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* ViennaFair 2011

gallery artists
* Ştefan
  Constantinescu
* Marcin Dudek
* Javier Rodriguez
* Kama Sokolnicka
* Florian Wüst

project artists
* Aoife Collins
* Hreinn Fridfinnsson
* Dave Hanger
* Karen Mirza and
  Brad Butler
* Trong G. Nguyen
* Karim Noureldin
* Anna Ostoya
* Ben Washington

past exhibitions
* I Will Eat
  This Sleepy Town
* murmur
* Cornered Rooms
* Inside outsider
  language
* Empty Sets
* All that remains
* unfinished business
* Cathode Ray Mission
* Weird Science
* just another shadow
* Javier Rodriguez
* an inquiry..
* Unnamed
  Collaboration

past events
* Flip the coin
* Digging and climbing
* The Cu Chi Tunnels
* Siegfried Zaworka
* In translation
* Performing the text
* Riding the Wave
* Poetic Corners
* ViennaFair 2010
* 3:00
* What will the
  next revolution
  look like?
* Phoney Language
* Tension,
  Intervention
  and Restraint
* travelling alone
* Memento

I Will Eat This Sleepy Town
Marcin Dudek and Ben Washington

What we call ‘progress’ doesn’t necessarily take the direction we expect. Sometimes, in an attempt to ‘modernize’, the march of society pulls the rug from beneath our feet.

In their two-man exhibition, Marcin Dudek and Ben Washington create parallel large-scale installations. Both artists pick up on the need to ‘push forward’, the need to dig or climb, but also the dangers of being swallowed up or lost in the clouds.

Marcin Dudek’s work takes as its inspiration the town of Katowice in Polish Silesia – in the 1970s, a model industrial city, with high-rise architecture springing up from the work of the coalmines underneath. Excessive exploitation (or over-mining) undermined this success story, and the ground has opened up, slowly swallowing the city. Using little more than cellophane and tape, Dudek’s tunnel installation leads us into the hollows of the earth, with traps of light, sound and video.

Ben Washington’s sculptures – precarious, unbalanced objects – emerge from the sink-holes and the rubble. Suspended underneath, Washington’s works bring attention to the structures and systems that keep our environments and landscapes in the orientation we have become accustomed to: the right way up. The sculptures are at once architectural models, abstract mountainscapes, floating cities and stellar systems, and bring together the Monolith, video games, and holiday snaps from Costa del Sol.

This underground utopia - a cross between the nuclear shelter and the hanging gardens - allows us to inhabit the man-made and the natural at the same time. From here, in the safety of the infra-thin, we can touch the spaces not just in the physical, but also in the emotional and psycho-geographic.

13 January – 20 February 2011
Private view: Wednesday 12 January, 6.30-9.30pm

* * * * *

Redshift

Text by Pierre d'Alancaisez

Look far enough, and things will begin to appear more red than you’d expect. Look really far though – past the horizon, past the sun, and past the galaxy, a few million light years away. Look through a telescope strong enough, look at the distant starts, and you’ll notice that they glow somewhat red.

Marcin Dudek

What you’re seeing is redshift, a consequence of the same law of physics that causes the pitch of ambulance sirens to change as they pass by our ears at speed. Even if we cannot quite observe redshift with a naked eye, employing instead spectral telescopes, the effect is conclusive proof that the universe is expanding. For some 13.7 billion years, light and matter have been travelling away from us, away from one another. Given time, any two distant bodies will drift even further apart, pulled away into new expanses of space. It is space itself that keeps growing, perhaps counter-intuitively, inflating ‘onto’ itself: where there was nothing, there will be space, and matter will follow.

Ben Washington, Massive Fat Removal, 2011

I will not attempt a scientifically-sound description of the physical world here. Marcin Dudek and Ben Washington do not refer to equations or draw in theory into their work either. They do, however, precisely what physical science has been doing all along: they create models which attempt to describe our world with an appropriate degree of accuracy, and to make predictions on what happens next and what is just our of sight.

Read more..

* * * * *

SPECIAL EVENTS

Opening performance by Siegfried Zaworka

Wednesday 12 January, 8pm

The Cu Chi Tunnels
A film by Mickey Grant

Wednesday, 26 January 2011, 7pm

Flip the coin - Sonic intersections
réaltympanica with Michael Picknett

Responding to the structures created in I Will Eat This Sleepy Town by Marcin Dudek and Ben Washintgon, réaltympanica will create a sonic journey through the gallery. Visitors will be invited to pick up a pair of headphones, enter the gallery adn experience the unexpected audio-material matches with the physical space of the installation.

Launch First Thursday, 3 February, 6-9pm,
then until 20 February during gallery opening hours

Digging or Climbing for a few minutes
Artists in conversation

Nearing the conclusion of the exhibition I Will Eat This Sleepy Town, the artists Ben Washington and Marcin Dudek, joined by director of Waterside Project Space Pierre d’Alancaisez and former curator of architecture and design at MOMA Tina di Carlo, discuss their attempts to describe the world.

Wednesday, 16 February, 7pm

* * * * *

Waterside Project Space is supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, and the exhibition by the Polish Cultural Institute, Austrian Cultural Forum, and Tesa Tapes. We would like to thank the artists, Peter Meikl, Anna Tryc-Bromley, Agnieszka Marszewska, Karolina Kołodziej, Paulina Latham, Jeremy Smith. Mariza Tschali, Rauri Watson, Duncan Ball, Mathilde Stone. We gratefully acknowledge the support of Mr James Ellery and Wonder.