João Penalva , the specially created cinema in St Nicholas Market to screen. Photo @Jamie Woodley
Synopsis
Thinking of the Outside was an exhibition of ambitious new art works presented in unusual sites across Bristol’s historic city centre in association with Bristol City Council and Picture This.
Description
Thinking of the Outside was an exhibition of ambitious new art works presented in unusual sites across Bristol’s historic city centre in association with Bristol City Council and Picture This. Featuring moving image installations, painting, sculpture and live events Thinking of the Outside offered an intriguing route through the Old City, exploring the relationships between insider and outsider. The education programme was co-ordinated by Arnolfini.
João Penalva, The White Nightingale, 2005 (film)
Penalva transformed the former market hall in St Nicolas Market into a cinema in which to show his spellbinding film. This work was produced from his forensic-like exploration of the bed of the River Avon, under Clifton Suspension Bridge. A beautiful and breath-taking piece of engineering, the bridge is an icon of Bristol’s cityscape and the subject of many stories and myths. Penalva’s dream-like journey draws on documentary footage to construct a fiction and to conjure fantastical places. What began as an exploration of the mud-banks and bed of the River Avon became a mythical tale of quests and wonder.
Situations
Situations is an art commissioning and research programme which operates from a University base, but produces artworks, events and publications outside the academic context. The programme was initiated in October 2003 by Claire Doherty, who is Senior Research Fellow in Fine Art at the University of the West of England, Bristol. From the start, the programme’s guiding principles were to combine the ambition of a commissioning agency model with the critical rigiour of an academic research centre. We believe that artists have the capacity to bring something we might never have imagined to a particular place and we are committed to realising those dreams. Curating is far more than project management to us. It is a creative, critical and often passionate undertaking where we seek to understand the best possible means through which to support an artist to make an outstanding work of art in response to a specific situation.
