NOTTINGHAM.- Nottingham Contemporary presents Hollow Earth: Art, Caves and The Subterranean Imaginary, a major thematic exhibition bringing together a range of responses to the image and idea of the cave, exploring questions of prehistory, geological time and the future.
Organised in collaboration with Hayward Gallery Touring and featuring works by 50 artists and collectives - including Lee Bontecou, René Magritte, Santu Mofokeng, Jeff Wall and Joseph Wright of Derby, as well as new commissions from Sofia Borges, Emma McCormick-Goodhart, Goshka Macuga, Lydia Ourahmane and Liv Preston - the exhibition spans painting, photography, sculpture, sound, installation and video, as well as archives and architectural models from 1960 to today, and works from the 18th and 19th centuries. The exhibition will tour to The Glucksman in Cork and to the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery (RAMM) in Exeter in 2023.
For millennia, the image and idea of the cave has exerted an enduring pull on artists. It has even been argued that the cave was the earliest studio and the first museum. Nottingham itself sits above a network of 800 hand-carved sandstone caves, which date back to the Middle Ages. Mapping both specific sites and imaginary underworlds, Hollow Earth considers what draws us to the subterranean. The exhibition is divided into five sections and mimics the necessary journey that must be taken into a cave - starting at the threshold and ending in the depths.
Every culture and religion has told stories about what lies beneath. Caves are where extraordinary events come to pass, the domain of gods and monsters, of births, burial and rebirth. Dark, dangerous and unstable, caves are places of visions, of experiences that are sacred as well as profane. More recently, they have become home to data farms, seed vaults and doomsday bunkers.
Following various 19th century discoveries of rock paintings, caves became imagined as spaces of revelation and fantasy, providing clues to our collective impulse to produce images. After World War II, artists came to associate the cave with the primordial creative space, with a bunker-like refuge from the atomic era, and even with the dream of a truly underground cinema. Today, in an age of ecological breakdown, they are portals to the deep past and to troubled futures, places where species and epochs intermingle.
Hollow Earth features the following artists: Hamed Abdalla, Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, Lee Bontecou, Sofia Borges, Brassaï, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Steven Claydon, Matt Copson, Juan Downey, Barry Flanagan, Mary Beth Edelson, Laura Emsley, Ilana Halperin, Frank Heath, Ed Herring, Michael Ho, Hans Hollein, Nancy Holt, Alison Knowles, Antti Lovag, Emma McCormick-Goodhart, Goshka Macuga, René Magritte, Santu Mofokeng, Nadar, Pauline Oliveros, Lydia Ourahmane, Gordon Parks, Flora Parrott, Walter Pichler, Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, Liv Preston, Ben Rivers, Robert Smithson, Michelle Stuart, N.H. Stubbing, Caragh Thuring, Kaari Upson, Jeff Wall, Aubrey Williams and Joseph Wright of Derby.
