Commissioned by MIMA in collaboration with Tom O’Sullivan to produce an artwork and associated events, working across the gallery, its collection and public programme and its site in Middlesbrough’s civic centre. The commission was timed in response to MIMA’s tenth anniversary, and sat within a wider curated programme that reflected on the institutional model and its history. The project continued research into the relationships between contemporary art practice and the contexts of its commission, looking in particular at the encounter that occurs within urban regeneration contexts. MIMA was one of the last millennial lottery funded regeneration art galleries built to stimulate economic revitalisation. Our project positions artworks and events to establish a dialectical mechanism through which to consider the behaviours and conventions of contemporary art, and through that a wider understanding of art’s social function and value. In Middlesbrough, we’re particularly interested in the images and narratives that have fixed or attached themselves as markers of the town’s identity, in which iconic images of the transporter bridge, or Kapoor’s Temenos sculpture are pitched against (largely negative) news-based stories associated with the town.

The commission process began in March 2017, with the exhibition of a scale model, providing an oblique proposal for a publicly sited work. Funding for the realisation of this was confirmed through an ACE funded capital award (£11K), with further support worth £25K from MIMA and with Middlesbrough Council, now partners in the process, committing £10K. The large scale publicly sited work was sited from July 2018 until March 2019. In the period leading up to this, a series of photographs of other local public “monuments” were sited in nearby buildings. These, together with a series of related texts, were used to engage and explore the context.