VISUAL ART | Previews & Reviews
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MIXED MEDIA NAVID NUUR: RENDERENDER Dundee Contemporary Arts, Sat 29 Mar–Sun 15 Jun
Permanent transience is a way of being for Navid Nuur, the Dutch / Iranian auteur. Here, he takes over DCA with an epic array of work that co-opts the temporary detritus of everyday life into a series of constructions that provoke as much as they play with the material to hand.
In what he describes as an ongoing set of
‘interimodules’ (a conflation of ‘interim’ and ‘modules’ that defines a state of impermanence beyond easy pigeon-holing), Nuur uses wheelie bins, water coolers, emergency blankets and slide projectors to make deeply personal expressions, riven from a very private world. ‘The art world is the only place where people listen to someone’s personal and private language,’ he says. For his second UK solo show, and his largest in a public space, Nuur presents key works, including When doubt turns into destiny (a surveillance video in which he attempts to evade detection in Berlin’s avenues and alleyways) and City Soil (a 1100-litre street bin filled with the ashes of the rubbish created in the making of the show). These will sit alongside new work inspired by both Dundee and the DCA site itself as a former hub for the local skateboarding community, and using found film footage.
As a former skater who came out of the graffiti art
scene, Nuur recognises the world all too well. ‘I wasn’t that good,’ he reflects, ‘but I loved it so much that I didn’t finish high school because of it. It wasn’t just about the tricks, but more about being part of a community. Back in the 90s, no-one would support it, but when you were skating, you saw the world from a different angle. Not just the architecture, but yourself as well.’ (Neil Cooper)
GROUP SHOW U ALWAYS KNOW THE RIGHT THING TO SAY Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sun 23 Mar. ●●●●●
This latest group show from the home of Edinburgh’s finest emerging art talent, the Embassy, promises that it’s ‘about friendship in relationship to networks, in real time and virtual spaces’. How that translates in real terms is often nebulous, with Jenna Bliss’ film portmanteau Bordering Homesickness offering perhaps the clearest indication. Loaded with self-referential lived experience, it seems to document – mostly in silence or ambient sound – her immediate surroundings of student flats and parties. It’s engaging but unfocused.
In fact, ‘unfocused’ is a charge that can be levelled at many of the works here, like Ash Reid’s provocative I didn’t shave my pussy for this?, a metal grate hung with items which gesture vaguely at a feminist context. Bernie Reid’s rugs, laser printed onto a canvas and the gallery floor, play convincingly with perceptions and expectations, while Darren Rhymes’ piece – a reproduction of the Channel 4 logo alongside a text he read on the opening night – is shorn somewhat of context. If only Goth Tech’s Happy Hour, a drink-strewn table and accompanying video, had been in operation when we visited. (David Pollock)
104 THE LIST 20 Mar–17 Apr 2014
PRINTMAKING DOMINIC SNYDER Glasgow Print Studio, Fri 4–Sun 27 Apr
As the legendary choreographer Merce Cunningham said: ‘Dance is an art in space and time. The object of the dancer is to obliterate that.’ Dominic Snyder’s work takes movement, dance and space as a stimulus, and here Glasgow Print Studio presents his visual response to movement and dance in the form of prints and drawings, some of which are presented as a digital sketchbook. Responding directly to live dancers through
drawing, Synder translates the drawn movements to produce drypoint and screenprints, as well as wire sculptures. ‘For me it’s about finding a way to capture movement using line and shape,’ says Snyder, whose previous printmaking work used jazz as a source of imagery and association, and although the medium has not changed, his interpretation of movement has. ‘This work is much looser and freer, less sculptured and solid, with more emphasis on rhythm and flow,’ he says.
The Snyver Project, founded two years ago with creative partner and dancer Penny Chivas, is the ongoing performative project from which the work on display has grown. The project has encouraged different media to influence one another, in a performative and unconstrained way. (Kirsty Neale)
PAINTING PAUL MARTIN: WHEN MEN AND MOUNTAINS MEET Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh, Fri 4–Sat 19 Apr
Borrowing its title from a William Blake poem, Dovecot Studios presents When Men and Mountains Meet, the current body of work by artist Paul Martin. Living and working in Musselburgh, Martin took these words as a departure point for exploration and interpretation, and over the past six years has created what he describes as the ‘most ambitious and important’ works of his career. More than 80 large-scale drawings and paintings
explore nature and our own human physical and spiritual relationship with it. Textured rhythmic surfaces, built-up layers and organic colour palettes evoke parallels with the environment and nature’s cyclical changes.
‘The work is in the layers,’ says Martin, ‘never
extinguished, always there underneath.’ Departing from previous figurative work, these pieces focus less on narrative, moving instead towards an abstract intuitive feeling or reaction to nature. Martin utilises a diverse range of organic materials such as ash, beeswax, charcoal powders and bitumen in his creative process. ‘I have always related the materiality of a work and the meaning,’ he says. ‘The material is in direct relationship to the substance of the piece.’ (Kirsty Neale)