Void is delighted to present Through interspacing by Anne Tallentire as part of the Void Offsites Billboard Project. Tallentire’s practice explores the built environment and how we inhabit space through sculpture, assemblage, photography and film. She works with found materials materials that are often associated with the construction industry to create assemblages. The sculptural works consciously demarcate units of space referencing state infrastructure and spaces of confinement such as direct provision centres. Her practice is a commentary on what is happening in the world in relation to infrastructure and the social impact of such living environments – the current debate on the lack of social housing and the rising costs of housing is indicative of the systemic failure of the state that is alluded to in her work. She gives agency to those who are excluded or hidden, forced to live in hostile environments, by highlighting the importance of our built environment to create a more equitable space for living.

The making of the work is a performative process in assembling, orientating, moving, disassembling. Through interspacing plays with perspective and perceptions and how we interpret generic patterns in our everyday life. The reuse and repurposing of materials is key to her practice – denoting the impermanence of the built environment and the precarity in which we live. The billboard’s representation of this staged work acts as a social and political disruption, an interruption from the everyday advertising.

Anne Tallentire Biography

Anne Tallentire (b. County Armagh, Northern Ireland) lives and works in London, UK. Her practice encompasses a range of media including moving image, sculpture, installation, performance, and photography. Through visual and textual interrogation of everyday materials and structures, Tallentire’s work seeks to reveal systems that shape the built environment and the economics of labour. Her recent work has examined geographical dislocation and demarcation in relation to infrastructure. From 1993, Tallentire has also made work as part of the artist duo work-seth/tallentire with artist John Seth and is the co-organiser, with Chris Fite-Wassilak, of the peripatetic event series hmn.

A solo exhibition of the artist is forthcoming at The MAC, Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 2021. Tallentire has presented solo exhibitions in the UK and internationally, including As Happens, Hollybush Gardens (2020); Plan (…), Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, Austria (2019); Shelter, Nerve Centre and Eighty81, both Londonderry, Northern Ireland, Ulster Museum, Belfast, Northern Ireland, and FabLab Limerick, Ireland (all 2016); This and Other Things, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2010); and Irish Pavilion, 48th Venice Biennale (1999), among others. Group exhibitions include Extrospection, Pi Artworks, London (2020); Truth: 24 Frames Per Second, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, USA (2017); Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980’s Britain, Tate Liverpool, UK (2014); Publish and be Damned, ICA, London (2013); and Anthology – for Lucy Reynolds, Film in Space, Camden Art Centre, London (2012), among others. Her work is held in significant public collections, including Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Government Art Collection, UK; British Council Collection; and Arts Council Ireland Collection.

In 2018 Tallentire was the recipient of a Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists. She is Professor Emerita at Central Saint Martins, where she taught from the early 1990s to 2014.

For more about Anne’s work please visit her website.

The billboard will be positioned at the crossroads of Abercorn Road and Bishop’s Street.

Acknowledgements

Interspacing 01

70 x 60 x 18 cms, ecoscreed board, gaffa tape 2018

Photo credit: Andy Keate

Void Gallery is supported using public funding from Arts Council Northern Ireland, Department for Communities, The National Lottery Community Fund, Derry City and Strabane District Council, Enkalon Foundation, Ragdoll Foundation, COVID 19 Charities Fund, the Arts Society, Art Fund, and Garfield Weston Foundation.

Void Gallery is also a member of the PlusTate network.