“Bold curating now about bold curating then, Deep Time runs deep and feels vital with satisfying, intermingling art forms.” The Wire
“Mitchener’s passions are deeply personal but also resonate with a broader community of artists, curators, writers and researchers who, through sonic and listening strategies, grapple with the question of what it means to pay attention in a world where this capacity is increasingly under threat.” Art Monthly
‘Art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time.’
Jean-Michel Basquiat
‘The right to be myself, as long as I live! As if I were a sound.’
John Cage
Deep Time is Fruitmarket’s annual festival for new music which takes place in Fruitmarket Warehouse. Programmed with a different curatorial voice every year, each edition of Deep Time takes a generative theme as its starting point.
This year the festival, which runs from 27.11.24–30.11.24, is curated by vocalist, movement artist and composer, Elaine Mitchener. 2024 is Fruitmarket’s 50th anniversary year and Mitchener has focused on 1984 when two artists from New York whose work blended visual art with sound and music were both shown at Fruitmarket during the Edinburgh Festival. John Cage (1912–92), a senior, hugely influential figure in avant-garde music exhibited works on paper in Fruitmarket’s upstairs gallery. Downstairs, a young painter Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–88) showed visionary paintings influenced by a context of jazz, hip-hop, no wave music, poetry, and art history, in his first institutional exhibition.
Deep Time uses this creatively significant moment as a prompt to bring a series of new commissions, performances, talks and curated playlists by some of the UK’s most radical and progressive experimental artists to Fruitmarket. Mitchener has invited them to respond to the idea of an imagined conversation between Basquiat and Cage, envisaging the meeting in Fruitmarket of these two artists as a cultural intervention that reshaped and reimagined future possibilities. The work of Basquiat and Cage continues to challenge and inspire, and Deep Time invites us to not only look back in reflection but to look forward with renewed energies in these unsettling times.
‘I don’t think about art when I’m working. I try to think about life.’
Jean-Michel Basquiat
‘Our business in living is to become fluent with the life we are living, and art can help this.’
John Cage
Jean-Michel Basquiat & John Cage, Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, 1984. Photo: Sean Hudson
Installation image of ‘Jean-Michel Basquiat: Paintings 1981–1984’, Fruitmarket, 1984. Photo : Sean Hudson
View full Programme:
www.fruitmarket.co.uk/deep-time
View Fruitmarket’s archives:
www.fruitmarket.co.uk/archive/deep-time-basquiat-cage-8424
Download Programme:
Deep Time