Following their record-breaking 10th anniversary year Jupiter Artland Foundation announce its full 2019 artistic programme that will celebrate the diversity and energy of the international art scene as well as creating moments of public assembly through an adventurous line-up of live commissions. Opening to the public on 18 May, the diverse programme will span across art, music and site-specific performance, with an emphasis on new commissions and opening up space for artistic voices to be heard. Highlights include a new commission by Daniel Lie as part of Jupiter’s ongoing ecological research, the unveiling of Joana Vasconcelos’ highly anticipated swimming-pool artwork Gateway, the staging of Trisha Brown’s most ambitious site-specific choreography, which marks Jupiter’s first collaboration with Edinburgh International Festival; all culminating with JUPITER RISING, a new outdoor festival that brings together artists, musicians, performers and thinkers for a weekend-long celebration across Jupiter’s iconic landscape.
Founding Director of Jupiter Artland Foundation, Nicky Wilson commented:
The depth and breadth of the programme this year reflects Jupiter’s values as a place where landscape, art and performance meet. This is going to be a summer of extraordinary moments.
For the first time, Jupiter Artland is collaborating with Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) to present Trisha Brown: In Plain Site (9 – 11 August 2019), a series of the US choreographer’s most striking short dance pieces reinterpreted for the iconic landscape of Jupiter Artland. Each work is staged in a dynamic relationship to the natural setting of Jupiter: Raft Piece, a quartet with floating rafts performed on Jupiter’s lake; Floor of the Forest, a duet which sees the everyday activity of getting dressed translated onto a horizontal suspended frame; Locus, a dance conceived from the geometry of a cube set within Jupiter’s woodland and more. For this commission, Trisha Brown Dance Company returns to its site-specific roots, blending intellectual rigor, physical virtuosity and tongue-in-cheek humour to create beautiful, often surprising works of art across outdoor spaces.
The performance series as part of EIF is accompanied by a gallery presentation Trisha Brown: Time, Space, Gravity (27 July – 29 September 2019), allowing audiences to explore the breath of Trisha Brown’s Brown (1936 – 2017) remarkable legacy. As choreographer and artist, her enduring legacy continues to be a source of joy and fascination for the generation of artists who followed in her footsteps. Her 40-year plus career was characterised by sensuousness, analytical structure and a feeling akin to flying. Combining physical virtuosity with the inquiring mind of a scientist, her early works did indeed defy gravity, with Brown inventing equipment allowing performances such as Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970) and Walking on the Wall (1971), which saw dancer’s cantilevered against New York high-rise buildings and gallery walls. With these works, the city and landscape became Brown’s laboratory as she engineered ideas that expanded the possibilities of movement for both dancers and audiences alike.
This presentation across Jupiter Artland’s gallery spaces focuses on Brown’s moving-image archive, traversing Brown’s early practice, placing her highly organised Accumulation dances in relation to the physical abandon she displays in Watermotor (1978), a work Brown described as ‘unpredictable, personal, articulate, dense, changeful, wild assed.’ The creator of one ballet, six operas and almost 100 choreographies, the exhibition showcases her move toward large-scale productions in the late 1970s, including Glacial Decoy (1979), with set design by Robert Rauschenberg; Set and Reset (1983) with a score by Laurie Anderson and costumes by Rauschenberg; and her production of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (1988). The exhibition also includes rare interview footage that provides insight into Brown’s evolving ideas, tracking her development of a natural, abstract movement language, one of her most important and lasting contributions to international contemporary dance.
Head of Exhibitions and Audience Engagement, Claire Feeley said:
Trisha Brown believed passionately in bringing art outside of traditional formal settings, which is why it is such a great honour to restage her most significant site-specific choreography across Jupiter’s special landscape as our first collaboration with Edinburgh International Festival. An artist of visionary power, Brown fearlessly transgressed artistic categories and Jupiter’s programme for 2019 flows from a celebration of experimentation. The landscape of Jupiter, with all the possibilities it presents, is a vital setting to both reframe artistic practice and yield new intimacy with it, providing a rich context for new commissions by Daniel Lie, Joana Vasconcelos, Mary Hurrell and our inaugural weekend long gathering of music, art, performance and ideas Jupiter Rising.
