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Fabrications:
New Art + Urban Memory in Manchester
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Exhibition
dates:11th September - 2nd November 2002
Organised by the University of Manchester
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This
exhibition of newly commissioned art has arisen out of an experimental collaboration
between artists, architectural historians and CUBE. Since 2000 the Urban
Memory in Manchester team of architectural historians at the School of Art
History & Archaeology, University of Manchester, has investigated architecture
and the post-industrial city, choosing Manchester as its focus. The research
analyses the shift from railway arch to designer bar, factory floor to loft
apartment, industrial machine to heritage artefact and approaches Manchester
as a rich network of layered memories, concealments and fabrications. Keen
to open the debate to other means of enquiry, the team invited six artists
– Sarah Carne, Adam Chodzko, Nathan Coley, Layla Curtis, Lubaina Himid
and Sarah Waring – to use the research as a starting point for new
work. The artists have explored Manchester and its redevelopment from very
different perspectives. They have assessed local, national and global implications
to create alternative views of the city that address notions of urban change,
memory and forgetting. This guide offers further insight into the works
on display.
SARAH CARNE
Sarah Carne has looked to America to intensify her investigation of
Manchester. For many years, she has been interested in the pervading sense
of dislocation of Third Avenue – one of a network of avenues arranged
in an Americanised grid formation at the heart of Trafford Park industrial
estate. In her new video installation, High Noon, Carne has made the connection
with the 1952 western movie of the same name which similarly features a
remote community struggling against its surroundings. Carne has worked with
the people of Third Avenue to recreate the movie in their locality, thus
highlighting the fictional Americanisation of the area.
As with many of Carne’s films, High Noon depends upon the good will
and cooperation of the public, but it also revolves around the artist’s
own charismatic performance as a kind of stage manager, prompter and advocate.
Carne’s film has the quality of a fly-on-the-wall documentary, one
seemingly at odds with the high production values of the Hollywood original.
This tension upsets conventional distinctions between reality and fiction,
familiarity and detachment, the local and the universal.
ADAM CHODZKO
Adam Chodzko’s work constructs poetic and inclusive views of contemporary
experience that give voice to the imagination, to subcultures and ‘misfits’,
establishing new relationships between them. The two works that he has made
for Fabrications develop these themes within the context of Manchester.
Remixer connects two events that Chodzko perceives to have catalysed Manchester’s
recent renaissance: the explosion of the city’s dance scene in the
late 1980s and the consequences of the IRA bombing in 1996. Across a series
of ‘fly-posters’ he has mapped a route from the (now demolished)
Haçienda club to the site of the blast. The ‘map’ is overlaid
by the sound wave of a song by A Certain Ratio called Flight (1980) –
a precursor to Manchester’s dance scene – which is audible in
the gallery space. The song is ‘remixed’ according to the materials
it penetrates as it cuts through the city at street level. Chodzko’s
irrational ‘map’ shows the attempts to understand cultural change
in terms of space, sound and time.
The Gorgies’ Centre also unites two seemingly unrelated locations.
Chodzko has become intrigued by a gypsy site, close to his home in Kent,
on land soon to be taken over by property developers. He has seen how notions
of home and lifestyle, ownership and power, transience and permanence are
as instructive in the shaping of rural Kent as they are in urban Manchester.
To interrogate this crossover further, he has distributed official documents
relating to one of Manchester city centre’s housing developments among
the residents of the caravan site. The gypsies become the proprietors of
a unique research centre, one that preserves documents of special interest
to house dwellers or ‘Gorgies’.
NATHAN COLEY
Nathan Coley’s work develops out of an intense scrutiny of a specific
building or situation. During the past year he has made a number of sculptures
based on buildings which have endured a dramatic change in function or
which embody a violent clash of interests – respectable home to squat,
garage to drugs den. Dollhouse in scale, these subversive objects playfully
defy categorisation: are they sculptures or architectural models? Are
they monuments to architectural development or memorials to loss –
symbols of reversed fortunes?
