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Saturday 25 Feb – Sunday 23 April

Mark Titchner

IT IS YOU

Mark Titchner is one of Britain’s most exciting young artists and we are delighted to present his first major solo exhibition. Titchner’s works explore systems of belief – both secular and spiritual – often focusing on discredited or marginalised ideologies and objects. Using language and motifs taken from advertising, religious iconography, club flyers, Trade Union banners, political propaganda and occultism, Titchner’s works demand our attention. Despite their directness, they remain curiously ambiguous – they attempt to address the big questions yet fall short of answering them.

Titchner ceaselessly searches out enlightenment wherever and however it may hide. In evoking brave new futures that so often disappear into our forgotten past, Titchner’s work taps into a fundamental human need for meaning and truth, whilst remaining provocatively enigmatic. Working across a number of media (including print, wall drawing, video, sculpture and installation) this exhibition features two major new commissions produced especially for Arnolfini, How to Change Behaviour (Tiny Masters of the World Come Out) 2006, and The Invisible Republic, 2006. The exhibition also brings together, for the first time, works produced over the last decade and will include Titchner’s major new multi-media installation When we build let us think that we build forever, 2005, shown here for the first time in the UK.

Supported by The Elephant Trust out of the George Melhuish Bequest.

PERSPECTIVE

Mark Titchner employs writings and texts from sources as diverse as Martin Heidegger, Wilhelm Reich, The Silver Jews, Emmanuel Swedenborg, Fugazi, The Old Testament, William Blake, Kabbalah and corporate manifestos. The works in this show address themes ranging from the fiction and folly of permanence, expressed through a kind of psychotic modernism, to the collective power of psychic amplification; from a lament to the failure of utopian socialism, to the decoding of the universe by a desktop PC. A publication to accompany this exhibition is available from 15 March.