Opening the 2019 season is Daniel Lie: The Negative Years (18 May – 14 July 2019), a culmination of a two-year research partnership between the artist and Jupiter Artland Foundation. Daniel Lie’s work at Jupiter Artland offers new perspectives on the long and deep relationship between human and non-human species in acts of co-creation, offering pathways to practices of collaborative co-survival as humanity faces an uncertain environmental future. The Negative Years, which is one manifestation of Daniel’s ongoing practice Death Centre for the Living, begins from a desire to de-centre human agency in favour of other actors in our shared ecological and emotional field. More an interspecies collaboration than an exhibition, Daniel’s interventions at Jupiter unfold across both indoor and outdoor spaces, as sacred plants, earth and organic materials harvested from Jupiter shift and transform over their lifespan, creating what the artist describes as a ‘geography of emotion’.
With heritage from Indonesia and Pernambucano in North West Brazil, Daniel Lie has developed a nomadic practice that is highly collaborative. Over the past two years, Lie has studied the situation of Jupiter, working alongside mycologists to understand processes of heat generation and bio-digestion; archeologists to consider death rituals past and present; and students from Design for Change at Edinburgh College of Art, a multidisciplinary programme addressing the environment, post-humanism, complex systems and organisations through ecological and design-led principles.
Celebrating the height of summer, and part of Edinburgh Art Festival, Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos (27 July – 29 September 2019) returns to unveil her highly anticipated new permanent commission for Jupiter Artland: Gateway, an intricately designed pool set within a landscaped formal garden. Gateway plays on the idea of swimming pools as sites fostering community; an experiential space that is inherently social, playful and shared. Shaped from over 11,500 hand-painted and glazed tiles crafted using traditional methods at a 100-year-old factory in Vasconcelos’ native Portugal, Gateway is a vast communal labour, and a celebration of the intricacies and social-political associations of the act of craftsmanship. Gateway is both intimate yet expansive, interweaving the dichotomies of publicness and privacy with the performance of bathing and art’s historical fixation with it. Visitors will be able to pre-book time slots to swim in the pool during August.
Jupiter Artland’s 2019 season will culminate with JUPITER RISING (23–25 August 2019), the sculpture park’s inaugural weekend-long festival of art, music, performance and ideas. Taking its creative cue from maverick New York artist Trisha Brown (1936 – 2017), who fearlessly transgressed the worlds of contemporary music, dance and site-specific performance, JUPITER RISING focus on showcasing adventurous new artistic work, including the Scottish premiere of HQ: (I Feel so Mezzaniney) by Steven Warwick and Carlos Maria Romero translated by the artists for Joana Vasconcelos’ swimming-pool garden. There are also new commissions by multimedia artist Mary Hurrell and sound artist Ain Bailey.
The two-night festival brings together a richly diverse programme, including Cate Le Bon, The Comet is Coming, Karen Gwyer, The Vaselines, OH141 and Alpha Maid, among many more. A highlights of the programme is the Scottish premiere of experimental music ensemble Apartment House’s presentation of the late, great American composer Julius Eastman, whose work is undergoing a popular and critical reappraisal since his untimely passing in 1990. A true innovator and collaborator with Meredith Monk and Pierre Boulez among others, Eastman’s first and only Scottish performance took place in 1974 at Glasgow’s Third Eye Centre (now the CCA). For JUPITER RISING, the powerful vocalist and artist Elaine Mitchener will join Apartment House to perform Eastman’s repertoire, alongside presenting a new solo piece especially for the festival. The programme also includes a presentation of The Otolith Group’s The Third Part of The Third Measure, their 2017 film on Julius Eastman in which Mitchener appears.