Mariele Neudecker, HOUSE Festival of Visual Arts, Brighton

Running in parallel with Brighton’s festival season is HOUSE, a celebration of visual art and domestic space. The lead artist for the sixth edition is Mariele Neudecker, who presents, Heterotopias and Other Domestic Landscapes at the Regency Town House, Brunswick Square, Brighton. Running 4 until 26 May, the exhibition is the artist’s most ambitious installation to date and utilises the building, treating it as a container for an increasingly immersive body of connecting works. The showcase includes sculpture, video, photography and imagery of the Arctic, the Azores, Australia, American and the world’s deepest oceans.

The interior of the Regency Town House is the perfect vessel for Neudecker’s commission; beginning in Greenland’s stratosphere at the top of the building and descending to the dark depths of the South West Indian Ocean in its basement rooms. Through the house, the artist’s multi-layered installation becomes a surprising continuum with the Regency architecture of Brunswick Square outside, and the sea’s distant horizon beyond. On the top floor is Recent Futures, twelve diptych photographs of intense, diffuse Arctic suns with hand drawn vapour trails. These photographs gaze down upon a hand-crafted maquette of Heterotopias inside Regency Town House, an installation within the installation. On the ground a floor sits a 2 metre high, 4.5 metre long sculpture of an iceberg. Reflected back into a large mirror, the work is based on footage taken by Neudecker whilst circumnavigating a iceberg in the Arctic.

Other parts of the exhibition include Another Day (Simultaneous Record of the Sun Rising and Setting in Two Opposite Locations On The Globe – South East Australia and West Azores), stills taken from a 19 minute video, and The Great Day of His Wrath, a 2-channel video installation and mirror, and a series of small monitors situated in the old wine cellar, kitchen and servants’ quarters, which explores the world’s most isolated marine environments. Formed in collaboration with Oxford University marine biologist Professor Alex Rogers, the video examines the impenetrable and mysterious places hidden thousands of meters below the surface of the ocean.

HOUSE 2013’s other commissioned artists have responded to Neudecker’s mediated dissection of the landscape, and the festival’s domestic theme by taking real or imagined journeys around the world, whether that be on the earth, high above it or underground. The other artists include, Emma Critchley, Dylan Shipton, Ben Fitton, David Whightman and Andrew Kotting.

The wider Brighton Festival is set to hold over 370 performances and 154 events in 30 venues across the city. There will also be 27 unique Brighton Festival commissions, premieres and exclusives.

HOUSE Festival of Visual Arts, 4 – 26 May, Regency Town House, Brunswick Square, Brighton. The Brighton Festival runs at the same time across the city, more info at www.brightonfestival.org.

Credits
1. Another Day, courtesy of Mariele Neudecker.
2. Iceberg, Michael Habes.