Asia Triennial Manchester

The projects are coming thick and fast at the moment; immediately after the re-launch of the Irwell Sculpture Trail, we go into the Manchester Asia Triennial. To coincide, Bury Art Museum presents its second 5 Places manifestation, with guest curator Australian Irene Barberis programming UK based photographer Dinu Li (first picture) alongside Tam Wei Ping (picture 2 and 3).

There is an interesting dialogue between the two artists' presentations: Tam Wei Ping's Pilgrim's Journey series questions whether all the places are the same; and where the boundary, identity and praxis to ascertain location and cultural identity rests. Dinu Li has four works from his series documenting the possessions of Chinese illegal immigrants in Liverpool.

Irene Barberis and 5 Places

Irene Barberis arrived in Manchester yesterday for a two week residency at Bury Art Gallery. Melbourne-based Irene and I have begun work on various projects, of which this project is the first part of an international curatorial collaboration called 5 Places. The concept of 5 Places proceeds from the notion of mobility, unpredictability and interchangeability brought about in networks challenged through curatorial and artist dialogue. As the name suggests there will be shows in 5 international venues around the world. The next show will also be in Bury in October as part of the Manchester Asia Triennial, but after that shows are planned in Hong Kong, Melbourne, New York, and one other to be confirmed.

http://www.irenebarberis.com/home.html


Showing alongside Irene's installation is Mike Parr's video project "Breathless", here he is talking about it.

Excuses

I've not really had time to write here recently. In addition to moving to a much nicer office in Bury and the day to day management stuff, I've been working on:

Bloom - the next exhibition, which opens in May. The idea for this came some years ago: given so many artists and curators are engaged with climate change and global warming, what would a show look like curated by a curator who has no interest in environmental issues?

5 Places - Still working on putting together the partners for this international project; Irene in Melbourne is waiting to hear whether Shanghi are going to join.

The Library of Infinity - I'm working on a proposal with Foligno museum, Italy (the town where Dante's Inferno was originally published http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foligno ) and the Library of Alexandria, Cairo, to develop international collaboration on artists' books.

The Text Festival - opening on 29 April 2011, the next festival has some new venues and, I hope, some really interesting people and projects coming together nicely. It's a huge labour. I'm open to proposals and submissions by the way - there'll be an official call for submissions soon but I can take them anytime. With the local government location, the hardest thing to sort out is the website, so it always lags behind. There should be something up in the next month.

Tesseract - progress has been slow writing this one, but the following publication with If p then q, which is now called The Tragedy of Althusserianism suddenly started going very well.