The World Turned Upside Down - Buster Keaton, Sculpture and the Absurd

Fri 4 Oct – Sat 14 Dec 2013

Curated by Simon Faithfull and Ben Roberts, ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ places the work of over twenty international artists working in film, sculpture, installation art and performance in direct relation to Buster Keaton’s films to track a lineage from the melancholic and at times anarchic comedy of Keaton to the dry wit of conceptual practice.

By examining Keaton’s approach to art through making – the processes of failure, risk and repetition – the exhibition also establishes a nuanced presentation of the developmental relationship between slapstick film, sculpture and performance and highlights parallels within modern and contemporary sculptural practice which continue to resonate today.

The exhibition features work of conceptual artists working in film, photography, sculpture, installation art and performance; by historical and contemporary, established and emerging artists. These include Bas Jan Ader, Angus Braithwaite and Fred Lindberg, Marcel Broodthaers, Alexandre da Cunha, Simon Faithfull, Peter Fischli David Weiss, Brian Griffiths, Emma Hart, Jeppe Hein, Sofia Hulten, William Hunt, Tehching Hsieh, Gordon Matta-Clark, Hayley Newman, Miranda Pennell, Ruth Proctor, Roman Signer, William Wegman, Richard Wentworth, Richard Wilson, John Wood and Paul Harrison, Ben Woodeson, Erwin Wurm.

‘The World Turned Upside Down’ is a Mead Gallery exhibition which has been supported by The Henry Moore Foundation.

Katie Paterson: In Another Time

Thu 2 May – Sat 22 Jun 2013

“The word ‘poetic’ is a treacherous one to apply to any artist, but Paterson’s is a poetry of knowledge and mystery, cosmicomically rendered.” Brian Dillon, The Guardian, 6 April 2012

From transmitting Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata to the moon and back, to providing a live phone line to a melting glacier, much of Katie Paterson’s work uses everyday technologies – from doorbells to record players – to make a connection between humanity and vast, intangible natural phenomena. Strangely intimate and inherently romantic, her work provides a poetic examination of the origins of time and space which is both understated and monumental.

Curated by Filipa Oliveira and Aldo Rinaldi, Katie Paterson: In Another Time is the largest, most comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work in the UK to date. Co-produced by the Mead Gallery with Fundacao Leal Rios, Lisbon; La Casa Encendida, Madrid and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, the exhibition will be adapted at each gallery to present individual, nuanced interpretations of Paterson’s practice.

Works presented at the Mead Gallery include letters of condolence for the death of stars, an archive of darkness from throughout the universe, and light bulbs specially created to simulate moonlight.

Artists' Plans for Sustainability

Joseph Beuys, Carole Collet, N55, Nils Norman, Lucy + Jorge Orta, Marjetica Potrc
Thu 2 May – Sat 22 Jun 2013

In just a few more decades, the world’s population will exceed 9 billion, 70% of which will live in cities. This exhibition brings together artists’ plans for innovative and radical solutions to a more sustainable and resilient way of life.

One of the first artists to examine sustainability was Joseph Beuys, a founder of the green movement in Germany in the 1960s. His famous multiple, Capri Battery, is here joined by the work of contemporary artists who propose a range of solutions to issues such as the waste and exploitation inherent in a textile industry founded in the Industrial Revolution, the hostility of the built environment to more sustainable behaviours, political divisions, food waste and the social and economic problems of Venice, a city faced with a binary catastrophe of rising sea levels and sinking land.

Visitors will be able to transfer some of the ideas to their own communities and homes and see how the Mead Gallery itself has endeavoured to limit the carbon impact of making this exhibition.

Workplace

Adel Abidin, Emily Jacir, João Onofre, Superflex, Pilvi Takala, John Wood and Paul Harrison
Wed 9 Jan – Sat 9 Mar 2013

From school to adulthood, we spend a huge amount of our lives in the workplace. In it, life-long friendships and romances are formed; it provides the arena in which power games and gender politics are played out at a macro and micro level; it is the setting for innovation and life-changing research as well as mind-numbing repetition and ennui.

This exhibition explores the workplace through contemporary art as a universal experience, one which cuts across political and geographical boundaries as well as distinctions between types of industry, including the production of art. Through film works selected from across the globe by leading contemporary artists, this exhibition explores the frustration and alienation of a contemporary workforce removed from the true seats of power, but also the often humorous strategies for survival and expressions of individualism that prevail.

BECOME PART OF THE ART

During Workplace, the Mead Gallery is encouraging visitors to use the gallery as their own workplace, to have working (and non-working) lunches in there and to make use of desks and meeting spaces that may be booked in advance for free. This is a unique opportunity to become part of the art and escape your own workplace for a while.