![\"Ali](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/47534.jpeg\")
<\/p>\nBaltic Centre for Contemporary Art opened in Gateshead on the stroke of midnight in a blaze of halogen glory one summer night in 2002. The thrill of it shines in memory. The new museum was all bright\u00a0promise: it was going to be international\ufeff and yet local; ever-changing\ufeff but uniquely itself. It was going to bring shows to the \ufeffnorth-\ufeffeast before anywhere else, and without any of your London hauteur. It was going to stay free for\u00a0all \u2013 and so it has. Baltic has truly\u00a0succeeded.<\/p>\n
It did not look that way at the start. The transformation of the old flour mill was frustratingly slow, finishing two years after that other brick fortress of contemporary art had already opened in London. Parallels between Baltic and Tate Modern were hard to ignore. Both were industrial buildings, once abandoned on the south side of city rivers but now connected to the north by spectacular Millennium bridges, one swaying over the Thames, the other tilting above the Tyne to let vessels through. Both initially had Swedish directors, who\u00a0returned home suspiciously fast, and both have internal spaces\u00a0so vast as to require a certain\u00a0scale of art.<\/p>\n
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Ali Cherri\u2019s \u2018extraordinary sculptural ancient\/modern hybrids\u2019 made from mud and legally acquired antiquities<\/p>\n
But Baltic is light and airy, its glass-panelled lifts shooting up and down their \ufeffglass shafts, all the way from the atrium to the 360-degree viewing platform at the very top. Here you can see Tyneside near and far, from swooping hawk to distant spire. Windows on internal staircases offer views into each of the five galleries, stacked above each other, and another platform even allows you to look down into the topmost gallery. At present, this means you can see the work of the Lebanese-born, Paris-based artist Ali Cherri \u2013 as never before \u2013 from high above.<\/p>\n
Cherri won the Silver Lion at the 2022 Venice Biennale for his extraordinary sculptural \ufeffancient\/modern hybrids. In How I am Monument<\/b> at Baltic, he is showing monumental figures that appear to be formed from mud \u2013 a winged sphinx, a seated goddess, a bird man \u2013 each with a carved face of exquisite sophistication. Which is older\ufeff, the inchoate mud or the subtle carving? The disjuncture (look closely and you can see the glue and stitches) is at the exact faultline of our cultural preconceptions. For it turns out that the mud is contemporary, whereas the faces are legally acquired antiquities.<\/p>\n
A winged sphinx, a seated goddess, a bird man. Each\u00a0is carved with exquisite sophistication<\/p>\n
A three-screen film installation shows men making mud bricks in present\ufeff-day Sudan. Or might this too be the past? The spectacle of hands and feet, water and clay; of moulds, shovels and barrows, the sun beating down and the builders waiting for the wherewithal to dam up water, is both mesmerising \u2013 each screen choreographed so that its movements overflow into the next \u2013 and appallingly Sisyphean. \ufeffThe longer you watch, the more you\u00a0sense that somehow all this labour will by stymied by fate; otherwise the old dams of Sudan would survive today.<\/p>\n
Cabinets contain what appear to be immaculately crafted wooden buildings: the seats of capital cities, as it seems. Each is in fact a model of the plinth of toppled monuments in Kharkiv, Aleppo and Baghdad. And in Cherri\u2019s central film, The Watchman<\/a>, a lone Turkish sentry mans the border between the two sides of Cyprus, his eyes red with the exhaustion of watching.<\/p>\n A bird flies into the window; strange lights appear on the horizon; perhaps soldiers are \ufeffcoming. The 26-minute film is extremely gradual, and superbly composed, shot by shot. A study of hallucination, dread and tension, what strikes is its Beckettian circularity. The enemy never arrives.<\/p>\n The floor below has enormous paintings by Laura and Rachel Lancaster<\/b>, twins who share a studio in the nearby Ouseburn area of Newcastle. Each image holds a memory intact \u2013 sisters holding hands, a long-ago picnic, sunlight on a woman\u2019s hair \u2013 but in different idioms. Laura\u2019s wet-on-wet technique keeps the act of trying to remember in play; Rachel\u2019s transparent smoothness has the gentleness of a hovering vignette.<\/p>\n Rachel Lancaster\u2019s Searcher<\/p>\n \u2018Each image holds a memory intact\u2019: Laura Lancaster\u2019s Wake Up Dreaming<\/p>\n In another gallery, the brilliantly smart Harold Offeh has taken the Baltic\u2019s famous warmth of welcome yet further with a playscape for children and adults (The Mothership Collective 2.0<\/b>). Visitors can walk into a sunny yellow film set, and make new sentences, games and visions with a range of media from music to light. One in three children in the north-east grows up in poverty. At Baltic their imaginations can \ufeffrun free.<\/p>\n![\"Rachel](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/47536.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\u2018Each](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/47535.jpeg\")
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