Look Again Festival is a celebration of the very best contemporary visual art and design, showcasing both local and internationally acclaimed talent in Aberdeen. Today, organisers announced details of the 5th Look Again Festival programme, extending an open invitation to residents and visitors to rediscover Aberdeen through fresh eyes and the most exciting, creative and innovative visual arts and design.
Through the prism of ‘New Narratives’ the 2019 programme seeks to re-activate vacant or underused areas of the city, supporting creative activity and discourse through ambitious, thought-provoking visual art and design installations and events. Born in 2015 out of a need to celebrate, showcase and support the incredible visual art and artists in the region, Look Again is now part of Gray’s School of Art at Robert Gordon University (RGU) and is firmly established as a year-round presence. Look Again works with the sector and city partners to cultivate the creative industries in Aberdeen, proving the value of creativity and culture to the city, spotlighting and supporting creative talent emerging from the region, and harnessing national and international connections.
Highlights of the 2019 programme include a series of newly commissioned major site-specific installations from two of the of the UK’s most exciting contemporary artists John Walter and Morag Myerscough. Each artist has their own personal connection to the North East of Scotland, connections which are explored in their work whilst responding to historic sites in Aberdeen’s city centre to reanimate and transform.
Marischal Quad Commission: John Walter – The Fourth Wall
Acclaimed British multimedia artist, John Walter has been commissioned to engage with Marischal Quad. This is an extraordinary architectural jewel in central Aberdeen, the second largest granite building in the world. The quad is a public space, yet underused.
Walter will animate the space with The Fourth Wall, a new Virtual Reality experience that tears up the rulebook about immersive space by applying techniques from collage and painting onto gaming and animation. Walter takes his Maximalist aesthetic to new levels of complexity and compression in a new work commissioned for the quad of Marischal College.
Participants will become performers as they don customised headsets for the augmented reality experience, their reaction to the VR creating an unwitting spectacle in real space for the waiting audience.
Castlegate Commission: Morag Myerscough – Love at First Sight
One of the UK’s most prolific designers Morag Myserscough will be working around the city’s historic Mercat Cross, thought to be the best example of its type in Scotland. For Love at First Sight, the artist bridges design and art, using her signature graphic style to create a free-standing structure that will reference the history of the space as a meeting point. Myserscough draws from her family history, and the moment that her parents fell in love at first sight in Aberdeen. She will be working with poet Jo Gilbert, who will produce text for the project through workshops with local groups. The completed structure will be animated throughout the festival with performance, poetry and music.
The 2019 programme also features a major new commission from Aberdeen based writer Shane Strachan. The Bill Gibb Line is a spoken-word film and exhibition of new narratives across poetry and fashion inspired by the life and work of the Northeast-born world-renowned fashion designer. Strachan is also developing a novel about Gibb, who is from Fraserburgh, in the North East, as he is.
Look Again Festival Seed Fund
The central ethos of Look Again is to embolden and nurture the next generation of creative talent in the North East, providing a strong platform not only to exhibit work but also providing a year-round structure of support and development. Every year, Look Again awards funding to a selection of emerging creatives with strong connections to Aberdeen through its Seed Fund. This year’s Seed Fund artists are;
Visual artist Zloto (Karolina Bachanek) presents, Caro&Karo Taxi a multimedia project of a socially engaged nature, which consists of three main elements: an iconic classic car, video-works and interaction. The project’s main character, a Polonez Caro, presented under a nickname Caro, is a legendary icon of east European moto-nostalgia, irrational romanticism and unfulfilled promises of prosperity. For this project it will become a pretext to discuss new perspectives on Scotland’s shifting relationships with Europe.
Specialising in urban art, commercial illustration and design, collective duo Studio N_Name transmute Aberdeen into Aberdabeedoo, a city whose young people have risen up and seized power. The Rebel Caterpillars imagines a world taken over by children, who have formed a new political party, the ‘Radical Caterpillars’. With propaganda popping up across the city, participatory workshops and its own border checkpoint, this will be a seriously playful look at politics, borders and Westminster rule from a child’s perspective.
Presented by Gray’s School of Art alumni David McDiarmid, Jon Nicolson, Stuart Noble, Emma Rogers and Rachel Rogers, The Artists’ Tuck Shop is a mobile tuck shop trolley serving up snacks and handy artworks made by artists.
Artist Kirsty Russell work Threshold(s), is a response to the hard-edged built environment of Aberdeen and the implied gender specificity of the hard, grey walls. Russell, will produce a rug to be installed in the city centre, acting as a threshold, welcoming visitors in to public space. It is an invitation to spend time, and rest during the festival.
Jacqueline Donachie, one of Scotland’s most prominent artists brings Temple of Jackie to Aberdeen. A mobile unit that will pop up in the city centre it will function as a DJ booth/soup kitchen/gathering space.
Scottish artist Craig Barrowman presents Mobile ‘Ploposal’ Unit, a huge head of architect Archibald Simpson, on wheels, housing a unit for the production of public art proposals. Through conversations with members of the public, Craig will produce public art proposals to be displayed, as 2D images across the city.
New Art from Macedonia curated by Jon Blackwood, at Peacock Visual Arts. Aberdeen Follies, a project developed with final year students at Scott Sutherland School of Architecture, responding to a brief to produce a digitally fabricated, demountable architectural intervention for the city – a ‘Folly’. The development process included road testing of the initial concept designs by children from two Aberdeen schools. Etsy Aberdeen Summer Showcase bringing together up to 50 local designers and makers selling locally produced high quality craft and design in a pop-up market at The Anatomy Rooms. Belmont Filmhouse features a Film Programme with films selected by Look Again featured artists. Trading Faces, an exhibition by photographer Steve Smith and writer Ian Grosz, featuring documentary photos and oral histories of traders from the historic Aberdeen Market. Tendency Towards, Aberdeen based art collective will work on a new collaborative exhibition.
FOR MORE INFO AND PROGRAMME CLICK HERE