It’s your last chance this weekend to see two beautifully contrasting exhibitions at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art.
Ali Cherri’s How I Am Monument, with its imposing sculptures, has been a thought-provoking fixture since April on Level 4, as have the paintings by the Lancaster twins, Laura and Rachel, in Remember, Somewhere on the floor below.
Both exhibitions end on Sunday (October 12) at 6pm.
Replacing them shortly will be a group exhibition called For All At Last Return, focusing on marine ecosystems, and Midnight Sun, a first UK solo show by artist and film-maker Saodat Ismailova, from Uzbekistan.
The group exhibition will feature new and recent work by 11 individual artists and a piece attributed to Taloi Havini, from Buka Island, Papua New Guinea, and sound designer Michael Toisuta.
Havini’s name was in lights last year as she was the 10th winner of the £40,000 Artes Mundi Prize, established to bring exceptional international art to Wales. Now we, too, can see what impressed the judges.
Representing the North East in the exhibition will be two artists with a shared interest in how nature and humans rub along.
Michele Allen, who uses photography, sound, video, text and archival research, will reflect on the region’s coastal ecologies in her new work.
Rob Smith will contribute a new multi-media work reflecting his investigation into the discovery of ‘dark oxygen’, generated by deep-sea nodules.
Who says art and science are worlds apart? Many of these artists have collaborated with marine biologists and oceanographers, as have the curators in pulling together a related programme of talks and events.
Saodat Ismailova, meanwhile, is a leading figure in Central Asian art, having exhibited around the world and twice at the Venice Biennale.
Baltic will premiere, and build the exhibition around, her new work, Swan Lake, a double-channel film composed from existing footage from post-Soviet Central Asia.
The piece is dedicated to the children of Perestroika, that process of Soviet restructuring announced by President Gorbachev which, we are told, saw “the collapse of an idea alongside an extreme pitch of hope, a time of losing ground, of liberation, grief, rage and joy”.
Both exhibitions open on Saturday, November 8 and run until June 7, 2026. Via Baltic’s website you can acquire tickets for the 6pm preview on Friday, November 7.