Press Release 2024

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KEY STATISTICS 

The return on investment for the various funders who contributed to hosting Turner Prize 2023 and Eastbourne ALIVE: 

● Return on investment for Arts Council England of 32:1 (£32 return for every £1 invested by ACE)

● Return on investment for East Sussex County Council of 214:1 

● Return on investment for Eastbourne Borough Council of 1305:1 

● Over 385 events, exhibitions, performances and workshops took place between June 2023 and April 2024 

● More than 20 high profile public arts commissions from international names from Helen Cammock to Michael Rakowitz were placed across the town on the seafront, outside Towner Eastbourne, on Eastbourne Pier and in community spaces and cafes - and explore the notion of a modern-day monument. These works were viewed by over 12.5 million people, either in person or online 

● A total of over 20,000 hours of art engagement opportunities were made available for young people and the wider community 

● Over 300 artists locally, nationally and internationally took place, with further creatives involved in making the work, supported by nearly 100 volunteers 

● Over 100 work and volunteering placements were provided for young people in Sussex 

● 130+ Eastbourne businesses took part in Eastbourne ALIVE, including dressing their shops and buildings in a colourful brand during the Turner Prize 

● 260,000 plus audience members and 500 participants took part in events

● Through the evaluation of the project, we can see signs that perceptions of Eastbourne are shifting locally, nationally and internationally. 

● Residents speak positively about the town and are proud they have hosted such a prestigious event 

● Visitors feel that Eastbourne is a place for them. Eastbourne ALIVE and the Turner Prize have made them think differently about arts in Eastbourne, with them now seeing it as an arts destination. 

Key participation and impact data from Eastbourne ALIVE's monitoring and the evaluation by RMR.

RMR are people-centred strategy, research and evaluation specialists. Led by Dr Ruth Melville, they conducted the evaluation looking at the economic impact of Eastbourne ALIVE and hosting the Turner Prize, changing perception of Eastbourne and partnership working in the arts and cultural sector. Find out more about their work at rmresearch.uk

THE FULL REPORT IS AVAILABLE HERE↓

Major Public Art

To accompany the Turner Prize exhibition, a series of major artworks were installed across public spaces in Eastbourne as part of Eastbourne ALIVE. These interventions explored the notion of a modern-day monument. Drawing on the resort’s original design from the mid - nineteenth century - laid out in long tree-lined boulevards marked by grand monuments and statues – these temporary public art installations investigated what cultural markers might look like today and what events, objects or people they would memorialise. 

Michael Rakowitz’s winged bull titled, ‘The invisible enemy should not exist (Lamassu of Nineveh)’, courtesy of the Mayor of London and Tate, is currently on Towner Plaza. The original Lamassu stood at the entrance to Nergal Gate of Nineveh from ca. 700 B.C. until February 2015 when ISIS destroyed it along with artifacts in the nearby Mosul Museum. Michael Rakowitz reconstructed the Lamassu for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London, using empty metal Iraqi date syrup cans to clad an underlying steel armature. The salvage of date syrup cans makes present the human, economic and ecological disasters caused by the Iraq Wars and their aftermath. Iraqi dates were once considered the best in the world and constituted the country’s second largest export after oil. In the late 1970s, the Iraqi date industry listed over 30 million date palms in the country. By the end of the 2003 Iraq War, only three million remained. 

‘I Don’t Have Another Land’ by the internationally renowned and Turner Prize-shortlisted artist Nathan Coley, invites the town to explore the contemporary text sculpture, which was inspired by graffiti found on a wall in Jerusalem in the early 2000s. The phrases used in Coley’s artwork, from overheard conversations, song lyrics, news reports and books, take on new meaning in each place they’re exhibited. The work is part of the Towner Eastbourne Collection, acquired with Art Fund support and the assistance of the Arts Council England / V&A Museum Purchase Grant Fund. Originally commissioned by Charleston, Firle. Courtesy studioNathanColey, Parafin Gallery, London. The installation is supported by the South Downs National Park Authority with funding from the UK Shared Prosperity Fund. 

