‘Radical Slowness’ is a group exhibition featuring work by Akil Ahamat, Emma Fielden, Dean Cross, Izabela Pluta, Aude Parichot and Tané Andrews. Curated by Anna May Kirk and Tai Mitsuji the showcase asks us to consider ‘what does it mean to do slowness?’
Our relationship to time is ever-present; ‘the days are long but the years are short’ we lament, ‘I can’t believe it’s already March!’ gets bandied about, we sit in limbo as times drags on yet clock the disappearance of days. In pandemic times I think we are especially cognisant of this duality, of things changing quickly and being seemingly never resolved. Aside from our internal measures, we now have abstract digital realms and the reality of unimaginable natural disasters to obfuscate our sense of time.
On view from 26 March to 15 May in Newcastle’s The Lock-up gallery ‘Radical Slowness’ promises to pull ‘into focus a multitude of temporalities that usually exist out of sight.’
The curators allude that on view will be an array of poetic artworks that draw on technology as they describe the viewer being treated to ‘an ocean of digital water endlessly laps around the base of a stone, an alarm clock is caught in the half-seconds that follow midnight, and two galaxies slowly hurtle towards one another, destined to meet in four billion years.’
On 3 April you can join the Newcastle Writers Festival in conversation at the Newcastle Museum where Claire Dunn author of ‘My Year Without Matches’ and ‘Rewilding the Urban Soul’, Anna May Kirk, and Izabela Pluta will muse on the question ‘what does slow art offer us in a fast world?’