone Pier, Margate
8-27 August 2007
Exhibition open Wednesday-Sunday 10.00-17.00

Famous for its association with JMW Turner and Tracey Emin, Margate once again became the inspiration for artists& and their children.
The 'Generate' project, brings together a group of artists and designers who share a belief that their creative practice as adults can be significantly advanced through the development of a greater understanding of the way in which their children use their creativity as a foundation for their learning.

The families have been developing ways of making art together, both in their studios and on location in the local area. Experimentation in painting, drawing, model making and collage, using a wide range of materials, have enabled the children to give their imaginations free reign, whilst at the same time providing a major source of inspiration for their parents.
All of the artists are now based in East Kent, and are all linked by their commitment to sharing their knowledge of their respective professional arenas through education. With the emergence a new cultural creative agenda in Margate it was felt that it would be appropriate to structure this project around responses to the town.

In addition, parents and children from the local community have taken part in a number of workshops during the summer that are linked to The 'Generate' project. Funded jointly by Turner Contemporary and the University College for the Creative Arts at Canterbury, the workshops have created opportunities to involve new participants in the project, especially parents who may not have been through formal art education. A significant aim has been to reach a new audience; the nature of the content increasing interest from the local community and beyond at the same time as leading to further research into childhood learning and its implications for adult creativity. The workshops were structured in such a way as to provide further research material for the 'Generate' project.

Inspiring Spaces
Droit House, Stone Pier, Margate, Kent
22 June - 22 July

Inspiring Spaces

For phase one which ran from February - July 2007, each organisation teamed up with Year 9 or 10 students (aged 14 to 15) and their teachers. Turner Contemporary worked with King Ethlebert School in Birchington, Canterbury's Museums and Galleries Service with Canterbury High School and Stour Valley Arts with Homewood School in Tenterden.

This exhibition aimed to showcase the ideas, research and discoveries of young people during phase one of the project. An exciting series of meetings, visits and discussions fuelled their interest in architecture, and led them to question how and why the spaces around us are developed. Each of the three groups worked independently and also worked with their peers from the other groups, helping to build their confidence and communication skills.

The project also encouraged young people to take an active role in developments in their area, considering ideas around regeneration and the role that culture has to play in their communities.

The work was showcased alongside an exhibition of  designs for Turner Contemporary by David Chipperfield Architects in the front of Droit House which highlighted the complexity of creating a new building. The architects need to design a building which fulfills the client's aspirations, responds to the particular challenges of the site and can be built within a fixed budget. They also need to take findings from community consultation into account and were pleased to invite the young people from Inspiring Spaces to their studio to find out about their research and ideas. This process has given the young people real insight into what it means to work as an architect.

Turner Contemporary aims to involve more young people in Inspiring Spaces in the coming years, equipping them with the skills, knowledge and confidence to programme and run the young people's gallery when it opens in 2010.

Hats Off to Margate, University College for the Creative Arts
20 April - 10 June
Droit House, Stone Pier, Margate

The third collaboration between Turner Contemporary and University College for the Creative Arts (UCCA) at Canterbury was inspired by Margate's rich and varied architecture.  Students studying for a BTEC National Diploma in Art and Design at UCCA worked in teams to design and make hats inspired by Margate's built environment.

As well as a selection of the final creations, the exhibition featured images taken by Foundation students from the Lens-Based Media pathway at UCCA during a fashion shoot of the participants modelling their work.

As part of their research, students spent two days exploring the architecture of Margate's town and seafront, drawing, taking photographs and collecting objects. The exhibition was the culmination of the project which formed part of the students' assessed coursework. 

The project was been part funded by Aimhigher Kent & Medway and was an element of a research scheme to examine the impact of embedding study and employablitity skills in the art and design curriculum.  As well as having worked in teams to discuss, design and create their headwear, students had to make a formal presentation of their ideas to Turner Contemporary, write a statement to support their work as part of the exhibition and produce a comprehensive evaluation of the whole process. 

Norbert Francis Attard
ARRIVALS>MALTA

9 - 31 March 2007
Margate's Stone Pier

Norbert Francis Attard trained as an architect before focusing on a diverse art practice that incorporates sculpture, photography, video and installation.

During a month long residency in Margate in 2007 Attard developed a new temporary public work specifically for Margate's Stone Pier. Attard's intervention consisted of painting the doors and windows of the old fishermen's stores along the pier with a choice of colours inspired by his own view of Margate, Turner's paint palette and the colours of the spectrum. The economy of this gesture is captivating - redefining the pier as a focal point for the town.

