SPONSORED FEATURE

Arnolfini Arts is a leading centre for contemporary arts, dedicated to bringing some of the most innovative and experimental work in the visual arts to the city

Partnered with the Tate, Arnolfini Arts also exchanges programmes, ideas and skills with the Plus Tate network of visual arts organisations across the UK. What results is a much lauded, varied programme of performance, dance, film, music, workshops and events.

Five exhibition spaces, a theatre/cinema auditorium, Reading Room and Light/Dark Studios are housed in the Grade II listed, fully accessible building.

This month at Arnolfini, two major photographic exhibitions continue in the exhibition galleries:  

British artist Josephine Pryde continues her photographic exhibition ‘These Are Just Things I Say, They Are Not My Opinions’, which includes a 3D installation that combines a new series of photographs and three dimensional work – a miniature train that can be ridden through the first floor galleries. 

Josephine is Professor of Contemporary Photography at the University of the Arts. Her work plays with different photographic conventions, for example publicity or advertising images, where seductive and highly staged, high resolution images evoke and respond to desire.  She draws on this visual language, responding to ideas and larger conceptual frameworks such as the history of photography and the moving image, through details, references, or the juxtaposition of different works.

The disclaimer in the exhibition title highlights questions around speech: what might be the difference between what is said and what is held as an opinion? Why distinguish between the two? And what is being said? 

Josephine Pryde, ‘These Are Just Things I Say, They Are Not My Opinions’

Until Sunday 22 February 2015, 11:00 to 18:00, Free

Dutch artist Willem de Rooij presents a new exhibition for Arnolfini featuring a politically-charged photographic work in an installation that explores themes of individuality, protest and representation.

De Rooij’s work is often multifaceted and incorporates film, sculpture, and installation. In many instances, his installations include the work of other artists and artefacts from historical or anthropological collections that relate to his own works, forming temporary groupings, which create new layers of meaning. This contextual gesture or act of framing draws attention to the relationship between cultural identity and memory, collecting and display. In his installations, meaning is not produced by an object alone, but in the relationship between the things we see, their context and our own act of reading.

Many of de Rooij’s recent works are reduced, almost abstract, and seemingly devoid of any explicit meaning or reference. In these works, which include fine weavings with delicate colour gradients, you are invited to experience immediate pleasure or fascination. In a much subtler way, his work can be interpreted as questioning, for example, the way in which colours relate to systems of meaning such as skin colour or political bodies. 

For his exhibition at Arnolfini, de Rooij further investigates the relationship between images and meaning through an installation that consists of two different works that explore the mechanics of representation. 

Willem de Rooij 

Until Sunday 08 February 2015, 11:00 to 18:00