firstsite, a major new centre for the visual arts, designed by internationally acclaimed Rafael Viñoly Architects, will open in Colchester on Sunday 25 September 2011.
firstsite’s opening exhibition, Camulodunum, taking its title from the original Roman name of Colchester, will feature major commissions to British and international artists, as well as loans from collections including Tate, V&A, Arts Council England, the University of Essex Collection of Art from Latin America, Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge, Art Institute Chicago and Kunsthaus Zürich.
The exhibition will draw upon the town’s important collection of Romano-British artefacts including coins, ceramics and other aspects of Colchester’s archaeology, shown alongside artworks that consider the treatment of objects in the museum and contemporary culture as future historical record. Among these are works by Ai Weiwei, Subodh Gupta, Barbara Hepworth, Sarah Lucas, Henry Moore, Cildo Meireles, Grayson Perry, Robert Smithson, Bill Woodrow, and Andy Warhol.
There will be new commissions to Aleksandra Mir and Danh Vo. Mir’s encyclopaedic HELLO Colchester will link one hundred found images to a photograph of a local soldier meeting Queen Elizabeth II, reflecting Colchester’s long history as a garrison town, from pre-Roman times to the present day. Danh Vo’s work features some of the first fragments completed as part of a two-year undertaking to fabricate a full scale replica of New York’s Statue of Liberty.
Further information: www.firstsite.uk.net.
Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup II – Oyster Stew, 1969 © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London 2011.
