Throbbing strobe lights, droning sound, optical after-images – using a multitude of guitar pedals to control 16mm film projections, Bruce McClure orchestrated his trademark manipulations of sound and film for his two-day installation at the AV Festival. In the new, two-part performance at BALTIC, he engineered a truly sensory overload, even more heightened in his evening performance, Build My Gallows High.
McClure’s installation was part of a host of activity on the festival’s opening weekend (1-2 March), and throughout this month, venues across the North East are hosting exhibitions, film screenings and live performances. Now in its sixth incarnation, this year the biennial festival boasts an impressive 11 exhibitions, 36 film screenings, 10 concerts and 11 new commissions by internationally and nationally renowned artists, all curated around the central theme of ‘extraction’.
‘Extraction’ responds to the region’s rich heritage and potent connection with industry, but also incorporates a global reflection of the word. It takes into account both an understanding of the natural geology of the Earth and man’s exploitation of it, the subjective approach of artists and performers, and the objective eye of the documentarian, historian and scientist.
Sonic landscape
At Globe Gallery, Akio Suzuki’s na ge ka ke (meaning ‘to cast, to throw’) brings together natural forms into sculptural elements that can also be ‘played’ in the manner of musical instruments. His work is aesthetically minimal but harmoniously balanced, and with the potential for sound – should you ask the gallery assistants for a demonstration. In a direct connection with the city, Suzuki has also created anoto-date, a journey through Newcastle where you can follow ‘ear’ symbols and pause to listen to the surrounding sonic landscape.
Susan Stenger’s Sound Strata of Coastal Northumberland at The Laing is also sonically driven. The installation is based on a Victorian cross-sectional diagram of geological formations from the River Tyne to the borders, which Stenger has translated into a score for brass, Northumberland and Highland pipes. It is one of the most successful works of the festival, traversing time and site and extracting a new and abstract experience from an existing historical document. Also at The Laing, Jessica Warboys exhibits paintings forged with the help of the sea, and a new film work shot on the shifting sands of Europe’s biggest dune, with a composed soundtrack by Morten Norbye Halvorsen, performed live over the opening weekend.
For the first time in the festival’s history, two group exhibitions – titled Stone and Metal – underpin the visual art programme, reducing ‘extraction’ back to its base natural elements. At Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland, Stone begins with a selection of historical artifacts by way of Thomas Sopwith’s Geological Models. These wooden visualisations of rock strata are beautifully abstract and their polished appearance combines well with Gabriel Orozco’s Boulder Hand, in which a stone is rhythmically handled by the artist in an action that mimics the erosion of a rock via natural water movement.
Highlights of this exhibition come via the seductive simplicity of Thiago Rocha Pitta’s film of honey gliding over a rock surface, and the vastness and clarity of the landscapes versus the subtlety of human gesture captured in Yuri Ancarani’s Il Capo. In the Project Space, Salvatore Arancio’s Cathedral focuses on Fingal’s Cave on the uninhabited Scottish island of Staffa. A reverberating synth soundtrack, colour filters and the ethereal play of light makes for a sci-fi-esque observation of the naturally created rock forms in this sea cave, overlaid with diagrammatic drawings.
Economic impact
At mima in Middlesbrough, Metal responds in a less material sense, alluding more to its economic impact and effect as an agent of financial global power. The location of the show directly links in with the area’s rapid industrial growth that had steel at its core, although the exhibition certainly takes in more of a global view. Simon Starling’s Gold Toned Okapi, for example, can be subtly traced back to the Congolese gold trade, via the gold toner used to fix his contemporary reproductions of an historical image.
Anja Kirschner & David Panos’ Ultimate Substance was filmed at the silver mining district of Lavriotiki, and through a bamboozling series of choreographed movement, abstract imagery and sculptural elements it references the earliest Ancient Greek coinage originating from the area. Hito Steyerl fuses the primal and contemporary, using the traditional tools of hammer and chisel to strike the surface of an LCD screen.
The most literal translations of the festival theme come via Anna Molska’s film The Weavers, aptly installed at the Mining Institute, Lara Almarcegui’s Last Coal Extraction in Newcastle at the NewBridge Project, dominated by the sculptural installation of a mineshaft cover, and the installation of the epic 14-hour film work Crude Oil by Chinese film-maker Wang Bing at the Stephenson Works. Wang Bing’s documentary of a worker’s day forms the crux of the AV film screenings, which steps up this coming weekend (7-9 March) with a Post-Colonial film programme at the Tyneside and Star & Shadow cinemas.
AV Festival has yet again stretched its chosen theme both conceptually and geographically, and the sheer volume of work is both its strength and weakness. Whatever your field of interest, bury deep into the Extraction programme and you’re sure to find some gems that will remind you that, in addition to the industrial action perpetrated by drills, mines and technologies, art too is a tool of extraction.
AV Festival: Extraction continues until 31 March. www.avfestival.co.uk
