Temenos: Greek, meaning ‘land cut off and assigned as sanctuary or holy area.’
Temenos is a bold contemporary artwork, which also recalls the heritage of Middlesbrough and the Tees Valley. Its construction will call on the traditional skills of the region: precision engineering and heavy industry.
Standing three times taller than the Angel of the North, at a height of nearly 50 meters and spanning 120 meters in length, Temenos stands shoulder to shoulder with Middlesbrough’s landmark Transporter Bridge. The sheer scale and strength of the stainless steel mesh structure physically responds to the locality’s industrial past in a poignant and profound manner.
It will represent the coming together of art, architecture and engineering on a giant scale.
Temenos is the first of five sculptures that will combine as the world’s largest series of public art – The Tees Valley Giants.
The epically scaled installations created by Turner Prize winning sculptor Anish Kapoor and pioneering structural designer Cecil Balmond, will soon grace the Tees Valley with the first of these, Temenos, completed and located at Middlehaven, Middlesbrough.
Over the next decade four more structures will be located within each of the other four Tees Valley boroughs: Stockton, Hartlepool, Darlington and Redcar and Cleveland.
Massive in impact, scale and world status, Tees Valley Giants is symbolic of the aspiration and ongoing commitment of Tees Valley Unlimited to enhance the way in which the Tees Valley is viewed and experienced.
Anish Kapoor is one of the worlds most acclaimed artists. He has, over the last 30 years, produced an extraordinarily varied body of work that questions notions about sculpture and our relation to objects. He has worked at various scales from the monumental to the human, somehow always holding on to the intimate.
Born in Bombay in 1954, Kapoor’s first solo exhibition was held in Paris in 1980. His international reputation was quickly established with a string of solo shows in London and worldwide including venues such as Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland, Tate Gallery and Hayward Gallery in London, Reina Sofia in Madrid and CAPC in Bordeaux, France.
He represented Britain in 1990 at the Venice Biennale, for which he was awarded the prestigious Premio Duemilla. He also won the Turner Prize in 1991 and was awarded a CBE in 2003.
Kapoor’s work is collected worldwide, notably by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, Fondazione Prada in Milan, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the De Pont foundation in the Netherlands and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan. Kapoor has also been chosen to design the British Memorial Sculpture at Ground Zero in New York. Most recently Anish Kapoor in collaboration with Cecil Balmond won the commission for what is to be Britain’s largest piece of public art – the London 2010 Olympic Games Monument titled Orbit- it will stand taller than the statue of Liberty at 120meters.
Cecil Balmond was born in Sri Lanka, where he trained as a civil engineer before joining Arup, London, in 1968. He founded the Advance Geometry Unit (AGU) in 2000, where he now works with scientists, architects and engineers to pursue his interest in the genius of form using numbers, music and mathematics as vital sources.
At the end of the 1980’s, Balmond started collaborating with a number of pace-setting architects including Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, Arata Isozaki, Toyo Ito and Alvaro Siza. Collaborations with Kapoor include the breathtaking sculpture ‘Marsyas’ at Tate Modern, London (2003).
In 2006 AGU completed The Pedro and Ines Footbridge in Coimbra, Portugal. The widely published bridge has an unprecedented structure that allows for the poetic pacing of pedestrian passage across a river. It encapsulates the magical, unpredictable and animated quality Balmond seeks in all AGU projects, whether collaborative or not. Projects currently under construction include the Centre Pompidou, Metz with Shigeru Ban (2009) and the CCTV New Headquarters, Beijing with OMA (2009).
Cecil Balmond is the author of ‘No.9’ (1998) and ‘informal’ (2002) which has won the Banister Fletcher prize for best book on architecture. Last year saw Prestel’s publication of Balmond’s latest book ‘Element’ and a major exhibition of his work at The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, Balmond’s art piece ‘H-Edge’ originally created for a solo-show for Artists Space New York (2006) will be the focus of an exhibition later this year at The Graham Foundation in Chicago.
Tees Valley Unlimited secured Temenos for North East England with funding from government initiative. The Northern Way, Regional Development Agency One NorthEast and key partners, the Arts Council England, Northern Rock Foundation, BioRegional Quintain and Middlesbrough Football Club.
Tees Valley Unlimted 2009
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