Stopping in Dundee two days in a row en route to Edinburgh and on the way back, I first went to check out Aberdeen-born, Edinburgh-trained, London-based Ruth Ewan’s first major solo show, Brank & Heckle, at DCA. As a incredibly thorough researcher, Ewan pulls together histories of radical actions and actionists including Paul Robeson, a jukebox of people trying to change the world, to the Decimal clock. Tying it into Dundee, a city with its own rich history of radical voices, Ewan traces the etymology of “heckle” back to the juters of Dundee, a city known for its jute as much as its jam and journalism. Related programming is happening on Sept 15, check here for details. 

I then stopped by past Deveron Arts artists-in-residents Dalziel and Scullion Studios for a well-fed studio visit. As environmental artists increasingly taking on public art commissions and projects ranging from the ecological balance of up keeping grousing estates to reclaimed parkland in former mining towns, Dalziel and Scullion engage with their audience through spellbinding narratives, stories that do not employ dogmas or fear-driven rhetoric, rather, they share stories that fascinate and enchant through an awe-filled wonder with the natural world. 

The next day, I returned to see the DJCAD Masters Degree Show, which I can’t say yielded anything of note. But I did continue onto Generator to get a glimpse of Twenty Four Hour Football by Catrin Jeans and Fraser MacDonald, and even subbing in for blue for a couple of goals.  While 24 hour football matches have come and gone for glory and for charity, the concept for a socially engaged art event works very well in bringing everyone, men and women, boys and girls, athletes and art critics, all together for over 1000 goals scored in a ebb and flow of team dynamisms. 

Image credit courtesy of Twenty Four Hour Football

Dundee’s reputation as a great arts scene superceded my actual visit, but I had barely stepped foot into Dundee for a weekend of art openings when I looked up and along the winding streets on Perth Road and felt compelled to compare Dundee to Winnipeg. I don’t live there either, but Winnipeg is a city I love visiting, mostly because of its art scene. A place of loyal locals ever populated and deflated by emerging, mid career and established artists, Winnipeg is a city creating and trying to sustain a lineage of mentorship, standards, and hope.

It’s a small city comparatively in Canada, sitting at about an 1/5 of the country’s biggest city, and just off to the center of the country. At this time, both cities are looking to develop their waterfront, hoping to rejuvenate a sense of economy and civic interest. Walking through Dundee’s downtown, both cities also share an apparent grit in character, from the smells and sights of decay where heritage and development sit side by side with a pervasive poverty.

With the weekend passed, I’m no longer sure that comparison stands, as the initial commonalities reveal the real differences. Each city is unique, but twin cities, or sister cities as some may call them, share strands that run deep through regional relativity.

On the civic infrastructure side, the foundation of a good art school exist in both cities, and Winnipeg has a fine art programme that year after year churns out graduates that go off and achieve some of the highest successes nationally as well as internationally. Parallel in Dundee is the Duncan of Jordanston College of Art and Design, where graduates include 2010 Turner Prize Winner Susan Philipsz. No aspiring Philipsz were spotted through the gauntlet of families, bouncers, and booze on opening night for the Degree Show 2011 but it was great to see that many of the more notable works were made by young women (considering this recent Guardian article), notably a water-based installation by Holly Keasey and a colour coded lunar moon piano composition by Louise Pearson.

Winnipeg’s arts scene has been put on the map largely due to Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, one of the most important art institutions in Canada in terms of curatorial programming on an international level. Saturday in Dundee was spent almost exclusively in the galleries of The Dundee Contemporary Arts, where the afternoon began with a curators talk by Sophia Hao and David Faithfull and durational administrative performance by Yuck ‘n Yum for Cabin: Codex, a revisiting of DCA’s fantastic library of rare artist books. The display could have been more engaging, as while they encouraged you to touch and read and rearrange these precious art books, there wasn’t much of a sitting area to do so, with seats in poorly lit areas and the general ambiance of a gallery still rather than a reading room.

On the main gallery floor of DCA, before the night’s opening, my eye caught a large colour wheel, reminding me of a flattened parachute or circus tent, and this would lead me into Berlin-based Nina Rhode’s Friendly Fire, possibly the best exhibition I’ve seen in quite sometime, and certainly since I’ve arrived in Scotland. DCA also has a great and busy cafe, keeping people coming and going in the building, along with an art house cinema, which is reason enough to return.

Unfortunately, the time-based work in the other gallery reminded me of why I have no patience for most screen-based art set in galleries, where I simply expect a conscious presentation of the time-based moving images to distinguish itself from a cinematic presentation. However, I hear Carla Tomlie is a fantastic theatrical performer, and she will do so on July 7 at DCA.

