Descripción de la Exposición
double edge
Creative Foundation is pleased to announce the dates of Folkestone Triennial 2017, which will return for its fourth edition and will be held over a nine week period from 2 September – 5 November 2017. Curated for the second time by Lewis Biggs, the Triennial in 2017 will take the title double edge.
The concept of double edge will further develop the inquiry into ‘sense of place’ that guided Folkestone Triennial exhibition, Lookout, in 2014. double edge refers to the two main axes around which Folkestone’s development as a town has taken place historically and geographically: the seashore and the Pent Stream, an ancient watercourse flowing from the Northern Downs into the sea, the present edge between East and West Folkestone. The title draws on the extensive academic study of ‘edge’ concepts in recent years: borders; thresholds; margins; the periphery; the liminal. double edge resonates with major contemporary cultural, economic and political realities experienced as part of everyday lives in Folkestone and across the globe: migration; border control; wealth inequality; sustainability; a challenging urban environment; and climate change, to name a few.
Internationally recognised artists will be commissioned to make new contemporary artworks exhibited in public spaces around the town. Artists will be invited to engage with Folkestone’s various narratives and material memories drawn from the town’s social, cultural, political and economic history. Some artworks will become permanent additions expanding the town’s permanent collection, Folkestone Artworks, built up since the first edition of the Triennial in 2008. All artworks that make up Folkestone Triennial are commissioned with the ambition of positively affecting the urban ecology of the town as a place to live, work, visit and study.
Lewis Biggs said: “The title double edge has two meanings – the first is one of anxiety: the edge of the world, the edge of the future and the unknown. The secondary meaning is one of balance, released through the artist’s imagination when one tips over the edge and looks back on the known with a renewed perspective. Great art makes change and the ambition of this exhibition is to give artists the opportunity to make excellent new work that plays with ambiguity and the several meanings of edge, stimulating audiences to consider why the world is the way it is, how it might be, and how it is always possible to change it.
Folkestone Triennial and the Creative Foundation
Folkestone Triennial is the flagship project of the Creative Foundation, an independent visionary arts charity dedicated to enabling the regeneration of the seaside town of Folkestone, in Kent, through creative activity. Working with the people of Folkestone, partners and other stakeholders, the Foundation aims to transform the town, making it a better place to live, work, visit and study.
Folkestone Triennial
Since its inception in 2008 (Andrea Schlieker was the curator), Folkestone Triennial has rapidly established itself as a significant event in the international calendar of recurring art exhibitions. It has done so by being one of a small number of contemporary art exhibitions that set out to have an effect beyond the art programme itself, changing the character of the place in which they occur. These exhibitions create a spirit of place through their collection of artworks, through changes to the physical environment and especially through changes in the thinking of the communities with which they work. In doing so, they transform a village, a town, a city, a community.
Each Folkestone Triennial invites artists to engage with the rich cultural history and built environment of the locality, and to exhibit newly commissioned work in public spaces around the town. Around twenty major artworks are commissioned for each Triennial, with eight or ten remaining in place permanently.
This ambitious process is paralleled in only a handful of outstandingly creative exhibitions around the world, including Münster (Germany), Echigo-Tsumari (Japan), and Santa Fé (New Mexico). Folkestone Triennial acknowledges the inspirational example of Skulptur Projekte Münster (founded 1977) as a progenitor.
Folkestone Artworks
Some of the artworks commissioned for Folkestone Triennial become permanent additions to the townscape. Folkestone Artworks, our “gallery without walls”, currently contains 27 works by internationally acclaimed artists such as Tracey Emin, Mark Wallinger, Pablo Bronstein, Yoko Ono, Richard Wilson, Pae White, Christian Boltanski and Spencer Finch. All works are site-specific in public spaces in the town, so the collection can be enjoyed free of charge, all year round by Folkestone residents and visitors. A further number of artworks by similarly prominent artists will join the collection from Folkestone Triennial 2017.