| Nottingham Contemporary | |
|---|---|
| Nottingham Contemporary - geograph-1825342.jpg | |
| General information | |
| Town or city | Nottingham |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Completed | 2009 |
| Design and construction | |
| Architect | Caruso St John Architects |
Nottingham Contemporary (formerly known as the Centre for Contemporary Art Nottingham (CCAN)) is a contemporary art centre in the Lace Market area of Nottingham.[1] To celebrate the area's history of lace manufacture, the cladding of the building is embossed with a traditional Nottingham lace pattern.
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Nottingham Contemporary opened on November 14, 2009 with an exhibition of early works by David Hockney and current works by Los Angeles based artist Frances Stark, some from the Tate collection. Nottingham Contemporary is one of the largest contemporary art spaces in the UK, with four galleries, an auditorium, an education space, a study centre, a café-bar and a shop.
It organizes four to five major exhibitions a year, bringing the work of the world’s contemporary artists to Nottingham. The ideas raised by the exhibitions are explored in educational activity for all ages.
Nottingham Contemporary is on the oldest site in Nottingham, Garners Hill, it once housed cave dwellings, a Saxon fort and a medieval town hall – before the Victorians swept all aside for a railway line. It is in the historic Lace Market, a showcase for a world famous fabric when technical innovation gave lace a mass market. A revolutionary concrete casting technique, carried out in Nottingham, has embossed a lace design into the building’s panels, some up to 11 metres high.
Nottingham Contemporary opened with a major exhibition by David Hockney and the first solo show of LA based artist, Frances Stark. The David Hockney exhibition will bring together over 60 works from 1960–1970, for the first time in nearly 40 years.
Held 31 October 2009 – 14 December 2009
At the Police Station, Galleries of Justice, Nottingham
Vito Acconci, Shaina Anand, Atelier Van Lieshout, Angela Bulloch, Chris Evans, Harun Farocki, Dan Graham, Group d’Information sur les Prisons, Mona Hatoum, Thomas Hirschhorn, Evan Holloway, Ashley Hunt, Elie Kagan, Multiplicity, Bruce Nauman, Tatiana Trouvé, Artur Zmijewski
Sixteen international artists became “inmates” in The Impossible Prison, an exhibition in an atmospheric abandoned police station. Inspired by Discipline and Punish, the extraordinarily influential book by the philosopher Michel Foucault, the exhibition explored power, control and surveillance, increasingly a part of all our lives.
The police station, which closed following the 1984 Miner’s Strike, is part of the Galleries of Justice, Nottingham’s national crime museum. Built into the cliff that runs through the city, it houses Her Majesty’s Prison Service collection. With five subterranean floors of cells, courts and dungeons that date from 1375, it is a literal archaeology of punishment that echoes Foucault’s own historical and ‘archaeological’ approach.
The Impossible Prison is the final instalment of Histories of the Present, Nottingham Contemporary’s year-long programme of exhibitions and events in historical sites in and around our home city before moving into our new building next year. Foucault has been an underlying inspiration. With The Impossible Prison, his influence becomes explicit.
Some artists specifically address prison itself (Hunt, Farocki, Zmijewski). In addition, three legendary figures of Conceptual art in the late 1960s and 1970s (Acconci, Graham, Nauman) explore the relationship of the camera to the body.
Foucault, in a communiqué on behalf of Group d’Information sur les Prisons wrote, “Prison these days begins long before the prison gates”. He closes Discipline and Punish (1975) with a vision of a society where bodies were forcibly redistributed and minds were moulded. Resistance was minimised and productivity maximised through new surveillance techniques.
The Impossible Prison evokes the contemporary ‘carceral’, as Foucault called it, on both micro- and geopolitical scales - from the ‘architecture of occupation’ in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (Multiplicity; Weizman), to the ubiquitous CCTV cameras on our city streets (Anand); from the exercise of disciplinary techniques in the modern office (Hatchuel and Starkey), to the privatization and expansion of America’s ‘prison industrial complex’ (Hunt) whose population has reached a staggering two million. The range of concerns reflects artists who come from or live in Palestine, Mumbai, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, Beirut, Brussels, Rotterdam, Berlin, Warsaw and Milan.