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Current Events
PIVOT: Editions
27 May 2022 — 4 September 2022Affordable editioned work by five artists based across the North West.
Artists: Pat Flynn, Garth Gratrix, Bridget O’Gorman, Salma Noor and Chester Tenneson.
These five artists are currently taking part in the inaugural PIVOT programme: a scheme delivered in partnership by Castlefield Gallery and the Bluecoat, Liverpool which includes bespoke mentoring and skills development for mid-career artists.
Pat Flynn’s work highlights the seductive qualities of Hollywood films, computer games, consumer goods and advertising. He makes digitally-rendered hyper-real images that over expose these qualities; exploring how our relationship to beliefs, rituals, ideologies, morality and mortality are caught up with images and objects. patflynn.co.uk
Garth Gratrix’s work deals with queerness and, or queering; how working with materials, language and space can remain ‘slippery’, experimental, and curious. Their minimal practice explores how ‘queer’ is embedded within construction materials such as wood, concrete, metal, and paint. Looking at how dating apps, such as Grindr, feed into performance anxiety and societal fears of ‘measuring up’, Gratrix creates installations that reclaim and reframe Language, expectation, scale, and nonsense. garthgratrix.com
Bridget O’Gorman works with text, live events, video and sculptural installation. Her enquiries move between mental, material and embodied perspectives; considering otherness with speculative and expanded corporeal experiences. She is currently researching a new departure in her work, reflecting on the disabled experience in relation to gender, creativity and access. bridgetgorman.com
Salma Noor’s multimedia practice includes the use of digital platforms to interrogate the structures of power that we inhabit and those which inhabit us. She splices historical imagery, often sourced from familial archives, into GIFs, computer animated collages and immersive installations. Noor is the co-founder of DAAD Futurism with Amrita Dhallu and Helen Starr and was both a member and in-house designer of the Radical Womxn’s DANCE Party — a Liverpool-based collective which organised events as a form of protest to bring awareness to the struggles of womxn in anti-capitalist movements. behance.net/Salma_Noor
Chester Tenneson’s work explores the absurdity within the norms of institutional design and authority, examining the idiosyncratic nature of commonplace objects and language. His position as a transgender man is important; his artworks frequently reflect his experience as an outsider from everyday norms and language, which have a cisgender base. His artworks question the absurdity of these everyday norms, playing with gendered gestures and objects, as well as more general rules and instructions which command our everyday experience and public placing. chestertenneson.com
PIVOT is delivered in partnership by Bluecoat and Castlefield Gallery. Both organisations share the vision that the North West of England is a place where artists are able to live and work whilst experiencing national and international success. With over five years experience and a strong track record in the field of contemporary visual art, each artist has been awarded a £5000 bursary and access to a programme that supports their practice over an 18 month period.
British Art Show 9
27 May 2022 — 4 September 2022Hayward Gallery Touring’s landmark exhibition British Art Show 9 (BAS9) opens in Manchester from 27 May – 4 September 2022. British Art Show is recognised as the most pertinent and ambitious recurrent exhibition of contemporary art produced in the UK, taking place every five years and bringing the work of some of the most exciting contemporary artists to Castlefield Gallery, HOME, Manchester Art Gallery and the Whitworth. This presentation will also mark the return of the British Art Show to Manchester which originally hosted British Art Show 4 in 1995 and British Art Show 6 in 2006.
British Art Show 9 is curated by Irene Aristizábal and Hammad Nasar and focuses on work made since 2015. The exhibition reflects a precarious moment in Britain’s history, which has brought politics of identity and nation, concerns of social, racial and environmental justice, and questions of agency to the centre of public consciousness. The artists presented in the exhibition respond in critical ways to this complex context. Through their works, they imagine new futures, propose alternative economies, explore new modes of resistance and find ways of living together. They do so through film, photography, painting, sculpture, and performance, as well as through multimedia projects that don’t sit easily in any one category.
The exhibition is structured around three main themes – Healing, Care and Reparative History, Tactics for Togetherness, Imagining New Futures – and has been conceived as a cumulative experience, adapting and changing for each city, and presenting different combinations of artists and artworks that respond to their distinctive local contexts.
In Manchester, the exhibition will showcase 19 artists whose works directly address BAS9’s three main curatorial themes. Their projects aim to extend our understanding of identity to beyond the human, often blurring the boundaries between art and life. Through their works, they propose alternative futures, economies and ways of living together. The presentation will feature many ambitious immersive installations, five new works and two new commissions made specifically by artists in response to local histories and cultures in Manchester.
Joey Holder and Grace Ndiritu will be presented at Castlefield Gallery.
List of artists presented in Manchester:
| Hurvin Anderson
Michael Armitage Simeon Barclay Oliver Beer Than Hussein Clark Oona Doherty Sean Edwards |
GAIKA
Patrick Goddard Anne Hardy Andy Holden Joey Holder Elaine Mitchener Grace Ndiritu |
Hardeep Pandhal
Hetain Patel Abigail Reynolds Katie Schwab Caroline Walker |
Images: Joey Holder, Semelparous, 2020, installation view. Photo: Damian Griffiths. © the artist. Courtesy the artist.
Grace Ndiritu, Plant Theatre for Plant People, 2021. © Grace Ndiritu. Installation view, British Art Show 9, 2021-22, Wolverhampton Art Gallery. A Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition organised in collaboration with galleries
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