Johan Grimonprez
22 May – 11 July 2010
Belgian artist Johan Grimonprez was propelled to international prominence when his highly acclaimed one-hour video Dial H-I-S-T-0-R-Y, a smart, visually complex and imaginatively compelling cultural history of aeroplane hijackings, was first shown at Documenta X in 1997. In 2008, a first version of his new film, Double Take, took the Basel Art Fair by storm.
This exhibition will be the first British gallery showing of Double Take which, like Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, is a montage of found film, television and documentary footage, and a complex mix of meanings and counter-meanings. A riveting portrayal of the Cold War era and its defining preoccupations with the space race, sexual politics and the suburban American Dream, the film questions the Contemporary hegemony of the image – the power accorded to the moving image in our culture. Written in collaboration with novelist Tom McCarthy, its central idea is the theme of doubling and mistaken identity, explored through Alfred Hitchcock’s cameo television and film appearances.
Martin Creed
29 July – 31 October 2010
The Fruitmarket Gallery’s 2010 Edinburgh Art Festival exhibition is a major new project by Turner Prize winning Scottish artist Martin Creed. Creed, whose stated philosophy is ‘I want to make things and I want to communicate with people’, will make a solo exhibition of new and recent work in the Gallery.
Creed’s work is concerned with human experience and what we think we know. Hugely diverse, his practice makes use of readymades, regularity and repetition – a stack of planks, the lights going on and off, a door opening and closing, all the sounds on a drum machine – to convey his fascination with the way we negotiate the world around us. His response to a situation is never predictable, but always makes a strange kind of sense – in 2008, he was awarded the prestigious Duveen Commission at Tate Britain, and responded with the phenomenally popular Work No. 850, in which runners sprinted through the space at 30 second intervals. In September 2009 the work was chosen to launch the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, with Sebastian Coe taking the place of one of the runners.
