Thursday night (15 April) in Manchester feels like a real art festival (unlike the Manchester International Festival) but one that appears to be a happy accident. Castlefield Art Gallery, the Chinese Arts Centre, Cornerhouse and Rogue Project Space are all previewing their latest exhibitions, all within walking distance of each other.
Castlefield Gallery
David Osbaldeston:
Out of Time (The Light of Day / The Action of the Play)
I’m looking forward to seeing this show by my newly discovered neighbour, David Osbaldeston. Through manipulated images of news photography and a print series of interpretive book cover designs from Luigi Pirandello’s celebrated play Six Characters in Search of an Author, the exhibition will explore relationships between the gallery and theatre staging, displacement, reality, illusion and social discord.
The journalistic images are taken from photographic records made between the 1970’s and 1990’s of protests or accidents that report a breakdown of social and economic order such as the LA Riots, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Waco Siege, the Piper Alpha disaster and the Iraqi Highway of Death. Re-photographed, appropriated and re-presented by Osbaldeston with textual snippets, amplified in scale and printed on 1980s Ilford photographic paper; the works draw playful attention to the constructed nature of the photographic image.
Exhibition Continues: Friday 16 April – Sunday 6 June 2010
http://www.castlefieldgallery.co.uk/Default.asp?eKey=333&eP=1
Address: 2 Hewitt Street, Manchester, M15 4GB
Cornerhouse
Contemporary Art Iraq
The first comprehensive UK exhibition of new and recent contemporary art from Iraq since the first Gulf War, examining practices that are emerging with fresh perspectives from a culture marked by conflict and turmoil. This has a bad taste because of the evil racism of UK immigration policy with 5 artists refused entry to the country because they don’t have bank accounts in Iraq. See
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/iraqi-artists-denied-entry-to-britain-for-their-own-exhibition-1934726.html I wonder whether the shameful Foreign Secretary and the Iraqi Ambassador will turn up to the preview, and if they are booked to make opening remarks.
Exhibition continues: Fri 16 April to Sun 20 June
http://www.cornerhouse.org/contemporaryartiraq
70 Oxford Street, Manchester M1 5NH, UK
Chinese Arts Centre
Lan Wei / Decaying End
anothermountainman (Stanley Wong)
Exhibition continues: 16th April – 12th June 2010
Lan Wei / Decaying End is anothermountainman’s first solo photography exhibition in the UK. It features a number of haunting large-scale photographic prints of abandoned, incomplete building projects from across Asia. Following the opening of its doors to foreign investment in China in the 1980s there was frenzied investment in real estate, which was exposed to corruption and contributed to the eventual collapse of the property market in the late 1990s. When the bubble burst huge numbers of building projects were abandoned and left unfinished. This wave of abortive building construction spread across other Asian cities that also experienced the same pattern of meteoric economic growth and collapse. The photographs in the exhibition were taken in China, Taiwan, Thailand, Cambodia, Turkey and Singapore.
Castlefield Gallery
David Osbaldeston:
Out of Time (The Light of Day / The Action of the Play)
I’m looking forward to seeing this show by my newly discovered neighbour, David Osbaldeston. Through manipulated images of news photography and a print series of interpretive book cover designs from Luigi Pirandello’s celebrated play Six Characters in Search of an Author, the exhibition will explore relationships between the gallery and theatre staging, displacement, reality, illusion and social discord.
The journalistic images are taken from photographic records made between the 1970’s and 1990’s of protests or accidents that report a breakdown of social and economic order such as the LA Riots, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Waco Siege, the Piper Alpha disaster and the Iraqi Highway of Death. Re-photographed, appropriated and re-presented by Osbaldeston with textual snippets, amplified in scale and printed on 1980s Ilford photographic paper; the works draw playful attention to the constructed nature of the photographic image.
Exhibition Continues: Friday 16 April – Sunday 6 June 2010
http://www.castlefieldgallery.co.uk/Default.asp?eKey=333&eP=1
Address: 2 Hewitt Street, Manchester, M15 4GB
Cornerhouse
Contemporary Art Iraq
The first comprehensive UK exhibition of new and recent contemporary art from Iraq since the first Gulf War, examining practices that are emerging with fresh perspectives from a culture marked by conflict and turmoil. This has a bad taste because of the evil racism of UK immigration policy with 5 artists refused entry to the country because they don’t have bank accounts in Iraq. See
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/iraqi-artists-denied-entry-to-britain-for-their-own-exhibition-1934726.html I wonder whether the shameful Foreign Secretary and the Iraqi Ambassador will turn up to the preview, and if they are booked to make opening remarks.
Exhibition continues: Fri 16 April to Sun 20 June
http://www.cornerhouse.org/contemporaryartiraq
70 Oxford Street, Manchester M1 5NH, UK
Chinese Arts Centre
Lan Wei / Decaying End
anothermountainman (Stanley Wong)
Exhibition continues: 16th April – 12th June 2010
Lan Wei / Decaying End is anothermountainman’s first solo photography exhibition in the UK. It features a number of haunting large-scale photographic prints of abandoned, incomplete building projects from across Asia. Following the opening of its doors to foreign investment in China in the 1980s there was frenzied investment in real estate, which was exposed to corruption and contributed to the eventual collapse of the property market in the late 1990s. When the bubble burst huge numbers of building projects were abandoned and left unfinished. This wave of abortive building construction spread across other Asian cities that also experienced the same pattern of meteoric economic growth and collapse. The photographs in the exhibition were taken in China, Taiwan, Thailand, Cambodia, Turkey and Singapore.
I’m also looking forward to meeting Wang Jun (picture), the current artist in residence and who is opening his studio also on this full evening. Since his recent residency in China, Phil Davenport has told me a lot of good things about Wang, whom he worked with out there.http://www.chinese-arts-centre.org/
Market Buildings, Thomas Street, Manchester, M4 1EU
Rogue Artists' Studios & Project Space
Tom Hobson, In the blessed abyss of the eternal ether
Exhibition continues: 15th – 24th of April 2010 (By appointment only)
With a monumental effort comparable to the great men of history and the inventiveness of a mad professor, Hobson has created a device for talking to the sky and turned mountains upside down for this (his first solo) exhibition.
http://www.rogueartistsstudios.co.uk/
Address: 66-72 Chapeltown Street, Piccadilly, Manchester, M1 2WH
