The yearly Brighton Festival is a truly excellent opportunity for all art lovers to experience pieces and exhibitions from all over the world, right here in Brighton, and often free of charge! Last Friday we took some of our students on a tour of some of the top exhibitions that the festival has to offer.

Our first stop was “Sound in motion” by Zimoun which was held at Brighton University. Zimoun is a Swiss artist who looks to harness sound and space using minimalist power. In the pieces created specifically for the Brighton University art gallery, Zimoun responds the bright and sparse interior with a characteristic articulation of the tension that exists between orderly patterns of modernism and the chaotic forces of life. In the pieces we viewed, Zimoun used low tech objects such as cardboard boxes, ping pong balls and filler wires, one of the pieces was made using 250 dc-motors and filler wire.

Another interesting exhibition at Brighton University was the “Waste House”. This is a house that has been built using 85% waste materials from households and construction sites. It was amazing to see how discarded materials could be salvaged to build a fully functioning house! The outside of the house was covered tiled with sample strips of carpet that have been put on backwards to provide waterproofing. Another very interesting part of the house was the wall cavities, old unwanted items such as jeans, CDs and cassettes have been put into the wall cavities in order to insulate the house and these parts of the wall are being monitored to determine what materiel gives the best insulation!

We then moved on to a piece by Jacob Dahlgren called “On balance”. The Swedish artist has created two interactive pieces of work which celebrate the aesthetic of mass produced objects, one piece was made using thousands of metres of ribbon which we were able to walk through. The other piece was made using 700 sets of bathroom scales, all the students were able to walk across the scales and weigh them, even if the scales were not exactly accurate!

The final exhibition we visited was “Nowhere and Everywhere At the Same Time No.2” by William Forsythe. The students found this the most entertaining piece of the day, it involved hundreds of pendulums swinging from the ceiling in the Old Municipal Market space. In this piece you are able to walk across the field of pendulums and must react to them in order to get to the other side without touching them!

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