Exhibitions

LEA Digital Media Exhibition Platform: UNITED VISUAL ARTISTS, HIGH ARCTIC

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LEA Digital Media Exhibition Platform
‘HIGH ARCTIC’ BY UNITED VISUAL ARTISTS (UVA)

Over 22 days in September 2010, British arts organization Cape Farewell undertook its ninth art/science expedition to the Arctic. Sailing from Longyearbyen around the north-east coast of Spitsbergen in the Norwegian arctic, a group of fifteen artists and scientists encountered the magnificence of this extreme and threatened environment and engaged with the scientific research being conducted on board. Amongst the crew of marine scientists, writers, musicians, visual artists, directors and architects from around the world was digital artist Matt Clark, Creative Director of United Visual Artists (UVA).

Over the summer, we will be presenting an extended exhibition based on UVA’s large scale commission for the National Maritime Museum (NMM) in London, titled High Arctic.

This first part of the exhibition will present Matt Clark’s creative response to his experience of the expedition to the Svalbard archipelago aboard the 100-year-old schooner The Noorderlicht, drawing directly upon his photographs, notations, posts and expedition reports. Developing from these personal insights, the second phase of the exhibition will turn its focus to the translation of these “findings” into UVA’s latest immersive installation, which has been designed as the first temporary show in the National Maritime Museum’s new Sammy Ofer Wing. Set in the possible future of 2100AD, High Arctic conveys the scale, beauty and fragility of our unique Arctic environment.

Established in 2003, United Visual Artists are an art and design practice based in London. UVA produce work at the intersection of sculpture, architecture, live performance, moving image and digital installation. Lead by principals Matt Clark, Chris Bird and Ash Nehru, UVA’s team members come from many disciplines including fine art, architecture, communication design, moving image, computer science and engineering. Pushing the boundaries of research, software and engineering with every project, UVA’s work aims above all to be meaningful and engaging.

UVA’s work has been exhibited at institutions including the V&A, the Royal Academy of Art, the South Bank Centre, the Wellcome Collection, Opera North Leeds, Durham Cathedral and The British Library. Their artworks have also toured internationally to cities including Paris, New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Yamaguchi, Taipei, Hong Kong, Melbourne and Barcelona. UVA also have large scale permanent art works in Toronto and Istanbul.
LEA International Curatoriate

Lanfranco Aceti & Christiane Paul (Senior Curators), Vince Dziekan (Digital Media Curator), Jeremy Hight (New Media Curator)
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For more information contact:
Ozden Sahin, ozden.sahin@leoalmanac.org

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Lanfranco Aceti is known for his social activism and extensive career as artist, curator, and academic. He is a research affiliate and visiting professor at ACT @ Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the Arts Administration Program at Boston University. He is also the Editor in Chief of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac, The MIT Press. He has exhibited numerous personal projects including Car Park, a public performance in the UK at the John Hansard Gallery; Who The People?, an installation artwork acquired in its entirety by the Chetham’s Library and Museum in Manchester; Sowing and Reaping, installation artworks acquired in their entirety by the National Museum of Contemporary Art of Cyprus; and Hope Coming On, a site-specific choral performance he designed for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, with the collaboration of the Boston Children’s Chorus, and realized in front of Turner’s Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On). In 2017, Aceti prepared a series of new artworks for an exhibition entitled Shimmer and curated by Irini Papadimitriou (V&A) at the Tobazi Mansion in Hydra, a new large choral performance titled Accursed for the Thessaloniki Biennial in Greece; and Knock, Knock, Knocking a public space installation in the Mediterranean Garden Pavilion of the New Sea Waterfront of Thessaloniki.