Baltic confirms 2024 exhibition programme
1 Dec 2023
Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art looks towards the year ahead and the 2024 exhibitions.
Baltic Open Submission, in association with Fenwick
16 March - 1 September 2024
Baltic Open Submission, in association with Fenwick, will showcase painting, sculpture, photography, video and more by artists, makers, self-taught creatives and hobbyists based in North East England, alongside several works by established artists.
This will be the second iteration of the Open Submission exhibition at Baltic, and works will be selected by a panel including North East musician and lead singer with Maxïmo Park, Paul Smith; artist Jasmina Cibic; Niomi Fairweather, Baltic Curator; and Rose McMurray, Baltic Curatorial Assistant.
The exhibition, in Baltic’s Ground Floor gallery, will present up to 100 works drawn from the submissions alongside work by several established artists. These include Phyllis Christopher, Newcastle-based photographer known for documenting LGBTQ+ sexuality and protest in 1980s/1990s San Francisco; Holly Hendry, London-based sculptor and installation artist who explores what lies beneath the surface, from hidden underground spaces to the interior workings of the body; and British institution, household name and prolific painter Jim Moir (aka Vic Reeves) whose submission is a newly completed, unseen work.
Franki Raffles: Photography, Activism, Campaign Works
11 May – 17 November 2024
In May 2024, Baltic will present the first major retrospective exhibition of feminist, activist, social documentary photographer Franki Raffles (1955–1994). Raffles documented the lives of women in the UK, predominantly in Scotland, and during travels with her family in the 1980s across the Soviet Union (Russia, Georgia and Ukraine), China, Zimbabwe, the Caribbean, Israel and Palestine. In Edinburgh she worked as a freelance photographer with schools and women’s groups. Her photography focused attention on women’s lives and their work, addressing issues such as inequality, gendered violence, disability, activism and sisterhood.
The exhibition, Franki Raffles: Photography, Activism, Campaign Works, will concentrate on her astonishing creative output over a period of ten years from 1984–94 when she was most active. During this time, she produced around 40,000 images, the majority now residing in the Franki Raffles Photography Collection at the University of St. Andrews. The exhibition will bring together photographs, many shown publicly for the first time, alongside archive material contextualising her work.
Presented in the Northumbria University Gallery, Level 3.
Joanne Coates: The Vasseur Baltic Artists' Award
11 May - 17 November 2024
Joanne Coates is a working-class visual artist working in the medium of photography who lives and works across the North East of England. Her work explores rurality, hidden histories and inequalities relating to low income through photography, installations, and audio. Coates uses photography to question the concepts of power, identity, wealth, and poverty, by exploring the social histories of land, gender, and class to narrate stories that have long been forgotten – or simply never told.
Coates will present a body of new work for Baltic’s Level 2 gallery space. The exhibition and research will build on themes around class, gender, inequality and the rural explored previously in Daughters of the Soil, and The Lie of the Land. Again, Coates will collaborate with participants to explore parallels between people and places, the exhibition will delve into questions around climate change, cost of living crisis, disparities of wealth and the impact on low-income communities.
Joanne Coates exhibition is supported by the Baltic Vasseur Artists’ Award, in memory of the late Isabel Vasseur. An admired figure, Vasseur inspired a generation of curators and artists with her fearless approach to putting art in the public realm. Through the 2024 Award, Baltic Legacy Patron, Vasseur continues to support the growth of contemporary art.
Hannah Perry
22 June 2024 – 14 January 2025
British artist Hannah Perry works across installation, sculpture, film and printmaking. Perry continuously generates and manipulates materials to develop a sprawling network of references. The result is an often candid, and personal exploration of mental and emotional health in our contemporary, hyper-networked society.
Baltic will present a major new commission by Perry for the level 4 gallery that considers the intersection of industry, class, gender and labour. The psychologically charged installation will use materials, from sheet metal to car lacquer, body wrap and hydraulics, that are often associated with manual occupations in manufacturing and industry. Drawing on the artist’s personal history growing up in a working-class family in the north of England, the new commission explores shifting cultural and social values, shaped by the economic forces of capitalism and their effects on mental and emotional health.
Capturing the nuances of intergenerational and gendered ideas of labour, in a context characterised by struggle, economic instability, uncertainty and precariousness, the commission reflects on the artist’s own personal experience – steel, hydraulics, and shock absorbers, are choreographed to resemble a pelvis during labour. The work captures the force, violence, struggle, shock and trauma of the transition and its brutal, constrained power.
Mani Kambo
7 December 2024 – 2 June 2025
Mani Kambo (b. 1992, Newcastle upon Tyne) is a multidisciplinary artist who explores the inner spirit by drawing on her own personal totemic symbols, influenced by her upbringing in a Sikh household filled with superstition, prayer, and religious ceremony.
Textile, fabric dying, and printmaking is rooted in Kambo’s family history within the caste system. She focuses on objects, routines and rituals distilled textile, fabric dyeing, and printmaking is rooted in Mani Kambo’s family history within the caste system. She focuses on objects, routines and rituals distilled both from the everyday and mythology, her work recording movement and documenting performative actions: the hand that creates, fire that reveals, water which purifies and eyes that perceive. Through layering and editing images together she collages narratives and weaves dreamscapes. These visuals are repeated throughout her work like markers linking to notions of spirituality and belief in reincarnation.
Kambo will present a major body of new work for Baltic’s Level 2 gallery space and in addition to this commission she will take part in a residency at Baltic from January 2024. The residency has been conceived through Baltic’s Artist Development Programme and will provide Kambo with expert support and mentoring. Throughout the residency Kambo will have access to Baltic’s expansive facilities as well as curatorial and technical input. Overall, the residency has been devised to provide Kambo with pivotal care that will aid her practice and support the development of new work for the exhibition. Baltic’s Artist Development Programme was established in 2022 and offers learning and developmental support for artists and curators working across the North East.
Exhibition supported by Foundation Foundation.
Press Contacts
Craig Astley craiga@balticmill.com
About Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art
Baltic is a major international centre for contemporary art situated on the south bank of the River Tyne in Gateshead, England and has welcomed over eight million visitors since opening to the public in July 2002. BALTIC presents a distinctive and ambitious programme of exhibitions and events, and is a world leader in the presentation and commissioning of contemporary visual art.
Housed in a landmark ex-industrial building, BALTIC consists of 2,600 square metres of art space, making it the UK’s largest dedicated contemporary art institution. BALTIC has gained an international reputation for its commissioning of cutting-edge temporary exhibitions. It has presented the work of over 460 artists of 60 nationalities in 220 exhibitions to date.
