Tag: Covid-19

Lockdown Posts 3

“The year of living differently.” Dr Margaret Harris (World Health Organisation)

20/20 vision means perfect sight and provided a handy title for a range of forward plans when 2020 was still in the future. We’re now half way through a year full of the unforeseeable. Locked-down in our homes for many weeks we are now permitted and encouraged to gradually emerge. The images here record some of the moments of experimentation and joy experienced by the Fife Contemporary team during confinement.

Our lives changed dramatically with the closing-in of the pandemic and we must now consider the possible shape of the future. Undercut throughout by uncertainty we navigate the language of the new normal and blended or hybrid activity. Interestingly, using language associated with museums and galleries, a pub owner asked by the BBC about how to leave lockdown safely, described it having to be a ‘curated experience’. We may try to carefully plan the process as we would an exhibition but we will have to engage with an increasingly complex and challenging context.  

Colliding with Covid-19 are the longer-standing crises of Climate Emergency and Black Lives Matter. The momentous challenge is to find a symbiotic way forward to address these seemingly distinct but related issues, locally and globally. The explosion of actions triggered by the death of George Floyd reminds us of the still open wound of racism, at its most acute for people of Black heritage. Covid-19 has disproportionately affected people of Black, Asian and minority ethnic heritage. The effects of the pandemic have also brought into focus social injustice more generally.

Climate heroine Greta Thunberg interviewed by Justin Rowlatt for the BBC stated that the only positive that could come out of the coronavirus pandemic would be if it changes how we deal with global crises: “It shows that in a crisis, you act, and you act with necessary force.” and that society has “passed a social tipping point, we can no longer look away from what our society has been ignoring for so long whether it is equality, justice or sustainability”.

BBC radio has been trying to address our multi-faceted challenge through their Rethink series featuring the responses of a range of guests. There is an opportunity, and necessity, to do things differently.  It feels as if we have reached a crucial point in human and social evolution.

At first my own view was that we needed the leadership of a profound and all-encompassing political vision. Realistically, the multiple fractures from the local to the international prevent this. As individuals we will have to take responsibility in both our personal and professional lives. We can find collaborators with whom to make a multitude of perhaps small but cumulative positive actions.

As part of this, creative practice can provide both comfort and challenge. We need to cherish humanity in all its diversity while recognising the damage caused by our anthropocentric world and making changes. Artists can highlight and inspire through their work in exploring, exposing and imagining our lives and our interaction with our environment. Three artists, in their eloquence with language as well as image, have recently expressed shared thoughts more eloquently than I can:

 Artist and poet Alec Finlay suggests in a blog for disabilityarts.online that “If we’re serious about making a new world then we need to learn more than one lesson at a time. We need recuperative forms of imagination.”

An Artnet interview by Taylor Defoe with Anicka Yi raises the issue that there is an alternative viewpoint of the earth from the human-centred one – difficult but timely to contemplate as humanity experiences a pandemic. The artist brings us back to human responsibility: “…historically viruses have wiped out a lot of the population – that’s just how they work. I feel that the virus’s work is a lot less treacherous and malevolent than the kind of violence that we inflict on each other as humans, as a society. To me, the virus is not really personal. It’s the social injustice that is.”

When challenged about the possible role of the artist at this time she responds: “I would say that, as an artist, I am not some sort of siloed, isolated entity…I think that artists can ask the difficult questions and demand a lot of accountability…We can’t do anything alone. We make an artwork and want to speak with an audience, that requires a symbiotic relationship.”

Lastly, in an interview for the Royal Academy by Louise Cohan, Lubaina Himid describes her current work which presents a hopeful and healing way to think of humanity coming together: “I’m currently working on a very, long, thin painting of about 60 different patterns, that will, I hope, go all the way around the room at a museum in Brussels; a Japanese pattern next to a Nigerian pattern, next to an Austrian pattern. You’ll see connections between them, and the point I’m trying to make is about the world we live in – that there are conversations to be had between these different patterns. It’s not an impossible combination. It’s not an impossible world.”

Fife Contemporary – Covid-19 Update

It’s hard to believe in some ways that we’re now into our 7th month since lockdown began in late March. The stockpiling of toilet rolls, tins of tomatoes and pasta has eased as most of us have got used to a different rhythm to life and we truly hope it’s not about to start again.

Fife Contemporary has been more fortunate than venue-based arts’ organisations who rely heavily on ticket income to keep all the wheels turning. However, we have had a major exhibition (Lines from Scotland) stuck in limbo – it was only open to the public for a matter of days before lockdown began. We’ve also had to cancel various public events, which is of course a great shame.

But we’ve found other ways to keep busy…

Online content – it’s virtually the way to go

If you follow our social media or receive our email newsflash, you’ll hopefully have noticed that we’ve been adding much more content to our website. Here’s what’s new so far:

• Lines from Scotland Online – INSIGHTS 1-10 (featuring some of the participating artists & curator Amanda Game) available now and several more to look forward to!
• Care Making for Good – an online exhibition to celebrate the first Phase of our project with Fife carers.
• Fife Portraits for LGBT+ History Month 2019 – to mark Fife Pride which was to have taken place on 4 July, we published this online exhibition of photographic portraits made last year by 2 LGBT+ youth groups in Fife.
• 100 Buttercups Education Pack – inspired by Laurie Clark’s beautifully drawn flower portraits & featured as part of Engage’s Children’s Art Week 2020.

There is more coming shortly to this web space, including the next in our series of Materialise exhibitions, supporting recent craft & design graduates/new makers.

And there’s more!

If you receive our newsflash, you may have noticed a change of content and style. This was partly in the pipeline anyway as our Artist Development Officer Stefanie Cheong took over the reins from me on 1 April. But with supporting artists still at the forefront of what we do, lockdown meant it was important to focus on how artists are surviving – see her new Artist Stories’ series.

Our blog now includes a variety of posts from Diana and Susan and more On This Day content from Arlene.

Looking forward

We are continuing to plan with our partners and are delighted (relieved?) that Lines from Scotland re-opened safely at DCL&G in Dunfermline in mid-August. In addition, we’re looking at blending virtual experiences with real ones, and how we can continue to reach audiences with Craft Pods’ exhibitions.

Join us for a celebration of Black History Month on 29 October 2020 on Zoom.Meanwhile, keep safe and well, and please get in touch with us by email or social media as we continue to work from home.

– The Fife Contemporary Team

Fife Contemporary & Covid-19

Fife Contemporary’s programme, like everyone else’s, is affected by the current Covid-19 pandemic.

With the partners who enable us to deliver activities in their venues, our priority is to protect the health of staff, artists and the public.

Our exhibitions – Lines from Scotland at Dunfermline Carnegie Library & Galleries and Berlin Water at the Byre Theatre, St Andrews – are in venues which have now closed. As well as the exhibitions closing to visitors, the activities organised around Lines from Scotland are therefore cancelled.

From Monday 23 March 2020 our staff team will be working from home (to complicate life further we are moving our office temporarily out of St Andrews Town Hall this week due to building work). Email will be the best way to stay in touch as well as on social media (@fifecontemp).

We will be looking to expand our Virtual Venue website to provide some art and craft experiences online to lift the spirits of us all as we live our more restricted lives.

To finish, we would like to share Alec Finlay’s Covid-19 Creative Toolkit as we look forward to better times.

All best wishes for keeping safe and well from the Fife Contemporary team:

Arlene Brown, Administrator
Stefanie Cheong, Artist Development Officer
Susan Davis, Programme Manager
Diana Sykes, Director