BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art BALTIC Archive

Volcanoes and Utopias: an audio performance by artists Kate Liston and Tess Denman-Cleaver

Kate Liston and Tess Denman-Cleaver's podcast is a poetic performance on volcanoes, parliamentary architecture, Norse mythology, Quaker design, pease pudding, the current lack of gossip, and the function of utopias.

Volcanoes and Utopias is a collection of work-in-progress extracts from Town Hall Meeting of the Air, which will be presented at Baltic 39 in January 2021. Town Hall Meeting of the Air considers the poetics of civic gathering and invites reimaginings of public political discourse. The work is framed here within a fictionalised account of the artists' attempt to design and plan for future public gatherings whilst in lockdown.

Kate Liston works with moving image, installation, and writing that is sometimes performed. Notable projects include Oh-Link Zone, Black Tower Projects, London (2018); Feel After the New See, The Hatton Gallery, Newcastle (2018); The Scientific Method, The Tetley Gallery, Leeds (2016); Feminism and the Body in Performance, MART Gallery, Dublin (2015); They Used to Call it the Moon, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2014). She is a lecturer in Fine Art at Northumbria University. 
 
Tess Denman-Cleaver’s work spans performance, writing, installation and workshops. She has recently shown work at Tate Britain, Hatton Gallery, Turner Contemporary, Tate St Ives, M_HKA Gallery Antwerp, Paul Mellon Centre, Audiograft Festival and Wilkinson Gallery. Tess was Artist in Residence at the Sonic Arts Research Unit (Oxford) between 2017-19 and is Producer, Artists' Moving Image at Tyneside Cinema. 

Image: Jerome F. Hamlin, Seasons of Fire: Iceland's Pompeii (still) 1974. Accessed via YouTube

In this BALTIC Podcast Dr Paolo Fortis, Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Durham University, explores Abel Rodriguez’ exhibition.

Paolo Fortis is a social anthropologist with research interests in the relations between art, ontology, notions of the person and alterity among Central and South American indigenous peoples.

You can view the exhibition at BALTIC, online here: http://balticplus.uk/abel-rodriguez-e785/

You can read a transcript of the podcast here: http://balticplus.uk/baltic-podcast-dr-paolo-fortis-explores-abel-rodriguez-exhibition-transcript-c33880/

In this BALTIC Podcast exploring BALTIC exhibitions, Alessandro Boussalem explores Imran Perretta's The Destructors.

Alessandro Boussalem is a human geographer. His research is on the intersections of gender, sexualities, and race/ethnicities in contemporary Europe. He is a PhD candidate at Newcastle University with a project on the experiences of LGBTQ people from a Muslim background living in Brussels, Belgium.

You can view The Destructors online here while BALTIC is currently closed: http://balticplus.uk/the-destructors-imran-perretta-c33847/

In this BALTIC Podcast exploring BALTIC exhibitions and research, art historian Victoria Horne examines Judy Chicago, specifically Femininity, Art and the Home.

Horne discusses the role of labour within the home, which was often at the fore of questioning within second-wave feminism and the Women's Art Movement. Horne also highlights the amplified and indistinct roles between domestic and paid labour that many may find present in their homes currently, while including reference to historical projects such as Womanhouse, ​that focused on these enquiries.

Suggested further reading:

- Castlemilk Womanhouse archive on Glasgow Women’s Library website: https://womenslibrary.org.uk/discover-our-projects/house-work-castle-milk-woman-house/
- Hannah Hamblin, 'Los Angeles, 1972/Glasgow, 1990: A Report on Castlemilk Womanhouse' in Feminism and Art History Now, London: IB Tauris, 2017.
- Amy Tobin, A Woman's Place, London: Raven Row. http://www.ravenrow.org/texts/75/
- Camilla M Rostvik, 'Blood Works: Judy Chicago and Menstrual Art', Oxford Art Journal, 42.3 (2019): 335-353.

Victoria Horne is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Arts at Northumbria University Newcastle, specialising in the cultural and intellectual history of Anglo-American feminism. ​

Animalesque with Daisy Hildyard
Wednesday 1 April 2020

Across three 5-minute sessions, writer Daisy Hildyard offers readings from selected texts in response to the exhibition Animalesque / Art Across Species and Beings at BALTIC. These extracts resonate with the exhibition by inviting us to re-think human's position in the world, their relationship to the natural world and to the various complex ecologies that bond beings together.

Images here: http://balticplus.uk/animalesque-exhibition-images-c33852/

1. From Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, ​published 2015
Reflecting on the exhibition.

2. From Svetlana Alexievich, Chernobyl Prayer, published 1997
In response to Pierre Huyghe, Human Mask (2014).

3. From Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being​, published 2016
Reflecting on Ho Tzu Nyen, 2 or 3 Tigers (2015); Pia Arke with Anders Jorgensen, Tupilakosaurus (1999) and Britta Marakatt-Labba, Borrhål (2018), Mellan två världar, Snömodd (2019).

Daisy Hildyard is the author of Hunters in the Snow (Jonathan Cape, 2013), a novel about farmers, and The Second Body (2017) and an essay about humans and animals in the Anthropocene.

BALTIC Podcasts

Join us every fortnight for a series of podcasts exploring BALTIC exhibitions led by special guests.

In these, artists, writers, academics and other guests offer short talks in their field of expertise to further explore the concepts and themes of our programme.

Animalesque with Daisy Hildyard
Wednesday 1 April 2020

Across three 5-minute sessions, writer Daisy Hildyard offers readings from selected texts in response to the exhibition Animalesque / Art Across Species and Beings at BALTIC. These extracts resonate with the exhibition by inviting us to re-think human's position in the world, their relationship to the natural world and to the various complex ecologies that bond beings together.

Images here: http://balticplus.uk/animalesque-exhibition-images-c33852/

1. From Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, ​published 2015
Reflecting on the exhibition.

2. From Svetlana Alexievich, Chernobyl Prayer, published 1997
In response to Pierre Huyghe, Human Mask (2014).

3. From Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being​, published 2016
Reflecting on Ho Tzu Nyen, 2 or 3 Tigers (2015); Pia Arke with Anders Jorgensen, Tupilakosaurus (1999) and Britta Marakatt-Labba, Borrhål (2018), Mellan två världar, Snömodd (2019).

Daisy Hildyard is the author of Hunters in the Snow (Jonathan Cape, 2013), a novel about farmers, and The Second Body (2017) and an essay about humans and animals in the Anthropocene.

BALTIC Podcasts

Join us every fortnight for a series of podcasts exploring BALTIC exhibitions led by special guests.

In these, artists, writers, academics and other guests offer short talks in their field of expertise to further explore the concepts and themes of our programme.