Raul Keller
ARRIVALS>ESTONIA

9 - 31 March 2007
Margate Seafront

Working predominantly with sound and film, Keller's work often involves collaborating with groups of people to create different kinds of sound environments, where sculptures and installations made from found materials become improvisational instruments.

For ARRIVALS>ESTONIA Raul Keller presented a new work commisioned for Margate Seafront. Keller describes the project's concept as being 'musical interaction that explores the aural environment of its surroundings, to reveal, something of the nature of human musical perception and social musical interaction.'

MARGATE RECREATED
An exhibition of work by AS Level Students from the Ursuline College, Westgate-On-Sea

Droit House, Stone Pier, Margate, Kent
Thursday 22 February - Saturday 3 March 2007

AS Level students from the Ursuline Sports College have used mixed media and collage to document the architecture along Margate's well known Marine Terrace in this panoramic display.

Szabolcs KissPal
ARRIVALS>HUNGARY

19 January - 24 February 2007
Substation Project Space Bilton Square, off the High Street

Szabolcs KissPal was born in Romania and lives and works in Budapest. He works predominantly with video to explore the meanings behind images, flipping them, reflecting them, changing positives to negatives, always playing with our perception.

For ARRIVALS>HUNGARY KissPal presented a video installation entitled The Dance, 2001, in which the mechanisms used to make a film are revealed, with film-stars and crew intertwined in a graceful choreography. This work, which used footage from a documentary film made by Peter Gero, was shown in the Romanian Pavilion at the 49th Venice Biennial.

UNITE, IV PROJECTS BY FRENCH ARTISTS
SAADANE AFIF, DELPHONE COINDET, BRUNO PEINADO, JEAN-FRANCOIS MORICEAU & PETRA MRZYK

Old Marks and Spencer Building & Substation Project Space
30 September - 2 December 2006

Paris Calling is an initiative by the French Embassy in London that involves exhibitions at Modern Art Oxford, Tate Modern, The Whitechapel Art Gallery, Camden Arts Centre, the Hayward Gallery and Turner Contemporary to mention but a few. Turner Contemporary invited a number of artists to make major public interventions in Margate for an exhibition titled Unite.

Unite celebrates the work of a new generation of French artists. The invited artists were all well known in France where each have held solo exhibitions at prestigious institutions but have had little or no exposure in Britain. Each utilise a pop aesthetic in various ways and to varying degrees. Their cartoon imagery, primary colour, funfair forms and rock and roll complement Margate's gaudy seaside signage. However they should not be seen as a distinct group as they are representative of an emerging cultural pluralism. Culturally, France was once considered to be one of the most centralised nations and yet the artists participating in Unite live and work in different French towns and cities and abroad.

Saadane Afif (b. 1970) lives and works in Berlin and Paris. Solo exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2005); Museum Folkwang, Essen (2004). Represented by Galerie Michel Rein (Paris).

Delphine Coindet (b. 1969) lives and works in Paris. Solo exhibitions at CREDAC, Ivry-sur-Seine (2004); Synagogue de Delme; Le Hall de L'Ecole National des Beaux Arts de Lyon (both 2003). Represented by Galerie Laurent Godin (Paris), Galerie Evergreene (Geneva).

Jean-Francois Moriceau (b. 1974) and Petra Mrzyk (b. 1973) live and work together in Chatillon-sur-Indre. Solo exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2005); MAMCO, Geneva; the Villa Arson, Nice (both 2004). Represented by Air de Paris (Paris), Ritter/Zamet (London), Galerie Rodolphe Janssen (Brussels).

Bruno Peinado (b. 1970) lives and works in Brittany and New York. Solo exhibitions at the Swiss Institute, New York; the Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (both 2005). Represented by Galerie Herve Loevenbruck (Paris), Galeria ADN (Barcelona), Parker's Box (New York), Galleria Continua (San Gimignano).

BOB AND ROBERTA SMITH
SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO? DILEMMAS FOR MARGATE

Margate High Street
29 September - 28 November 2006

Bob and Roberta Smith believes in art and democracy and thinks 'it is with the small 'p' politics that you can effect change as an artist'. His work offers a critique of artists and the art world and references art history as well as popular culture.

Hand painted banners spanning Margate's High Street, Smith posed a series of short direct questions such as 'Love or Hate?', 'In or Out?', 'Kent or Cornwall?' Devoid of a wider context, these questions could be interpreted in a number of different ways - the balance shifting and changing depending on one's mood. The title of the series is derived from the punk band, The Clash's hit of the same name. In many ways the title of Smith's series of works acts as a metaphor for Margate's current situation, poised as it is on the verge of development and regeneration and struggling to come to terms with the creation of a new identity.

