Posted on 11 May 2015
Portrait of Gillian Wearing © Paul Cox, 2008
As part of Museum at Night’s Connect! competition, the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea has the opportunity to work with major prize-winning artist Gillian Wearing. However, we need your help!
A biannual UK-wide festival, Museums at Night attracts visitors into museums, galleries and heritage sites by throwing their doors open after hours and putting on special evening events.
Gillian Wearing, a conceptual artist who won the Turner Prize in 1997, is one of the artists participating in their October festival and has picked the Dylan Thomas Centre, along with four other arts venues across the UK, to go forward to a public vote to determine the venue she’ll work with during the event.
From 11am on Friday 1st May to 8pm Saturday 16th May, the general public can cast their vote and decide which of the five venues Gillian Wearing will work with. By voting, you also get the chance to take part in an event that you have helped create.
Born in Birmingham in 1963, Gillian Wearing investigates the tensions between public and private, fiction and reality, and the relationship between the artist and the viewer. Her performative photographs and films explore personal revelations and private fantasies.
Speaking about her ideas for the event, Wearing explains:
“My idea is to do a Personal Karaoke, to ask members of the public to write about themselves based upon a topic of my or the museum’s choosing, set these lyrics to music and then have a Karaoke machine they can sing off with their written lines. They don’t have to be able to sing to be involved.”
It is hoped that the event, with complementary exhibition documenting the creative process, will be the centrepiece of this year’s annual Dylan Thomas Festival. To ensure this happens, and to bring Gillian Wearing to Swansea, we need your vote!
Vote for the Dylan Thomas Centre now at: http://bit.ly/gillianwearing
The other venues to be shortlisted in this competition are: Backlit, Nottingham; the Museum of Croydon; Strange Cargo, Folkestone; and Turner Contemporary in Margate.