On the 23rd January 2010 I went to Newcastle to visit a friend, for a little break away. She took me to the Baltic Art Gallery, which was a nice surprise.
DAMIEN HIRST
The first exhibition I saw in there was 'Pharmacy' by Damien Hirst - The exhibit is in a large space, and as soon as you walk in, you enter from behind the desk, and your eyes are just bombarded with medicine packaging, boxes and bottles arranged by colour and shape in glass cases around the edge of the room. These packaging are also arranged to suggest the representation of the human body, and is sometimes installed with preparations for headaches at the top of the cabinets, stomach medicines in the middle and preparations for the feet at the bottom. For my own personal experience, I felt very claustrophobic in a large room, but by having all these medicine packages taking up that amount of space around the edge of the room, this is where the claustrophobic feeling came from. In contrast to the overwhelming atmosphere of manmade medicines etc there are four bowls of honey on small stools at four points in the centre of the room, it was so nice to have that space to wonder through to give your eyes a rest from staring at the mountainous packaging! The honey bowls are there to attract flies, there is an insect-o-cutor fly killer hanging down from the ceiling in the centre of the space - This is representing a merciless God, killing without emotion and without distinction. The medicines circle the agent of death ironically.
Hirst has basically put the message across that our society today places unquestioning confidence in modern medicine, offering the suggestion that our whole idea of medicine helping the diseased body is maybe just a belief system that is centered on death.

KIM SOOJA
The second exhibition I saw at The Baltic, was a video art installation by Kim Sooja called 'A Needle Woman'. Her work explores ideas about time and consciousness. To create this piece of work, Kim Sooja travelled to major cities all over the world which includes Tokyo, Shanghai, Delhi, New York, Mexico City, Cairo, Lagos and London. Each performance is projected through one of eight video channels. It is the artist herself who stands with her back to the camera, they are all silent and motionless apart from the environment she is stood within. Everybody still goes about their everyday life, in some cases people just ignore her and brush past her, but in other cases people become curious about her and the camera.



When you first sit down to watch one of the channels, the immediate thing you do is focus your attention on her presence, but as time passes, we become more aware of the faces of the people in the passing crowds and the type of environment that she stands motionless in.
When I experienced this installation, I became aware of the environment that I was in - The whole piece is silent therefore the echoing of peoples footsteps within the gallery became more enhanced and the muttering of peoples voices under their breath. I dont know wether this was intentional, but it was as if we were the soundtrack to the piece, I thought it was very clever.

There was another little section at the end of this big room which showed a ninth video installation - It was the same concept, the artist standing silent and motionless, this single piece is called 'A Laundry Woman'. The setting for this pice is the Yamuna River, India. This represents a very big contrast to the previous 8 channels you see/walk through before viewing this end piece. A Needle Woman was all set in Urban environments whereas A Laundry Woman is set in a natural environment, much more peaceful and relaxed. The work considers the relationship between the body and nature, stillness and movement, and the cycle of life and death. Compared to A Needle Woman, A Laundry Woman has no hussle and bussle or any motion of bodies - the only motion in this piece is the floating debris of earth and twigs etc floating dreamily past Kim Sooja.
When I experienced this piece, I felt a lot more intimate with it, it is mesmerising. Also, you still here peoples footstaps in this tiny room, and their muffled voices, it became really annoying and distracted from the silence of the piece whereas in the other 8 video channels it was acceptable. As soon as people became still and quite, there was a sense of relief!




KIM SOOJA Talking about this piece of work.

I also asked at The Baltic Gallery wether it would have been possible for me to talk to someone about the process that the artist has to go through to get their work shown there - The woman on the information desk was very helpful, but told me the person I needed to see really wasn't in on that day! He looks after all the artist archive library, and she said he is very helpful and would talk to me with pleasure if I want to come back. So I plan to visit Newcastle again at Easter and wil definitely plan to visit again on a day that this person will have time to talk to me.