Smith's use of colour in the banners sought to highlight the questions but also brightened up the street scene. Working with local signwriters, Smith gave precise instructions about the colours to be used and also the typeface.

Smith's work including painting, sculpture, installation and performance often contains a humorous and immediate message. He makes use of found and everyday materials and appropriates styles from other areas of daily life. Words and short slogans often feature in his practice and may sometimes contain mistakes to create puns and misunderstandings. The hand-crafted style of much of his work combined with its direct message often belies the complexity of his idea.

Smith has shown extensively in the UK and abroad and his work is represented in a number of public collections. Earlier this year, he worked with Peer on a project in East London to encourage people to 'Shop Local'.

MARGATE GOES POP! 

Saturday 30 September - Sunday 15 October
Droit House, Margate Harbour

This summer the community took part in artist-led workshops as part of Turner Contemporary's Unite programme. Unite, IV Projects by French Artists is part of Paris Calling, an initiative by the French Embassy in London presenting a season of contemporary art from France.

The workshops were run for all ages and included printing and soft sculpture for young people and felt making for young children and adults. The participants were able to try out these new techniques and develop new pieces of work.

The participants drew on some of the ideas explored in Unite, including scale, colour and contemporary culture. Artists including Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein were also refered to. The final work, presented in this exhibition, brings together this Pop Art style with Margate's funfair forms and bright seaside surroundings.

NIKOS CHARALAMBIDIS
ARRIVALS>CYRPUS

Saturday 29 July - Sunday 10 September 2006
Substation Project Space, 6 Bilton Square

Charalambidis' work draws strongly on his experiences as a child when him and his family were forced to leave their home in the north of Cyprus by the invasion of the Turkish army. The artist has never returned to his home but uses his experiences as a refugee as inspiration for much of his work.

Charalambidis' practice is characterised by complex sculptural installations that are created as a series of platforms to host other activities that encourage audiences to engage with the idea of contested territories and with one another.

The exhibition, in Substation Project Space, comprised a replica of a monument designed by German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1926 and destroyed by the Nazis in 1930, inside which is an improvised shelter inspired by Margate's Shell Grotto and several artists' films.

JEREMY DELLER AND ALAN KANE
STEAM POWERED INTERNET MACHINE

July and August 2006
Various venues

Turner Contemporary worked with acclaimed artists Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane to develop a Steam Powered Internet Machine.

Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane's practice is based within one of 'social sculpture' - creating situations as much as objects - to engage with broad and diverse audiences and traditions.

Steam Powered Internet Machine made a literal link between the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s and the current Information Age within a working model by combining the chief engines of both the steam engine and the computer.

The work can, in theme if not form, also perhaps be seen to follow Britain's favourite painting: JMW Turner's The Fighting Temeraire (1839) that depicts sail power being superceded by steam.

Deller and Kane's work for Turner Contemporary was be presented in specific outdoor locations in Kent with partner organisations on weekends in July and August 2006 including Chatham Historic Dockyard, the Kent County Show and  Gallery IOTA, Ramsgate.

CULTURAL AMBASSADORS: PART TWO

Thursday 29 June - Sunday 23 July 2006
Droit House, Margate Harbour

Cultural Ambassadors is a partnership project between Turner Contemporary, University College for the Creative Arts at Canterbury, Epsom, Farnham, Maidstone and Rochester and Aimhigher Kent & Medway. The project aims to ensure that people living in the most deprived areas of East Kent benefit directly from learning and regeneration opportunities.

The accredited training programme offers a creative and inspiring means for learners to find out more about routes into the creative and cultural industries, as well as participating in the development and running of Turner Contemporary.

The participants, recruited with the help of educational and social service agencies across Kent, are mentored by artists and educationalists linked to the University College for the Creative Arts and Turner Contemporary.

Cultural Ambassadors: Part Two was an exhibition of the work that partipants produced whilst taking part in the scheme. The exhibition was be opened by Roger Gale MP.

SCREENING: MARGATE IN A MINUTE

Wednesday 24 May 2006, 6-8pm
Substation Project Space, Margate High Street

First year students studying BTEC National Diploma Art & Design at the University College for the Creative Arts were asked to work in teams to create a one-minute animation film as a response to Margate. The project also formed part of their assessed coursework.

As part of their research, students spent two days Margate's town and seafront, drawing, taking photographs, recording sounds and collecting objects. They talked to Karen Eslea, Audience Development Officer at Turner Contemporary, about the regeneration of Margate and viewed a short film by Latvian artist Girts Korps as part of the series ARRIVALS>NEW ART FROM THE EU.

Part-funded by the Learning an