Zoe Walker & Neil Bromwich

Thursday, 26 June 2008 00:04

LONDON - On the Threshold of a Dream, the second exhibition in the Turner Contemporary Project Space features work by Zoë Walker and Neil Bromwich. Working together since 1999, Walker and Bromwich’s performances, sculptures and videos often encourage the participation of the audience and are both playful and utopian in their exploration of art’s ability to overcome boundaries.

The artists have a fascination with ‘in between’ states and places, the zones between fact and fiction, dreams and reality, land and sea. On the Threshold of a Dream is comprised of two parts: an exhibition in the Turner Contemporary Project Space and an off-site touring project, Celestial Radio, which during the course of the exhibition will visit the harbours of Whitstable, Margate and Folkestone.

The exhibition in the Turner Contemporary Project Space features Walker and Bromwich’s inflatable sculptures and video work. The centerpiece of the exhibition is Friendly Frontier No. 1, a large inflatable mountain range complete with emergency slide, offering a simple, child-like solution to the complicated problem of international border control. The peace-loving message continues in a pair of works from the Siege Weapons of Love series of inflatable ‘missile’ prototypes, while the mesmerizing video installation Limbo-Land presents an attempt at lunar exploration which remains caught between land and sky, never quite achieving lift-off.

Celestial Radio is a radio station broadcasting from a crystal ship, The Celeste, its surface coated in sixty thousand mirror tiles. The Celeste will anchor in the harbours of Whitstable, Margate and Folkestone from where it will broadcast, on 87.7FM, a specially recorded soundtrack. Taking as its theme ‘Aspirations, Hopes and Dreams’ the soundtrack has been made in response to the coastal landscape of Kent and the history of painters, poets, writers and other visionary thinkers who have populated the landscape at different times. Taking as its starting point TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, an epic poem weaves together these histories and rekindles the power of the romantic spirit. This scripted narrative is mixed with interviews with people living and working along the coastline to create a sound work that exists in the inter-tidal zone between fact and fiction.

Celestial Radio will visit Whitstable Harbour from 21–22 June, during the Whitstable Biennale, Margate Harbour from 5–8 July and Folkestone Harbour from 19–20 July, during the Folkestone Triennial.

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