Nina Canell & Robin Watkins, Digging a hole, 2008. Film still. Courtesy of the artists & mother's tankstation
A cumulative lists of all artists and projects involved in Nought to Sixty.
Nought to Sixty presents sixty projects by emerging artists based in Britain and Ireland over six months from 5 May to 2 November 2008.
Most of the artists in Nought to Sixty are under thirty-five, few of them have had significant commercial exposure, and in most cases this is their first opportunity to mount a solo project in a major public space.
The season is not intended to announce any new generation or style, but to build up a multifaceted portrait of the emerging art scene in the two countries, and to provide a space for exchange.
The Nought to Sixty programme consists of:
Events happen at the ICA every Monday night:
Sign up for regular updates about the Nought to Sixty and the rest of the ICA's programme, special events and offers. It's free.
Nought to Sixty is supported by:
Other partners:
Canell and Watkins have made a new gallery-specific installation, bringing together a number of recent works to form a sculptural whole.
Nina Canell (born Växjö, Sweden, 1979, lives in Dublin) and Robin Watkins (born Stockholm, Sweden, 1980, lives in Dublin) are long-term collaborators. Canell creates sculpture in the most expanded sense, assemblages that fuse matter, light and sound to create surreal testing grounds. Working together, Canell and Watkins have previously realised several film works and musical recordings as well as numerous live performances and events. For Nought to Sixty the artists have made a new gallery-specific installation, one which brings together a number of recent works to form a sculptural whole. The film work shown is Digging a Hole (2008), which portrays a man in his overalls digging in a bog. The sculptures include A Meditation on Minerals and Bats (2007), Heat Sculpture (2007) and Score for Two Lungs (2008).
For her most recent solo exhibition, Slight Heat of the Eyelid, Mother's Tankstation, Dublin (2008), Canell created an installation of seven sculptures, independent yet complimentary. The works seemed like elements in a periodic table that had been energetically shaken, leaving them re-ordered and re-charged. The title of the show goes some way to indicating the interests of the artist, who explores what Samuel Beckett called "all that inner space one never sees." In Beckett's Molloy (1955), the character 'C' decides one day to climb a hill rather than simply peer at it from afar, and moves from observed to physically-learned experience and on towards a third, more intuited realm. Similarly, the flickering sights and sounds of Canell and Watkins' ICA installation - the first solo presentation of their work in London - are best navigated by the incalculable, intuited or imagined.
One central characteristic of the works of Canell and Watkins is their use of unorthodox sculptural materials and combinations - including found debris as well as precise custom-fabricated objects. Heat Sculpture (2007), for example, comprises a leafless branch, trapped or cradled in the fingers of four neon lights, the whole composition tied together with cables. Another characteristic of the duo's work - and one which emphasises its extra-linguistic properties - is its use of music. In a recent interview Canell and Watkins said that, "in contrast to audio-art which foregrounds perceptual effects, technological progression, and self-referentiality, [we are] interested in engaging with acoustic phenomena as a catalyst for collective imagination, the construction of a magical image [...]". Music, whether played live, pre-recorded or merely signified by the presence of instruments, is a key mechanism within their work, and always an agent of transformation.
Isobel Harbison
Nought to Sixty in pictures: Nina Canell and Robin Watkins
Why an institution of contemporary art(s) like this, and not any other?
Artist-led organisations that support networks of emerging art in England outside London.
Photos of the projects, artists and audiences taking part in Nought to Sixty.
Nought to Sixty includes a series of monthly discussions that address the networks that form and contribute to an emerging scene.