MORE than half a million people are expected to visit the new V&A Dundee in its first year, bringing a welcome boost to the local economy as the city continues its economic and cultural transformation.
But similar establishments in the city are not shying away from what could be considered formidable competition.
READ MORE: Dundee hailed as 'new world centre of design' as V&A opens doors
Indeed, they appear to be embracing the opportunity for potential collaboration with the new museum.
One of these is DCA – Dundee Contemporary Arts – which opened to the public almost 20 years ago and is only a ten-minute walk from the V&A.
Its director Beth Bate told us she did not regard V&A Dundee as competition.
READ MORE: Dundee deserves the Guggenheim effect with the opening of the V&A
“One of the things I was very keen to do when I came here in 2016 was to make friends with our colleagues at V&A, and we are all keen to talk about how we can work together.
“It never struck me as competition. If people come to Dundee and turn up at the V&A and leave without visiting the rest of the city, arts and cultural organisations, eating in our restaurants and bars and shopping in our shops, then it won’t have done its job.”
Two new shows in DCA will make that walk worthwhile.
The ambitious Black Flag, by Catalan artist Santiago Sierra, is on its UK premiere.
It comprises two walls of monochrome pictures taken on expeditions to the extremes of the earth. North is on one wall, south on the other. Between them are two large pictures of the black flags – symbols of the anarchist movement – planted at each pole, representing the whole planet squeezed into a few metres.
Bate said to bring such work to Dundee, with its own links to polar exploration, “felt quite timely”.
Likewise, the other exhibition – Mobile Homestead by the late Mike Kelley – three videos which relate a road trip through his home town of Detroit’s main thoroughfare with a camper-van-sized model of his former house.
Bate explained: “The connection with Dundee and our post-industrial decline, culture-led regeneration – Detroit is Unesco city of design in the USA, Dundee is the only Unesco design city in the UK – meant there were richer connotations as well.”
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