Sudden White (after London), curated by Mark Beasley (Creative Time NY)
Part of Collision Course (gsk contemporary)

Russell Oxley, Cyprien Gaillard, Linda Weiss, Guido van de Werve, Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt, Jonathan Horowitz, Mungo Thomson, Lisa Oppenheim, John Russell and Ryan Gander

16 Dec 2008—19 Jan 2009

Royal Academy of Arts
Burlington House
Piccadilly
London

The Royal Academy of Arts has launched GSK Contemporary, a new eclectic three month season of exhibitions and events. GSK Contemporary introduces international artists, surveys emerging trends and provides a new platform for experimentation, discussion and debate within the contemporary visual arts. The exhibition programme is split into two main parts:

Part I: Molten States 31 October– 4 December
Part II: Collision Course, 16 December – 19 January

The second part of the season, Collision Course, reflects the winter timings of the programming with a bleak and austere aesthetic underlying the three main exhibitions; Burroughs Live, Sudden White and Dark Materials, as well as the accompanying programme of talks and cinema screenings. On entering the building, visitors will be greeted by a vast snowscape painting of a post–apocalyptic London, which covers the entrance to the exhibition of artists' film and video, Sudden White, curated by Mark Beasley of Creative Time. Film and video works from Bruce Conner, Cyprien Gaillard, Ryan Gander, Jonathan Horowitz, Tracey Moffat, John Russell, Robert Smithson, Javier Tellez, Guido van de Werve and Linda Weiss will be presented on a series of screens, light boxes and monitors.

Upstairs, Burroughs Live co-curated by Burroughs expert José Ferez and David Thorp, aims to establish the presence of American novelist, film maker, social critic, painter and spoken word performer, William Burroughs. The show presents film footage of Burroughs' own performances and films including Thanksgiving Prayer and Towers Open Fire and previously unseen footage. A series of photographic self-portraits will be exhibited alongside works produced in collaboration with other artists such as George Condo and Keith Haring, as well as portraits by among others Robert Mapplethorpe, Annie Liebowitz, David Hockney and Damien Hirst.

A new film work from artist Malcolm McLaren, Shallow, will be shown alongside Burroughs Live. The 21 'film portraits' that make up the work were inspired by Burrough's Cut Up technique.

Dark Materials, draws together recently acquired works from the Frank Cohen Collection which evoke the sense of the aftermath of destruction, from Banks Violette's burnt out framework of a church, to Indian artist T.V. Santhosh's installation Counting Down, in which digital timers count down the final moments to catastrophic disaster. The exhibition culminates with a room of 'skeletal' sculptures from Asian artists Hyungkoo Lee, Sudarshan Shetty and Jitish Kallat.