Turner Prize winner Helen Cammock was commissioned by Eastbourne ALIVE and Artists’ Research Centre to produce a new body of work titled ‘Garden’, which is displayed on the exterior walls of Eastbourne Winter Garden, curated by Ben Roberts. In her work, Cammock examines mainstream historical and contemporary narratives about Blackness, womanhood, oppression and resistance, wealth and power, poverty and vulnerability through film, photography, print, text, song, and performance.

Right at the heart of the town centre, locals as well as visitors were able to enjoy a moment of contemplation within a pink shipping container, a work by Eve De Haan. ‘It’s nicer to be nice’ is an urban ‘healing garden’, filled with pink sand and plants, where the public can enter and enjoy a moment of escapism. Eve De Haan is a Mauritian-English artist. She uses the moniker “Half a Roast Chicken”, chosen to challenge expectations of the traditional notions of what art should be. 

Jason Bruges Studio x Eastbourne Experiments has been exploring the natural elements and their effects on people and wellbeing in a coastal town. They partnered with the National Saturday Club to host an Art & Design workshop for young people, designing dioramas inspired by the coastal environment and relationships to the sea. Jason Bruges us a multidisciplinary artist and designer, based in London. Internationally renowned as a pioneer of the hybrid space between art, architecture, and technology, his artworks are moments of theatre that transform in response to their surroundings and connect people with their environments. A master of light and kinetic art, he uses a high-tech, mixed-media palette to explore spectacle, time-based interventions, and dynamic immersive experiences. 

Delivery Partners

Eastbourne ALIVE were also working with a range of creative organisations across the town including Compass Arts, Devonshire Collective, Take the Space, Talent Accelerator, Coastal Schools Partnership and Sussex Modern. These partners delivered an engaging and thought-provoking creative programme. 

Devonshire Collective

Devonshire Collective co-curated new work with Young People, Devonshire Youth Collective, and marginalised communities to change perceptions of spaces across the town with commissions, events, talks, and films inspired by Turner Prize 2023. 

Devonshire Collective commissioned four artists to spark conversations and rethink public spaces in Eastbourne: 

Rottingdean Bazaar are artists James Theseus Buck and Luke Brooks. Working together as a duo since meeting at Central Saint Martins in 2015, their work straddles creative direction, fashion design, video direction, installation, and fine art practice. Their work ‘Skill Cut Winner’ was placed in the Arcade on the Eastbourne Pier to coincide with Turner Prize 2023.

Adam Moore’s work ‘Still life’ can also be found on the Eastbourne Pier. Moore is a transdisciplinary artist from East London of Caribbean and European heritage. He speaks in a range of artistic languages and strategies, moving freely across dance, architecture, ceramics, design, painting, sculpture, sound, video, and text, resulting in multimedia performance installations. 

Nadina Ali, a graphic artist from Marseille, worked with Devonshire Collective and Sanctuary, delivering an exciting project for the Devonshire Youth Collective, working on a collaborative mural, ‘Love, Empathy, Respect, Dignity’, placed on the hoardings on the seafront at the Eastbourne Redoubt.

Madeleine Pledge re-imagined a public space near to the Devonshire Collective Learn Studio in Eastbourne with her work ‘superstructure (a public image)’. Pledge works with sculpture via replicas and remakes, she often uses the surfaces and structure of fashion and design to approach bodies as subjects and objects within systems of production and power. Her work attempts to find and hold space between the repetitive tyranny of capitalist production and fictions of individualised authorship as well as artistic originality. 

Compass Arts

Compass Arts presented Promenade, a visual arts exhibition in Eastbourne seafront hotels, exploring the theme of ‘water’ and ‘land’ in an environmental context. Compass artists also curated an exhibition titled ‘The Big Conversation’, which offered a platform to vulnerable and disabled artists, publicly communicating Eastbourne’s support for inclusion & diversity to its visitors, and challenging perceptions. 

