in the perpetual back and forth

Maria Amidu is the third artist in iniva’s Future Collect Commission partnership programme. Future Collect is a three-year programme designed to create a dynamic new model to transform the culture of commissioning and collecting within museums. 

The exhibition centres around 26,778,780 minutes, a new paper and text-based installation and accompanying sound piece which explores the dialogue between paper and writing. Featuring over 1000 sheets of laser-etched handmade abaca fibre paper, the work evokes a sense of absence and longing, considering the nuanced meanings of the term ‘desire lines’. Once a day, at 4.00pm, air blown into the gallery will cause the prints to momentarily move outside their designated location. Once each print has settled to the floor after this activation, audiences will be asked to put them back in place. In what Maria describes as a ‘soft performative role’ public involvement becomes part of the work, provoking questions about how we relate and respond to a fragile artwork in a public gallery, through a gesture of tenderness and collective care.

Throughout 2023 Towner Eastbourne is partnering with iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts) for the third and final year of Future Collect, a project that will reimagine the future of public collections to better reflect our culturally diverse society.

Each year this partnership project commissions a new work by an artist of African, Caribbean, Middle Eastern or Asian heritage living and working in the UK. The work will be collected and exhibited by three major British institutions (previously Manchester City Art Gallery and Hepworth Wakefield). The exhibition will be supported with a public programme of events and engagement activities contributing to a wider public debate on collections and whose heritage is being preserved.

iniva’s Future Collect programme has been generously funded by Arts Council England, Art Fund, and Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.