The March 2024 monthly Cover Story “Dibbets in Palencia” is now up on our homepage: www.lttds.org

“On the morning of 8 February 2009, it was still pitch dark when we arrived with cameraman Fijko van Leeuwen on a wide stretch of the beach near the extremity of the port of Rotterdam. ” → Continue reading (after March 2024 this story will be archived here).

Cover Stories are published monthly on Latitudes’ homepage featuring past, present, or forthcoming projects, research, texts, artworks, exhibitions, films, objects, or field trips related to our curatorial projects and activities.

(Above and below) Betwixt 2024 publication. Photos by Andy Stagg, Courtesy of the Freelands Foundation.

In February 2023, Latitudes was commissioned to write a text on the artistic practice of Crystal Bennes for “Betwixt 2024”, a publication produced by the Freelands Foundation as part of their Freelands Artist Programme initiative supporting emerging artists across the UK since 2018.

The book has now launched, coinciding with the opening of an exhibition across four sites in central and north London between 17–23 February 2024, in which Bennes participates alongside 19 other artists based in Belfast, Cardiff, Edinburgh, and Sheffield.

Writers in the publication are Alice Bucknell, Beth Hughes, Candice Jacobs, Cindy Sissokho, Colette Griffin, Ingrid Lyons, Jamie Sutcliffe, Jenny Richards, Kandace Siobhan Walker, Khanyisile Mbongwa, Lara Eggleton, Lucy A. Sames, Maria Howard, Mariana Cánepa Luna, Mark Peter Wright, Max Andrews, Precious Adesina, Rosalie Doubal, Sunshine Wong, Susannah Dickey, Theo Reeves-Evison and Zakiya McKenzie.

Published in 2024, 370 pages. Designed by Kristin Metho.

Available for £15 (plus shipping) here.

(Above and below) Crystal Bennes, “When Computers Were Women” (2021). Courtesy of the artist.

A month later, on March 16, 2024, Bennes will present her new project “O (Copper, cotton, cobalt, crude, naphtha, bauxite, palm)” (2023) at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh, culminating her two-year residency there and at the Edinburgh College of Art on the Freelands Artist Programme. Involving tapestry, sculptural installation, video, and performance, her project addresses the rapaciousness and sophistry of commodities trading, an arena in which financial instruments are used to bet on the future value of raw materials and natural resources including crude oil, metals, coffee, and cotton.

Latitudes’ text will also be available on the Talbot Rice Gallery website and in the gallery booklets for £2 at the venue. 

Crystal Bennes, Fragment from “O (Copper, cotton, cobalt, crude, naphtha, bauxite, palm)”, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

A Classicist with a PhD from King’s College London, Dr Crystal Bennes previously worked in the U.S. Senate, and as an architecture and design journalist before retraining as an artist. She studied for an MFA at Aalto University, Helsinki, and École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and obtained a practice-based PhD at Northumbria University, Newcastle.

Her practice is grounded in long-term projects that foreground archival research, durational fieldwork, and material experimentation. Recent bodies of work include an ongoing photographic exploration of an artificial island in Sweden created entirely out of radioactive waste from industrially-produced synthetic fertiliser and the experimental recreation of a nineteenth-century hay meadow based on a myth of unintentional plant migration from Italy to Denmark. 

Recent exhibitions include Platform: Early Career Artist Award, Edinburgh Art Festival (2023); Flora Italica, Thorvaldsens Museum, Copenhagen (2023); Mauvaise Herbes, Centre Photographique d’Ile-de-France; No Island is an Island, Landskrona Foto International Festival; and Hermes and the Veil, Gallery North, Newcastle (all 2021).

Klara and the Bomb (2022) her first photobook—charting connecting threads between the U.S.’s nuclear weapons research, women programmers, the invention of modern computers, and nuclear colonialism—was published by The Eriskay Connection in 2022, and it was shortlisted for the Photo Text Book Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles in 2023. 

Between 2022 and 2024 she was a resident at Talbot Rice Gallery as part of a Freelands Foundation Artists programme. Together with Tom Jeffreys, she is the editor of The Peninent Review.