Take the Space

Take the Space supports arts and heritage organisations to move from policy to practice – to develop diversity strategies that create inclusive spaces. The organisation enables artists from Black and British multi-ethnic backgrounds to tell their stories and take their space. Take the Space presents Saidi Kanda & Mvula Mandondo, Akila Richards and Nathan Gardner. 

Saidi Kanda is regarded as one of the best performers of recent times within African Traditional and New African Music. Hailing from Tanzania and learning his craft from his Grandfather, Kanda grew up to become one of the most talented multi-instrumentalists of African Traditional Music with a sweet melodic voice accompanied by mesmerising, charismatic stage presence with a feel-good factor, through the energy of his performance. Presented by African Night Fever and Take the Space, Saidi Kanda brought his band Mvula Mandondo to Eastbourne for an evening of spiced up East African Traditional and New African music for a journey through the African Savanna. 

Akila Richards is an award-winning poet, writer and spoken word artist, performing and collaborating nationally and internationally. Her portfolio includes facilitating and initiating creative and cultural events, offering creative workshops, managing projects, and providing mentoring and coaching to writers. Following a residency at Brighton Dome, Akila is developing ‘The Rest Experience’ programme.

Nathan Gardner is a filmmaker and producer who created the Young People’s Digital Programme, enabling Young People to experience working with experienced videographers and film producers while learning how to produce a treatment for a music video using just one’s phone. 

East Sussex Arts Partnership: Is it Art? and Eastbourne ALIVE artists

Stuart Waters is an Eastbourne based, intersectional dance artist who places access, care, diversity, and inclusion at the heart of his work. Waters has been developing his unique artistic voice in international advocacy for diversity and inclusion through public speaking, co-creation, teaching and performance. A Queer Collision is a mash-up of private and historical queer stories that is both funny and poignant.

Local dance artist, Yanaëlle Thiran, took to the streets and coastline of Eastbourne to rehearse and perform her movement project, The Performance Path. Audiences were invited to participate and experience the town through Thiran’s movement and choreographic responses to its architecture and nature. 

Liz Wilson’s practice explores the stretch of time between the industrial and post-industrial; In particular the beginning of automation and how this is altering our relationships with technology. To coincide with Turner Prize she presents OF CONFLUENCE in collaboration with The blackShed Gallery. Using site visits as a catalyst to research, write and produce works, she explores the human-machine relationship of both ‘conductor’ and ‘orchestra’ and how these performative roles manifest themselves within both our natural and fabricated environments.

Flatland Projects is an East Sussex based artist-led exhibition, education, and community programme founded in 2018 by artists Ben Urban and Billy Stanley in Hastings, East Sussex. Flatland’s core focuses are to support artists of an emerging stage of practice to reach new audiences, access funding, and to create collaborative ambitious projects with artists for the first time in their career. Flatland Projects commissioned two artists to coinside with Turner Prize 2023 and Eastbourne ALIVE - Martyn Cross and Tarek Lakhrissi.

‘My Assembled Selves’ is a solo exhibition by Bristol based Artist Martyn Cross. Swelling clouds, aged turf and morphing figures populate the paintings and drawings of Cross. Within this presentation at Flatland Projects, personal, elemental and historic fragments assemble together, crafting a series of works which are untethered to any singular era, person or place.Martyn Cross (b. 1975, Yate, UK) holds a BA in Fine Art from Bath Spa University. He lives and works in Bristol, UK. 

Tarek Lakhrissi is a French artist and poet with a background in literature. He works across installation, performance, film, text and sculpture, engaging with political and social issues around transformative narratives within language, magic, weirdness, codes and love. 

Phoene Cave and Transit Collective presented TRANSIT, a cross-arts collaboration which animated Towner non-gallery spaces in February 2024. Collective improvisations responding to the East Sussex Arts Partnership funding programme Is it Art? question as part of Eastbourne ALIVE. 

