kiki smith :

'A dream is like and animal, but an unknown one, and you cannot see all its limbs. Interpretation is a cage, but the dream can never be found inside.' ( Elias Canetti ). Quotation taken from start of book on Kiki Smith entitled, 'All Creatures Great and Small'.
The introduction goes on to say " Kiki Smith's works construct an image of the world that unites the fragmented experience of our time. It is an image that is permeated by the utopia of a harmonic whole but where the wounds and fractures of human existence and the desires and contradictions of our time remain, become tangible even."

Mark Wallinger curates the Russian Linesman

One of Britain’s most intellectually curious, socially committed and unpredictable artists, Mark Wallinger has often dwelt on the interface between two realms. The mundane and transcendent meet in Ecce Homo, his anti-heroic sculpture for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, in which an ordinary man becomes a life-sized Christ. State Britain, a painstaking recreation of Brian Haw’s protest running through the Tate’s Duveen Sculpture galleries is intersected by the circle defining the limits of freedom of political protest in the vicinity of Parliament.

For the 2007 Münster Sculpture Project, Wallinger has created his own ZONE appropriating the delineation employed in an Eruv, the area within which observant Jews are permitted to behave as if at home (carrying or pushing objects on the Sabbath, for example): a nylon cord, 4.5 metres above ground and 4,800 metres long encircles the centre of the city.

Mark Wallinger’s exhibition for Hayward Touring will be concerned with the liminal, a concept with physical, political, metaphysical meanings. It signifies the dissolution of boundaries and fixed identities, and is associated with rituals and rites of passage, transitional states characterized by ambiguity, openness and indeterminacy, during which the normal limits to thought, self-understanding and behaviour are relaxed, opening the way to something new. Where necessary the artist will show his own work, along with objects that fit the manifesto - whether they are aesthetic, scientific, political and social or anthropological.

‘The Russian Linesman’, Tofik Bakhramov, is famous (or infamous) for a controversial ruling in the 1966 World Cup Final between the home team England and West Germany, which had just eliminated the Soviet Union team in the semi-finals. His ruling gave the goal to England, a 3-2 lead in extra time, perhaps the most debated decision in all of football. In England, it is commonly believed that the decision was correct, while in Germany it is commonly said that the linesman made a mistake. Bakhramov was in fact from Azerbijan.

TOUR INFORMATION



Exhibition opens at the Hayward Gallery, London in February then tours to -

16 May - 28 June 2009
Art Gallery, Leeds

18 July - 20 September 2009
Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea

For information on this exhibition please contact Alison Maun alison.maun@southbankcentre.co.uk

Image credit: Renato Giuseppe Bertelli, Profilo Continuo (Testa di Mussolini) [Continuous Profile (Head of Mussolini)], 1933. Courtesy The Imperial War Museum © The estate of Renato Giuseppe Bertelli