Curatorview [Alfredo Cramerotti]

MOSTYN, Wales’ foremost contemporary visual arts centre, is delighted to announce a new season of exhibitions.

Image: Words to Sea (detail) by Diango Hernández 2015. Courtesy of Marlborough Contemporary, Alexander and Bonin, Galerie Barbara Thumm and Nicolas Krupp. Photo: Anne Pöhlmann

Diango Hernández
Time Islands and Space Islands
Galleries 2 & 3

One of the foremost conceptual artists from Central and South America working today, the Cuban-born, Düsseldorf-based artist’s work and sculptural constructions are directly related to his biography, upbringing and socialization. Born in 1970 in Sancti Spiritus, Cuba, Hernández lived in the Caribbean island nation until 2003. He maintains his Cuban citizenship and still regularly visits the country. From 1988 to 1993, he studied industrial design in Havana. For Cuba, the dissolution of communism in Eastern Europe meant an end to economic subsidies and trading partners, resulting in severe shortages of material and consumer goods. These events had a profound effect on Hernández’s practice. Through experimentation and juxtaposition, he repurposed and transformed discarded, obsolescent debris into new objects and spatial installations. Since this time, found objects have formed a basis for his works, which are in turn frequently marked by the imaginary world of socialist ideology: the objects’ original purposes are lost as far as possible, whilst the half-life of their ideological re-packaging remains intact.

This exhibition at MOSTYN, comprising old and new works, draws on his past experience while growing up in Cuba but transfers those experiences to European and Western dimensions. The show includes, amongst others, Let us see if a million people can be silent, a full-scale, site-specific wall mural made of regular, diagrammatic waves, each one representing a font used to quote Fidel Castro; a series of fruit sculptures; a room installation; a series of works on canvas and offset printed paper; and Years, a fragile, six-meter-high construction of rusty steel—a partition of numbers, namely of the years 1959 to 2008, in descending order.

This exhibition is curated by Alfredo Cramerotti (Director, MOSTYN) and produced by MOSTYN. The exhibition is made possible with the additional support of Marlborough Contemporary, London and Federico Luger Gallery, Milan.

#diangohernandez / #timeislands / #mostyngallery

WAR II
Galleries 4 & 5

Artists in the exhibition:
Pierino Algieri, Ulla von Brandenburg, Vanessa Billy, Peter Coffin, Thomas Demand, Mario Garcia Torres, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Claire Fontaine, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Diango Hernández, Jon Kessler, Catrin Menai, Lydia Ourahmane, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Wilfredo Prieto, Mandla Reuter, Ron Terada, Sung Tieu, Gwyn Williams and Josh Whitaker, with over 100 artefacts, images and memorabilia telling the story of Llandudno and the surrounding area during WWII

WAR II is an exhibition that responds to the use of MOSTYN’s building during World War II, as well as to the town of Llandudno and the wider local area at this time. The exhibition is part of a sequence of shows titled “History Series,” which has been designed, in part, to explore the rich history and heritage of MOSTYN.

As a sequel to WAR I (MOSTYN, 2014), which focused on the building’s function as a drill hall during World War I, this new exhibition moves on to World War II and takes as its starting point the building’s use as a “Donut Dugout”—a space for food and recreation for American troops located in the town.

The exhibition will provide a guided yet open viewing narrative for the viewer, where each wall within the space will concentrate on a single theme broken into subsections. Some of the subjects addressed are the history of doughnuts, the Ministry of Food presence in Colwyn Bay, the Inland Revenue evacuees in Llandudno, local theatres, the Home Guard, espionage links and Snowdonia military aircraft crash sites.

Presented among the historical subject areas—each containing artefacts, documents and images—will be artworks by contemporary artists. Both components, the historical and the contemporary, will be placed together in close dialogue in such a way as to create unexpected links between the two. The selection of artworks deliberately eschews a grouping of works exclusively tied to World War II, or even to ideas of war and conflict. The intention is to create a framework through which to consider not only World War II and the local context in a new light, but also history and the backdrop of our present.

This exhibition is curated by Adam Carr (Visual Arts Programme Curator, MOSTYN) and co-curated by Jane Matthews (Engagement Manager/Research MOSTYN) with Richard Cynan Jones (Operations and Facilities/Research, MOSTYN), and produced by MOSTYN.

A full-colour publication will follow In December 2015.

#mostynwar / #HistorySeries / #mostyngallery

&
Gallery 1

& (pronounced “and”) is an exhibition exploring collaboration as a subject and concept for the projects on view and the exhibition overall. It has been brought together by GLITCH, MOSTYN’s collective of under-25-year-olds, which is a part of Circuit, led by Tate and funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation.

& includes projects by the GLITCH group and also presents existing and previous collaborations that have occurred amongst the disciplines of art, design and fashion.

#mostynglitch / #oncollaboration / #mostyngallery

Uprisings: Iwan Lewis
Gallery 6

Gallery 6 is dedicated to presenting the work of young and emerging artists, all of whom are yet to have a solo exhibition in an institutional setting, nationally or internationally. Three Uprisings occur each year. This, the last of 2015, is by Iwan Lewis.

Born in 1980 and a graduate from the London Royal College of Arts, Lewis works primarily in painting and installation. Drawing from a broad spectrum of cultural influences, Lewis’s landscape is often surreal yet diaristic, indulging in misreadings and failed languages.

The exhibition is curated by Alfredo Cramerotti (Director, MOSTYN) and is accompanied by a full-colour booklet. Produced in collaboration with—and with the generous support of—CALL Cultural Action Llandudno C.I.C., Helfa Gelf Art Trail and the Esmee Fairbarn Foundation.

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About MOSTYN | Cymru | Wales
Located in Llandudno, North Wales (UK), MOSTYN is the leading publicly funded contemporary visual art centre in Wales, serving as a forum for the presentation and discussion of contemporary life through international contemporary art and curatorial practice. Through exhibitions, learning programmes, lectures, symposia and publications, MOSTYN plays an active role in discussing contemporary culture in Wales, the UK, and beyond.

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