Generator, the only artist run center in the city, was also unfortunately forgettable, but a nice annual idea in revisiting recent graduated artists selected from previous Scottish Degree Shows. Of all the emerging artists seen that weekend, Stefan Blomeier appeared to offer something unique unto himself and his interests, through an aesthetic that is recognizable, though may not actually say anything. 

This leads to the perpetual grind for finding artist studios. One of the best treasures of Winnipeg’s art scene is visiting the endless studios in the city’s old factories, which Dundee also has no shortage from its jute and jam days. Stopping in for a seemingly open afternoon yard party at The Tin Roof, a new factory studio space spearheaded by the college and containing about 20 young artists in a 2 storey brick building. I didn’t see much art, but I learned something from what I did not see.

The rain and the wind had the best of that weekend, and walking through the factory space, I do wonder if they had just moved in as there were no walls dividing each space. Empty spaces are inspiring through their potential, but studio spaces are inspiring because of their concentrated chaos. I wandered through the open space, with makeshift barriers, and there was no concentration amidst the piles. Most artists I have ever visited with in shared studio spaces put up walls, or at least floor to ceiling curtains, to have some form of privacy and concentration to work and make work. I remember lending a hand to move a set of studios from one end of Winnipeg to the other, a whole floor of one factory to another, and one of the first things moved were the slabs of drywall and 2 x 4’s. I was slightly shocked to learn that the group at Tin Roof have had the space since December, as while I’m sure a lot has been done to the space, nothing evident resembled a functioning studio space was visible.

While at first glance it appears Dundee’s thriving arts scene is charged with an overwhelming majority of emerging artists, I am left wondering how much of that energy simply dissipates. I did meet a few mid career arts professionals, but they appeared greatly outnumbered by the progeny. I look forward to checking back, and seeing how a city’s reputation grows through its artists and their output.

Image credit: Nina Rhode, C Major Harmonica, 2009

Friendly Fire, the first UK solo exhibition by Berlin-based Nina Rhode, shakes you down deep into your internal core, reverberating a resonance that draws you in before it spins you back out.

As the first major survey show of her kinetic and aural workings, Friendly Fire is not a culmination of her past projects via monikers like Ninja Pleasure, collectives like Honey-Suckle Company, and collaborations with musician Chilly Gonzales. In some ways the exhibition marks a watershed moment for an artist working undefined across disciplines, making work that tries to answer her own self-affirming question, “If it can be done why do it.”

As an artist that has not necessarily made work for a gallery system, Rhode here makes a deft impression of what it means to experience our visual and aural pleasures in a controlled environment. Elements and expectations of alchemy and transformation are inherent throughout Friendly Fire, from the melted street bin seamlessly emerging from the gallery floor greeting you upon entry to the undulating sensation of mirages in her combination of motors and mirrors, Rhode conjures up the playful mad scientist efforts of Roman Signer and Fischli & Weiss with an awareness of the bodily malaise.

Starting with a gong, or simply titled “Gong”, hanging overhead near the entrance of the gallery, a tree trunk embedded with a long thick rope hangs dutifully between two large stone cutting disks inviting audiences to strike the improvised gong. The ceremonial nature of striking such a resonance, often done so to mark a passing of time, especially to your neighbors, is here done so to ring in the activation of your physical senses, to send a reverb through DCA’s cavernous space to say we can see, hear, and feel all that is around us.

The call to participate and engage with her works runs throughout, as many of the works require you to manually spin or adjust the speed of light repetition (“3 RAD”). Coming back to “Bin”, which was inspired by the street vandalism of the May Day Riots in 2009, an event that reinvigorated the thought for self organization and socially engaged participation, Rhode subtly inquires into the value of participation on all levels of engagement by casting this bin, symbolic of the anti-capitalist riots, and transforming this object into an art object that once gain fits into a capitalist value system.

While every work gave me some level of joy, especially the soundless yet organ-shaped “Procurator” composed of once audible and visually explosive firecrackers and I fell hopelessly for the alluring siren hum of “C Major Harmonica”, I was actually most enraptured by the artist’s self portrait of “Es It”, a photograph of a round head-like mirror over a red arm chair resembling a body in repose. The photograph is stately, as is suggested by its self reference to a throne, and lit naturally by daylight, which was only visible in the mirror along with the artist’s face in profile and her one hand, which is holding a half moon mirror, reflecting back the image ad infinitum. The photograph is as perfect a self portrait as I have ever seen, as the endless refractions of perception and identity are contained but in a reflection. The viewer is made aware, but only of what we cannot see and what we do not know. 

Nina Rhode, Friendly Fire, Curated by Graham Domke, runs 21 May 2011 - 31 July 2011. Check DCA for further information.