Mariele Neudecker's Heterotopias at Brighton

Associated media

Mariele Neudecker

Heterotopias and Other Domestic Landscapes

4 – 26 May 2013

‘HOUSE’, Brighton’s festival of visual art and domestic space, and Brighton Festival present Mariele Neudecker’s ‘Heterotopias and Other Domestic Landscapes’ in the city’s atmospheric Regency Town House.  HOUSE has also commissioned a series of satellite works by artists Emma Critchley, Andrew Kotting with Anonymous Bosch, Dylan Shipton & Ben Fitton and David Wightman, who all connect to the idea of unknowable/knowable landscapes in found spaces around Brighton.

In Neudecker’s most ambitious installation to date, Brighton’s Regency Town House becomes a vessel for an increasingly immersive multi-layered body of connecting works melding sculpture, video and photography.

Descending from the earth’s stratosphere to the bottom of the South West Indian Ocean, ‘Heterotopias’ presents photographs of intense, diffuse Arctic suns with hand drawn vapour trails; a sculpture of a iceberg made after Neudecker circumnavigated an Arctic iceberg, shown with films, polaroids and pinhole photographs; light boxes depicting the sun simultaneously rising and setting in the Azores and Australia; and in the dark cellars of Regency Town House, various video works travel 2000 fathoms deep to a seemingly deserted seabed, colossal underwater mountain range and the vast abyss of deep sea space.

HOUSE 2013 extends beyond Regency Town House in commissions threaded throughout Brighton.  Projected inside a 30ft shipping container on Brighton’s seafront, Emma Critchley’s Aria depicts a figure moving within the depths of an underwater landscape pulsing with the soaring voice of a female soprano.

Lying in St Peter’s Church Gardens in the centre of Brighton, Ben Fitton & Dylan Shipton’s Monument to the Excluded Middle takes the form of a stricken airship whose central section has collapsed, permanently grounding the vehicle. Referencing the invention of the powered airship and its fundamental impact on exploration and ways of seeing, the work marks its eventual catastrophic demise.

For Underland: Beyond the Mounting Fear, an installation of pinhole images, sounds and artefacts in a deserted seaside retail unit, Andrew Kotting andAnonymous Bosch journeyed into Hastings Caves (accessed via a domestic living room and bathroom) to create a work weaving the experience of Kotting's recent near-fatal accident with his passion for French Pyreneean culture.

Further along the seafront in a glass pavilion is David Wightman’s Hero, his large-scale wallpaper painting of a Sublime mountainscape using a marquetry-like technique, and derived from found images of landscapes that have been edited and idealized.

The HOUSE 2013 commissions are accompanied by a programme of talks and events. Further details on www.housefestival.org

Regency Town House, Brunswick Square, Brighton

 A co-commission with Brighton Festival with Emma Critchley, Andrew Kotting with Anonymous Bosch, Dylan Shipton & Ben Fitton, David Wightman

St Peter’s Church Gardens and locations along Brighton seafront

 Guest Curator for HOUSE 2013 is Celia Davies, Acting Director & Head of Programme at Photoworks.

 HOUSE 13 is supported by an Arts Council England National Lottery funded Grants for the Arts award.

 Neudecker’s new Arctic and deep sea works have been developed in association with Gretel Ehrlich and Dr Alex Rogers (Oxford University) respectively, and produced in collaboration with curator Alice Sharp at Invisible Dust. The Greenland research was funded by Arts Council England, Bath Spa University and HOUSE Festival, Brighton.