Videocity x Grainger Market x Creative Central NCL

Playing with Rules

Videocity exhibition at the Newcastle Grainger Market

Artists:

!Mediengruppe Bitnik, Peter Aerschmann, Polina Chizhova and James Stephen Wright, Copa & Sordes, Christian Jankowski, Abi Palmer

Curators:

Andrea Domesle, Polina Chizhova, James Stephen Wright 

Exhibition dates:

27th June – 21st July 2024

Opening hours: 9am – 5pm

Projections in unit 163, Grainger St, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 5QQ

Polina Chizhova and James Stephen Wright will be at the Grainger Market on the 27th from 3-5pm for an informal opening.

Concept and Planning

Playing with Rules is a public video art exhibition that presents artistic positions that challenge the status quo and question how society is constructed every day. In the presented works, the artists transcend invisible rules and laws of nature, making us question the architecture of what is ‘normal’.

In ‘The Hunt’, Christian Jankowski hunts food in a supermarket with a bow and arrow, whereas ‘A Skulk in London’ plays with how understand and interact with the animal world around. ‘Surveillance Chess’ by !Mediengruppe Bitnik reverses power structures with a game of chess through a CCTV system and ‘Sputnik’ by Peter Aerschmann displaces the technologisation of space exploration with a focus on the materiality of waste produced by human civilisation – afterall, what if only crisps and cigarettes are left behind us? Finally in ‘Abi Palmer Invents the Weather (Heat)’, the artist recreates weather conditions for her cats – a DIY version of forces of nature, whilst Copa & Sordes invite a raven for a fine breakfast.

The exhibition invites visitors and passers-by to playfully reconsider the normality of everyday actions and the structures that shape us.

With thanks to the Swiss Cultural Fund UK, Creative Central NCL, the Grainger Market, videokunst.ch and the Carola and Günther Ketterer Ertle Collection in Bern.