Turner Contemporary

On 13 February 2013, exhibiting artist Rosa Barba discussed her new exhibition at Turner Contemporary, Subject to Constant Change, and film installation Subconscious Society. shot in Kent and Manchester, at a live talk with Lynne Cooke, Andrew Mellon Professor at the National Gallery of Art Washington. Barba playfully explores cinema’s material elements: the physical characteristics of film (light, projector, celluloid filmstrip, screen, and sound apparatus) and the structure of cinematic narrative. In this conversation, Barba revealed her creative approach to the medium of film. She reflected upon the experience of working in East Kent, exploring how Turner Contemporary’s location in Margate impacted on the way in which she approached the exhibition. Barba’s work is presented alongside a number of perspective studies by JMW Turner, which she chose to accompany her work. She also discusses this unique connection to the painter.

Watch this film to see what Turner Contemporary offers and the effects it's having on Margate

Blank Canvas is an intergenerational group of younger and older people that meet regularly at Turner Contemporary. The group share ideas, experiences and reflections with each other and regularly create group art work. The group is also part of a current transnational exchange programme, ETNA - find out more by visiting http://etna-learning.weebly.com

Watch our festive film from our late night event where we turned on the lights of our Christmas tree, Father Christmas visited on a lifeboat, The Thanet Big Sing Community Choir sang carols, and a range of artists led free craft workshops.

The second artist commission for our Sunley Gallery is Tempo para Respirar (Breathing Time) by Brazilian artist Maria Nepomuceno. Artists and makers from Margate took part in Nepomuceno's Studio Group and helped to create the piece, which is made up of donated rope from the community.

Inspired by traditional South American craft techniques, Nepomuceno weaves straw, strings and piles beads, and sews brightly-coloured ropes into draping coils and flower-like forms. These materials form a fantastical landscape, also populated by playful ceramic shapes, shiny over-sized beads and found objects.

This new work, Nepomuceno’s most ambitious to date, brings a landscape of colour, sound and texture into our beautiful Sunley Gallery, which overlooks Margate seafront. Tempo para Respirar (Breathing Time) expresses the energy and colour of Brazil, but goes beyond the earthly, with spiralling forms and carefully balanced objects drawing on opposing forces, like movement and stillness, unity and division, contraction and expansion.

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Artist Tracey Emin was a Torch bearer for the Olympic flame on its arrival in her hometown Margate on Thursday 19 July. She carried the flame to Turner Contemporary, where she passed it to swimmer Karen Pickering MBE who took it on the rest of its journey around East Kent

Internationally acclaimed artist Mark Wallinger's new site-specific commission for Turner Contemporary, Sinema Amnesia, opened on 7 July on the promenade outside the gallery. Hear Mark talk about this new work for Margate, filmed and edited by students at the University for the Creative Arts Canterbury.

This summer, leading UK artists Mark Wallinger and Lindsay Seers have created new artworks for Turner Contemporary's spaces that respond to Margate.

Mark Wallinger’s Sinema Amnesia is a special viewing space overlooking the sea behind the gallery. It shows the film The Waste Land, an ever-changing, endless picture of unfolding time. A lens is fixed to the structure recording the view out to sea. The recorded image is played back inside the space 24 hours later, like a delayed camera obscura. The film is inspired by T.S Eliot’s famous poem The Waste Land, partially written on Margate Sands and exploring the disconnected time of modernity. Wallinger’s time machine calls memory and perception into question.

Lindsay Seers’s film installation Entangled² captures a pair of female actresses dressed as men on the stages of Margate’s two great entertainment venues, the Theatre Royal and the Winter Gardens.

Both theatres historically hosted scores of famous performers, and Seers takes particular interest in two male impersonators from early 20th century music hall, Hettie King and Vesta Tilley. As in all of Seers’s work, Entangled² weaves several narratives together: the actresses’ doubled identities connect to Seers's fascination with her great-great uncle’s condition Heterochomia, where different coloured eyes result from one twin subsuming the other in the womb. Entangled² sweeps visitors into a saucy seaside past where the boundaries between people blur.

The art of sound is an exciting collaboration between Turner Contemporary and Pie Factory Music, that introduces young people who wouldn't normally have access to the relevant resources, to art and music and gives them the opportunity to create their own work. At Late Night Live: Landmark, the particpants will perform their specially composed music, inspired by JMW Turner and Hamish Fulton. See a film of their work here.

On 4 & 5 April 2012, lots of families helped us to create a fantastic walking animation, as part of our Easy Holidays Easter workshop. Watch their finished animation. For more family events at Turner Contemporary visit turnercontemporary.org/families

To celebrate our current exhibition Turner and the Elements, we've put a camera on the top of the gallery's roof and will be filming the elements as they happen each week. Watch this film to see the dramatic skies over Margate that JMW Turner described as 'the loveliest in all Europe'.

Share your photos of Turner's skies... add your pictures to our Flickr group pool at flickr.com/groups/turnerskies