insideKENT Magazine Issue 56 - November 2016 | Page 6

Folkestone Triennial 2017: double edge The biggest visual arts event of 2017 is coming next September Creative Foundation has announced the dates of Folkestone Triennial 2017, which will return for its fourth edition and will be held over a 9week period from 2nd September – 5th November 2017. Curated for the second time by Lewis Biggs, the Triennial in 2017 will take the title double edge. Folkestone Triennial is one of the most ambitious exhibitions of contemporary art outside the gallery context presented in the UK. The seaside town of Folkestone has no publicly subsidised art gallery, so artists are invited to use the town as their ‘canvas’, utilising public spaces to create striking new art that reflects issues affecting both the town and the wider world. Inaugurated in 2008, the Triennial takes place every three years and is one of the five key projects of the Creative Foundation. Artists commissioned to take part in previous Triennials include Cornelia Parker, Tracey Emin, Jeremy Deller, Martin Creed, Richard Wilson, Yoko Ono, Pablo Bronstein, Andy Goldsworthy and Michael Sailstorfer. The 2014 Triennial was visited by over 135,000 people and a significant public programme included some 18,000 learners, over 70 schools and 50 community groups. The concept of double edge will further develop the inquiry into ‘sense of place’ that guided Folkestone Triennial exhibition, Lookout, in 2014. double edge refers to the two main axes around which Folkestone’s development as a town has taken place historically and geographically: the seashore and the Pent Stream, an ancient watercourse flowing from the Northern Downs into the sea, the present edge between East and West Folkestone. The title draws on the extensive academic study of ‘edge’ concepts in recent years: borders; thresholds; margins; the periphery; the liminal. double edge resonates with major contemporary cultural, economic and political realities experienced as part of everyday lives in Folkestone and across the globe: migration; border control; wealth inequality; sustainability; a challenging urban environment; and climate change, to name a few. Internationally recognised artists will be commissioned to make new contemporary artworks exhibited in public spaces around the town. Artists will be invited to engage with Folkestone’s various narratives and material memories drawn from the town’s social, cultural, political and economic history. Some artworks will become permanent additions expanding the town’s permanent collection, Folkestone Artworks, built up since the first edition of the Triennial in 200 8. All artworks that make up Folkestone Triennial are commissioned with the ambition of positively affecting the urban ecology of the town as a place to live, work, visit and study. 6 Lewis Biggs said: “The title double edge has two meanings – the first is one of anxiety: the edge of the world, the edge of the future and the unknown. The secondary meaning is one of balance, released through the artist’s imagination when one tips over the edge and looks back on the known with a renewed perspective. Great art makes change and the ambition of this exhibition is to give artists the opportunity to make excellent new work that plays with ambiguity and the several meanings of edge, stimulating audiences to consider why the world is the way it is, how it might be, and how it is always possible to change it.” Further details, including information about the artists commissioned for Folkestone Triennial, will be announced in March 2017. For more information go to www.folkestonetriennial.org.uk.