Guided by artist Sophie Wright, young people aged 16 to 24 met weekly to mind-map creative ideas, meditate and holistically explore wellbeing and safe spaces. Through this process, three meditation pods were created to be placed across East Sussex locations for visitors to enjoy a reflective moment.

Associated Artists

Renee Vaughan Sutherland & Flo Wright at Motcombe Pool Artist Residency. The project focused on community engagement, youth voice, wellbeing and creativity in a space that is much-loved by the locals and will highly benefit from the animation of currently disused rooms. 

Grace Lau’s ‘Portraits in a Chinese Studio’ in a disused shop on Terminus Road to celebrate the Lunar New Year 2024. To celebrate Chinese New Year, artist Grace Lau invited audience members to get a free photo taken inside a reimagined 19th century Chinese portrait studio. 

Youth Voice 

Young People are at the heart of the Eastbourne ALIVE programme. Towner Eastbourne is delivering a bespoke Turner Prize programme with Year 9, SEN and home educated students in the region to increase confidence in engaging with contemporary art and supporting the development of creative practice. 

Working with the Coastal Schools Partnership, the 14 member schools will visit Towner on Mondays when the gallery is closed to the public. Each visiting student will be given a guide for young people in the gallery created by Richard Phoenix and year 9 students at The Turing School. This guide includes activities and a soundtrack to support feeling comfortable in a gallery context, exploring materials, discussing historical context and imagining your place in the future. 

Following these visits Towner is delivering a day-long creative workshop in each participating school or group. These sessions are led by artists who will share their practice and collaborate with students to respond to the artistic practices and themes of the Turner Prize exhibition. 

Over the academic year, Towner is delivering Philosophy for Children, Communities and Colleges (P4C) training with art teachers and community group leaders. This group methodology is a way to practice sharing ideas, speaking and listening, holding other perspectives and being comfortable with the unknown. Towner’s aim is to embed creative learning as a school-wide priority for the long-term benefit of all. 

Alongside this schools’ work, Eastbourne ALIVE is developing a Youth Voice strategy working with creative organisations in the town. Training in Youth Voice will lead to an action plan and the development of a manifesto for Eastbourne. 

Sussex Modern meanwhile issued their second edition of the Zine, which complemented their agenda in aiming to invigorate tourism and culture uptake across Sussex. Talent Accelerator will be working closely with East Sussex College Eastbourne Campus on work experiences and placements within Eastbourne ALIVE programme. 

In addition to the varied youth programming by the cultural partners, Eastbourne ALIVE is working closely with Talent Accelerator and Coastal Schools Partnership, to bridge the gap for young artists out of education entering first creative roles as well as those, who haven’t chosen the higher education route when pursuing a creative future. From work experience placements to volunteering roles and creative workshops, there was something for everyone throughout the Eastbourne ALIVE programming in 2023 and 2024.

There were two pieces of research carried out around the Turner Prize and Eastbourne ALIVE.

RMR conducted an evaluation looking at the economic impact of Eastbourne ALIVE and hosting the Turner Prize, changing perception of Eastbourne and partnership working in the arts and cultural sector.

Shared Intelligence and Common Futures, working with East Sussex Public Health, assessed the impacts of involvement in Eastbourne ALIVE on Young People’s emotional wellbeing and mental health. The results will be included in the East Sussex Public Health report and presented at the 2024 Annual Southeast Public Health Conference.

The project was devised to capitalise on the opportunity of the Turner Prize and ensure that Eastbourne residents, particularly Young People and those living within the most disadvantaged communities, take the opportunity to define and celebrate their town and their experience of living in Eastbourne. 

Download the press release for a full list of project partners, collaborators and artists.

