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The exhibition looks at how architecture shapes public gathering and language
Image: Town Hall Meeting of the Air installation view, BALTIC 39 Newcastle upon Tyne 2021. Photo: Janina Sabaliauskaite © 2021 BALTIC
Opening this month at BALTIC39 in Newcastle is Town Hall Meeting Of The Air, an exhibition and broadcast programme conceived by Tess Denman-Cleaver and Kate Liston.
Collaboratively developed since 2018 and throughout current social restrictions, Town Hall Meeting Of The Air looks at how architecture shapes public gathering and language. Liston and Denman-Cleaver’s text and installation draw from research into ancient assembly sites, abandoned parliaments, radio broadcast history and the experimental and politicised writings of Gertrude Stein. Town Hall Meeting Of The Air uses these starting points, in the context of a global pandemic, to hope for alternative forms of collectivity.
The exhibition also hosts work by Anna Barham and collaborators Rosie Morris and Taryn Edmonds as well as James Newrick. Alongside the exhibition, a temporary internet radio station will broadcast a series of live events and archive content including performances of Liston and Denman-Cleaver’s text The Hundreds, a 52-hour marathon broadcast of Anna Barham and Irene Revell’s project entitled ‘They are all of them themselves and they repeat it and I hear it: A yearlong reading of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans’, and recordings of the original America’s Town Hall Meeting Of The Air radio show (1935-1956).
A programme of events takes place from June to August. Click here for more information.