RELATED CONTENT:

• Latitudes’ writing since 2005.
• Text on Lara Almarcegui’s Graves (2021) in “Sketches of Transition. An Atlas on Growth and Decay” edited by Michele Bazzoli, 27 Oct 2023
• Text on Crystal Bennes for the Freelands Foundation Artists programme, 31 May 2023
• Latitudes’ essay “Un suelo para las historias del arte del futuro” [Soil for Future Art Histories] in TBA21’s catalogue “Futuros Abundantes”, 22 Jan 2023
• Max Andrews reviews Bruno Zhu’s exhibition “I am not afraid”, Cordova, Barcelona, 30 Mar 2022
• Nueva publicación: “Passió i cartografia per a un incendi dels ulls” (MACBA, 2022), 2 Mar 2022 
• New publication: “Things Things Say” now available, 28 Feb 2022

The February 2024 monthly Cover Story “Climate Conscious Travel to ARCOmadrid” is now up Latitudes’ homepage: www.lttds.org

“As part of its wider Climate Conscious Travel campaign, Gallery Climate Coalition and its International Volunteer Team, GCC Spain, are collaborating with ARCOmadrid on the initiative #TrainToARCOmadrid to encourage more climate-conscious travel choices when traveling to the art fair, which this year runs from 6–10 March 2024. ” 

→ Continue reading (after February this story will be archived here).

Cover Stories are published monthly on Latitudes’ homepage featuring past, present, or forthcoming projects, research, texts, artworks, exhibitions, films, objects, or field trips related to our curatorial projects and activities.

The January 2024 monthly Cover Story “Curating Lab 2014 – Curatorial Intensive” is now up on our homepage: www.lttds.org

“As we start 2024, for one reason or another we find ourselves pausing to reminisce about Curating Lab 2014–Curatorial Intensive, which took place in June 2014, and which was organised by NUS Museum, Singapore, with support from the National Arts Council of Singapore. ” → Continue reading (after January 2024  this story will be archived here).

Cover Stories are published monthly on Latitudes’ homepage featuring past, present, or forthcoming projects, research, texts, artworks, exhibitions, films, objects, or field trips related to our curatorial projects and activities.

Since Spring 2015 we have been publishing a monthly cover story on our homepage (www.lttds.org) featuring past, present, or forthcoming projects, as well as sharing our research, travel, or texts, featuring artworks, exhibitions, films, or objects related to our curatorial practice. Below are those published throughout 2023 (#90 to #100), which you can read again in this archive. See you in 2024!

December 2023 cover story on www.lttds.org

“This month’s Cover Story, the 100th no less, focusses on artist Ibon Aranberri, whose anthology exhibition “Vista partial” (Partial View) has recently opened at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, and with whom Latitudes has been able to collaborate on several occasions.” → Continue reading (after December 2023 this story will be archived here).

Cover Stories are published monthly on Latitudes’ homepage featuring past, present, or forthcoming projects, research, texts, artworks, exhibitions, films, objects, or field trips related to our curatorial projects and activities.

Foto cortesía de Laia Ventayol.

• Catálogo de la exposición diseñado por Bendita Gloria
• Guía de la exposición (descargar pdf)
• Videos de la exposición (tráiler disponible en catalán, castellano e inglés)
• Audioguía (disponible en catalán, castellano e inglés)
• The Pilgrim from Askeaton, 12 September 2023
• Cover Story, May 2022: Things Things Say in print, 2 May 2022
• New publication: “Things Things Say” now available, 28 Feb 2022
• Premiere del vídeo “A knot which is not” [Un nus que no ho és] (2020–21) de Eulàlia Rovira, 15 febrero 2021
• Reseñas: Exposición ‘Cosas que las cosas dicen’ en Fabra i Coats: Centre d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 11 January 2021 
• Cover Story–January 2021: ‘Things Things Say’: ‘VIP's Union’, 1 January 2021
• Performance “One motif says to the other: I can’t take my eyes off you” by Eulàlia Rovira and Adrian Schindler in the exhibition ‘Cream cheese and pretty ribbons!’, 17 September 2018

The November 2023 monthly Cover Story “Surucuá, Teque-teque, Arara” is now up on our homepage: www.lttds.org

“Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s exhibition “Una fulla al lloc de l’ull” (A Leaf Shapes the Eye) opens later this month at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). Curated by Hiuwai Chu and João Laia, the show includes works from the late 1990s to the present.” 

→ Continue reading (after November 2023 this story will be archived here).

Cover Stories are published on a monthly basis on Latitudes’ homepage featuring past, present, or forthcoming projects, research, texts, artworks, exhibitions, films, objects, or field trips related to our curatorial projects and activities.