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The University of Southampton
Great War: Unknown War

Special Collections Exhibition

An exhibition organised by the John Hansard Gallery

Courtesy the artist.
Mark Anstee, Siege Mentally, 2014.

Mark Anstee: Enchantment of Distance

17 October 2014  - 18 January 2015

There will be an exhibition in the Level 4 Gallery of the Hartley Library showing the work by Mark Anstee.

Mark Anstee has been making work about war, conflict and the monuments that commemorate battle since his time at Goldsmith's College in the 1980's. His focus has always remained on the markers at either end of conflict; the preparation manifested in toys, games, stories of the heroic, and the commemoration of the dead in the proliferation of public monuments. In this Centenary Year, amidst a renewed public interest in WW1, Anstee is looking back over past works and questioning the narrative in-between.
Enchantment of Distance in Level 4 Gallery, Hartley Library at the University of Southampton, forms part of a larger proposal for winter 2015 centered on the Edwin Lutyens Memorial in Southampton’s Watts Park, the first and largest of Lutyens Cenotaph structures in the UK. Work in the Level 4 Gallery show includes conceptual drawings from this ongoing proposal, and observational and imagined studies produced over the last decade from residencies undertaken, such as the Stonehenge Riverside Project. Also showing is the short film, Encounter, a durational drawing piece for In Flanders Fields Museum, Belgium, a project which saw Anstee singularly mark out two opposing armies of equal numbers either side of a four metre wall over 72 days.

Further information about the exhibitions please contact the Hansard Gallery.

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