Core

Co-exhibitors:

Massimo Bartolini, Angela Conner, Anya Gallaccio, Andy Harper, Caroline Jones, Mileece, Thomas Nicolai, Kevin O'Brien, Julius Popp, Michael Sailstorfer, Neil Stewart and Keith Bowler.

CORE brought together a diverse group of international artists exploring the contemporary context of ideas and experiences of the natural elements and redefining artistic practice in the 21st century. Making site-specific work, artists both explored the chemical and physical change of matter and acted as a physical entity in contact with the elements – opening themselves to embrace time and nature in all traces and chance happenings. In creating a simulacrum of natural phenomena, the artists constructed a unique sense of time and place.

The exhibition examined different approaches and possibilities, and asked how contemporary artists frame their experience of the natural elements. Artists responded through sculpture, painting, film installation and sound.

CORE was held at Union Works, a disused factory on the South Bank, chosen for its unique energy, vast size, temporal structure and history. Union Works houses the site of the last remaining bear-baiting arena from the 1680s.