A downloadable map may very well serve as a useful coda for the latest CCA Derry-Londonderry exhibition Contours of the Common.
Taking in both Protestant and Catholic areas, it provides an alternative path through the city, pinpointing the commissioned pieces alongside permanent public artworks that make up the daily experience of the city. It also contains written histories which act as a useful reminder of the contested territories and complex narrative within which an exhibition like this sits.
A collaboration with PLACE, the Architecture and Built Environment Centre, Belfast, and the University of Ulster School of Architecture and Design, the aim is to critically examine that which connects and concerns anyone and everyone – processes and problems, situations and solutions.
Responding to this curatorial framework, the participating artists – Lara Almarcegui, Amy Balkin, Andrew Dodds, Andrea Geyer, Seamus Nolan, Sean Lynch, and Johan Tirén – have chosen to focus on ‘resources that are owned collectively or shared among communities’, to produce works that range from subtle and poignant interventions into the aural environment of the city, to large-scale advertising billboards containing views of desert landscapes.
Discussing how the artworks have been sited, Johan Lundh, co-director at CCA, explained that, for practical reasons, many of the pieces are on the ‘cityside’, where both CCA’s main gallery and satellite space is situated: “A lot of them are also within the historic city walls, which in some way has become a somewhat neutral [space] in the last decade, since very few people actually live within the walls.”
The area is the city’s main shopping and leisure district and, said Lundh, is frequented by both communities: “It’s also where most cultural organisations are located these days.”
In 2013, Derry-Londonderry will take up the mantle of the inaugural UK City of Culture. As part of the celebrations, the city also plays host to the Turner Prize, though the venue for this has yet to be decided.
Contours of the Common runs to 28 October, 2012. cca-derry-londonderry.org