I Don’t Have Another Land is the newest work in this vein. It is
based on the old Marks & Spencer’s building destroyed as a result
of the IRA bomb damage in 1996. In researching and re-presenting this
lost building, Coley gives new consideration to a structure erased from
urban memory by the rush of new plans. To reinforce the significance of
the building, this scaled-down version now sports a blackened sheen and
is accompanied by a phrase taken from an anonymous folk song. The result
is a tense and mischievously evasive object, one which invites us to interpret
its function, but which ultimately dodges a single analysis.
LAYLA CURTIS
In previous work, Layla Curtis has used collage to distort maps in ways
that dislocate our position within the world. For Fabrications, she has
extended her interest in disorientation by embarking on a journey to investigate
shared place names.
Curtis has become intrigued by the fact that over forty industrial towns
in the US have called themselves ‘Manchester’ in an attempt
to garner some of North West England’s industrial might. She has
travelled to a number of these American Manchesters to pursue this itinerant
myth and to collect souvenirs to document her journey. Presented in the
gallery and the bookshop window, the Souvenirs from Manchester reveal
the diverse ways in which a place can be branded and commodified. They
remind us of the human desire to preserve fragments from a place and to
invest them with personal memories and experiences. Curtis encourages
us to consider Manchester (UK) within a global context, which, at a time
when this city has consciously redefined itself to attract an international
audience, seems an especially timely consideration.
LUBAINA HIMID
Lubaina Himid’s semi-abstract paintings often embody fleeting everyday
experiences and memories, yet at their heart exist universal issues concerning
race, work, health and history. In recent work, she has produced multiple
paintings on a small-scale to express collective identities and narratives
and to convey neglected issues in bite-size form.
For Fabrications, Himid has made a hundred new paintings under the title
Cotton.Com. The paintings unite her research into nineteenth-century Manchester
cotton workers and Carolina cotton-picking slaves and highlight the fine
line between work and slavery. A plaque featuring an imaginary statement
by a worker or slave accompanies the canvases. In combining text and image,
Himid seeks to ‘make real the idea of dialogue, communication, exchange
and collaboration in a sort of monument to similarity and difference shot
through with political banter.’ The paintings – aptly decorated
with designs borrowed from textiles – are presented in a towering
grid in the atrium of CUBE. They accentuate the fabric of the gallery,
and, when viewed from the ground, echo the overpowering elevations of
the Ancoats Mills.
SARAH WARING
Sarah Waring has mapped Manchester city centre from above. She has gained
access to the top of the city’s tallest buildings to experience their
vantage points and to consider the aspirational nature of high-rise architecture.
From the rooftops, the city becomes miniaturised: a playful toy town,
a chequerboard patterning of flattened space. Yet, although an aerial
perspective gives the city an overall sense of order, particular aspects
of urban development appear less controlled. The view reveals a layering
of false starts, concealments, modifications and revisions within the
built environment.
Waring’s photographic fiction, ‘It’s hard to be down when
you’re up’, disrupts the notion that a singular narrative or
perspective can document urban space: ‘Manchester’s timeline
and its spaces are constantly being conjoined and rearranged. The stills
I have taken of the city appear as fact, evidence, a moment of change
captured. As a series, taken from different perspectives at different
times, they disturb this possible “truth”. Combined with a fictional
text, the images become even more subjective. It makes the viewer, “you”,
the protagonist or witness in a tale troubled by multiplicity and repetition.’
This exhibition is
supported by The Arts and Humanities Research Board, Bruntwood and North
West Arts Board.
A catalogue featuring each of the new works in situ will be available
from October. To pre-order contact RIBA bookshop at CUBE 0161-236-7691.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a programme of events to help extend
and develop the debate about architecture and planning in the modern city.
For further details please contact [email protected].
The Young Person ’s Gallery (previously known as the Children's Gallery)
will also present an installation created by students at City College,
Manchester, based on the issues raised by the exhibition.
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