October 22nd; Nottingham Contemporary Visit! (Marguerite Humeau).

Unfortunately, David doesn`t know how to bloody smile.

I`ve had a wonderful little break away from University today, this has been one of my weekends off and I wanted it to be productive in some kind of way.
Last Friday a new exhibition was put up at the Nottingham Contemporary, two different female artists this time around and one of my friends from University, Jas, was one of the people who actually helped to set up the whole thing! Marguerite Humeau; she explored the ideas of FOXP2 (I`ll explain later). Otobong Nkanga; the encounter that took a part of me.


Otobong`s work was really interesting to walk around but didn`t strike me on an emotional level, and I`ll explain what I mean by that later. Her work was site specific and one was a commission piece, it was large scale and quite dramatic.

One room had a metal strip that curved throughout the room; it was then filled with white pebbles, and small boards of work placed on top. Some areas had odd but large rocks, and some vegetation. Then right at the back it had an embroidery piece on a large stand that was absolutely gorgeous. It was strange everything being completely white, but it still made the boards of work stand out since the colour scheme was dark brown.

In the next room, which was also site specific. It had a large wall piece that went all across one side of the large room, and then an embroidery piece at the end of it that kept with the dark brown colour scheme. Then there where cases filled with some smaller pieces of work, and pieces of work then hanging off small metal cylinders that come out of the side of the cases... I`m not too sure if I even explained that in a way that people can actually understand.
Her work is impressive, and I loved the scale of it all; but it didn`t quite affect me on a level that the other artists did.


Marguerite`s work is something that I hadn`t actually experienced before and it was very, very strange to experience. At first I even put a status on facebook just saying that I didn`t even know how to react to the piece.
To begin with, a whole room had been turned into two corridors. You just walk down and turn left and then walk down that one and there`s just pure light coming through a rectangle door. The corridor area is pitch black and only has some small blue-ish lights coming from the edges of the ceiling. Within the corridor are loud and weird sounding noises, to be more straight forward the corridor plays a choir of 108 billion voices. These 108 billion voices re-enact the time our ancestors gained the morphing gene FOXP2, FOXP2 was a gene which allowed our ancestors to be able to develop speech.
So, as you walk down this corridor you can hear these weird and strange noises coming from every direction; but it`s nothing like anyone talking, it`s even lower than baby level speech and there`s so many of them going off at the same time that it`s almost overwhelming.

When you walk through into the next room, through the seriously bright rectangular door. You find a large room with salmon pink walls, and boxes with large white sculptures on top.
In this room, she explores elephants, yes; she explored the possibility of elephants becoming sentient beings, instead of us humans. So basically, if humans hadn`t of evolved into knowledgeable creatures with feelings and emotions, would elephants? I`m not too sure if it was like Elephants would be the dominant creatures on earth if it wasn`t for humans, or If they just gained the FOXP2 gene instead of humans.
To then explore the idea of elephants gaining the gene, there is a serious of different elephants throughout the room that are all doing completely different things and are expressing different feelings.

Unfortunately, none of these images

will be in order due to how quickly
I was trying to update, if you want
to see all of the elephants, then google the
artist and have a look at some of her work

online.

The centre elephant, is one that is sculptured in a way that makes it look like it`s taking it`s final breathes, and the noises it creates are unsettling. This ones called Echo.

There`s a series of three at the opposite side of the room, and these three are built in such way that makes it seem like their larynges have dropped so they sing in an articulate language that sounds really strange... Not unsettling, but strange. These three are called Edwina, Amelia and Antonia.

This is Echo, the elephant who

is currently taking it`s final

breaths.

There`s another one which was almost creepy to walk past, I was leaning right over the box that the sculpture was sat upon so I could get a better look at it. Enid, is programmed to cry out of sadness.

There was only one elephant that wasn`t making any noise whatsoever and it was the only one that didn`t have tubes or speakers coming out of it. It`s called Jean and it watches the others in "a sense of wonder".

One of them made some seriously strange noises as you walked around it, and was almost in sync with the other one right next to it. Felicie is engineered in such a way that it`s drunk, and the noises it`s making are from it being drunk from ethanol which comes from the masala fruit.

The front of Echo.

One of them kept on making very heavy breathing sounds and then made an eruptive noise. Emmett is made to be aggressive and loud, and made me jump a few times.

A quite one, was by the one that made no noise and also behind the aggressive one. Bastein is a foetus being born, and it made quite whining kind of noises aswell as breathing sounds.

Throughout the room, you could constantly hear loud heart beating noises, that where literally non-stop. But because the corridor that was blacked out was right next to the pink room full of elephants, you could also hear the choir of 108 billion voices along with the sounds of the elephants.

I seriously cannot describe the way that the elephant pieces made me feel, it was seriously strange to walk around witness.
the piece was amazing, yes, I`m not saying that it was bad in any way, definitely not saying that because I was honestly blown away with what I saw because I only thought it was going to be a small range of sculptures.

It was strange to witness I guess, and upsetting in some way; when I first walked in I just though "wow, this is amazing". But after sitting in there for ten minutes I just thought about how they where feeling and why these noises where coming out of them, and the noises where just like something I`d never heard ever before. Sitting In there for ten minutes also made me feel like I wasn`t quite supposed to be in there, like I was intruding.

It was a mixture of weird emotions just from being in that room and seeing those sculptures made me feel slightly in-easy, and made my head slightly confused. It was definitely amazing, eye-opening and made you think about the piece. It was brilliantly effective and I bloody loved it.

if your around Nottingham or just passing through, it`s by the Broadmarsh shopping centre and is free entry. Also, look up the artists and have a good look at both of them, it`s actually Marguerite`s first major solo exhibition so it`ll also be good too look at her previous work before this exhibition.

I also apologize for not putting up all of the images, and for not putting up the ones that I do have in the right order. you`ll be able to find them all on the Facebook page later on in the day!

Thanks for reading everyone! I`ll be updating again very, very soon!


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