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Home > Exhibition > Future worlds and strange matter in Birmingham

Future worlds and strange matter in Birmingham

By Caroline King - September 17, 2020Posted in : Art, Exhibition

Are you ready to step into future worlds and discover strange matter this autumn? Then head over to the innovative public art gallery, Eastside Projects.

This October, Birmingham’s Eastside Projects will be presenting two new art shows. The exhibitions will feature new work from Birmingham’s Luke Routledge, and the 2020 Max Mara Art Prize for Women recipient, Emma Talbot. This will be Talbot’s first UK exhibition since being awarded the prize.

Emma Talbot’s When Screens Break

Emma Talbot’s new large-scale commission, When Screens Break, forecasts a layered sci-fi narrative; imagining a future world where technology has moved beyond the control of humans and operates as a distant but authoritarian force.

Emma Talbot, When Screens Break
Emma Talbot, When Screens Break

Talbot imagines a future where our current technology is obsolete. Humans look back at the early 21st century with nostalgia, reminiscing about the shared intimacy and relationships between human and device. See this speculative narrative reveal itself across 40 metres of silk, in an immersive architectural painting. Questions are raised and explored around what makes us human and how we engage with intimacy via hand-held technology.

Developed prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, Talbot’s narrative has a visionary and prescient quality. The work considers our own physicality and presence in the future, and the ongoing balance of hope and angst that accompanies our being in the world.

Emma Talbot constructs multilayered narratives via a range of media, including hand drawn imagery and text, painted silk hangings, 3D forms and sound. Exploring ways of describing the inner landscape of personal thought, emotion and self-narrative, and the unconscious of dreaming.

Luke Routledge’s Strange Matter

Strange Matter is an introduction into the constructed universe of Birmingham artist Luke Routledge. A meeting of absurd figurative sculptures map out the beginnings of an invented folklore: a sculptural invitation to explore the territory of another society.

Luke Routledge, Strange Matter
Luke Routledge, Strange Matter

The title of the exhibition, Strange Matter, is a term borrowed from particle physics. Proposed to be created inside neutron stars, strange matter is formed within the remains of collapsed giant stars. It is hypothesised that it could either be the most stable matter in the universe, capable of teaching us how the universe first began, or it could convert all ordinary matter in its path into strange matter.

Routledge’s works draw upon myriad references to assemble a cast of inhabitants within a possible world. Brought to life by moving animatronic elements, the figures weave an ambiguous narrative; caught somewhere between sense and nonsense.

If you like unusual art exhibitions, you might like these.

When: 2nd October – 12th December 2020. Wednesday – Saturday, 12pm — 5pm
Where: Eastside Projects, 86 Heath Mill Lane, Birmingham B9 4AR
£: Free

More info: eastsideprojects.org

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