Tania Kovats in conversation with Ysanne Holt
To celebrate the launch of Tania Kovat’s new exhibition ‘Head to Mouth’ at the Gymnasium Gallery, join Tania in converrsation with Ysanne Holt from Northumbria University for an informal conversation to exploring the ideas and themes within the exhibition.
Tania Kovats makes drawings, sculpture, installations, writing and large-scale projects that explore our experience, understanding and relationship with the natural world. Recently she has focused on water as her central subject, the seas and oceans, river systems, maritime culture, flooding and tides, necessarily touching on environmental concerns.
For this new body of work at the Gymnasium Gallery, Kovat’s looks at water as a boundary, both psychological and physical including a series of new works that explores how the River Tweed has acted as a geopolitical boundary.
The talk is free, but please book in advance as places are limited to berwickvisualarts@maltingsberwick.co.uk or 01289 333 075
About Tania Kovats
Born in London, Tania Kovats studied at Newcastle Polytechnic before completing her MA at the Royal College of Art, London in 1990. Following this, she exhibited at the Barclays Young Contemporaries at the Serpentine Gallery in 1991.
Kovats has shown extensively in the UK and abroad, with solo shows including those at The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London; Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield; New Art Centre, Salisbury; Oriel Mostyn Gallery, Llandudno; Asprey Jacques, London and Newlyn Art Gallery, Cornwall. Group shows include those at BALTIC, Gateshead; Camden Arts Centre, London; Hayward Gallery, London; Tate Liverpool; V&A, London; Museum Of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; Kunstraum Innsbruck and ICA,London.
Her sculptures and drawings feature in numerous public and private collections including the Arts Council; The British Council; Government Art Collection; and the V&A. Kovats has been commissioned by: the Public Art Development Trust; Centre Point; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Kielder Water and Forest Park; Secret Gardens for the Salisbury Festival; Bath Spa University; University of Oxford; Docklands Light Railway at Shadwell Station; Natural History Museum, London; Cicely Saunders Institute, King’s College; Weston-super-Mare; Islington Council, London; Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh and University of Cambridge.
About Ysanne Holt
Ysanne Holt is Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at Northumbria University. She has a strong interest in the social and historical relations between forms of cultural production and was founding editor of the Routledge journal Visual Culture in Britain, now in its fifteenth volume. Her most recent preoccupations are with the experience and representations of the UK north, in particular with the shifting historical and present-day identities of marginal or ‘at edge’ sites such as borders and island locations. She is currently writing a book on art and visual culture in the 1920s and editing an anthology of essays on subjects relating to visual culture and the northern British archipelago.