- ENDS- 

Notes to Editors 

For further information: 

Nicola Jeffs 

nj@nicolajeffs.com 

07794 694 754 

Eastbourne ALIVE is an ambitious creative town-wide partnership project celebrating the local art scene, creatives, and businesses. It highlights a wide range of projects including the reanimation of underused spaces through public art, dance, and music events as well as training and workshop opportunities. Eastbourne ALIVE is working with a range of cultural partners across the town as well as East Sussex Public Health to catalyse lasting change. Eastbourne ALIVE celebrated Turner Prize 2023 coming to Towner Eastbourne with an ambitious wraparound partnership programme of public art, exhibitions, movement, music and workshops. eastbournealive.co.uk

Towner Eastbourne has been collecting and exhibiting contemporary art for more than 100 years. The gallery sits where the coast and the South Downs meet and presents exhibitions of national and international importance for audiences in Eastbourne, the UK and beyond, showcasing the most exciting and creative developments in modern and contemporary art. Towner develops and supports artistic practice and collaborates with individuals, communities and organisations to deliver an inclusive, connected and accessible public programme of live events, film and learning. Towner’s collection of almost 5000 works is best known for its modern British art – including the largest and most significant body of work by Eric Ravilious – and a growing collection of international contemporary art. Towner Eastbourne was Museum, of the Year 2020 and was the host of Turner Prize 2023 townereastbourne.org.uk 

Devonshire Collective (DC) are a cultural and community organisation re-animating a network of ex-retail sites in the Devonshire ward, Eastbourne. DC combine national ambition with a grassroots ethos: commissioning significant solo exhibitions and public realm visual arts projects by emerging, underrepresented UK artists that attune to national debates and speak to the lived experiences of our local communities. The upcoming programme is connected by a vision that centres artistic practice and focuses on co-creation and socially engaged research methods devonshirecollective.co.uk

Compass Arts is based in Eastbourne, Compass Arts is an intergenerational, co-creative, artist led organisation for anyone vulnerable to social isolation, lived trauma, mental illness and hidden disabilities. Our tried and tested approach recognises that people feel most empowered when given independence, responsibility and are at the ‘giving’ end of care. Nine interdisciplinary artists deliver a weekly program across several sites, free of charge and without any expectation of participants. Our spaces are always safe, supportive and compassionate and provide new direction and skills in people’s lives. The artists’ regularly work together to put on exhibitions, events and self-publish. A Collective was formed for participants who identify as an artist and wish to develop their contemporary practices and have greater public interface. We welcome partnership projects from the wider community that look to improve our environment and the lives of people in our environment compasscommunityarts.co.uk

Sussex Modern is the wine tourism development agency for Sussex. Telling a story of Sussex that is about more than sleepy villages, coastal retirement towns and historic ruins, we celebrate and promote Sussex as now home to a vibrant, youthful culture for audiences with metropolitan tastes for world-class art and high-quality wine – all within breathtaking landscapes. Founded in 2017, Sussex Modern is an independent business consortium with a distinctive voice and an agile approach, working to build a new narrative for Sussex, which will bring visitors and investment to the region by celebrating the county’s unique contribution to modern culture and experiences sussexmodern.org.uk

Take the Space is led by senior cultural leader, Jenny Williams, who brings lived experience as well as sector experience to anti-racism and inclusion work. Jenny has over 28 years of experience in the arts and heritage sector, a track record as a leader on diversity and inclusion, and is one of the few Black producers working across arts and heritage in the UK. In 2020 Jenny was awarded the British Empire Medal in the New Year’s Honours list for her work with Revoluton Arts, the Creative People and Places programme in Luton, during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a Fellow on the Clore Leadership Programme (2007-9), she was mentored by acclaimed playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah takethespace.com

Talent Accelerator is a programme that supports young people (aged 5 to 25) into creative careers in East Sussex. This is done through raising understanding of the range of jobs available in the creative industries, developing high quality work experience, developing opportunities for skills development and expanding what creative businesses and cultural organisations can offer young people dlwp.com/talentaccelerator

Coastal Schools Partnership (East Sussex) is a partnership of schools and colleges located in Eastbourne and the surrounding area. By linking our resources, expertise, enthusiasm and commitment, the aim is to develop projects and ideas that inspire, excite and offer creative opportunities for children and young people. In so doing the hope is to enable the pupils to work together for mutual benefit and the benefit of others across our town coastalschoolspartnership.org