Art Assembly is a free one-day festival with the theme of City as Art School, championing culture, art and creativity and demonstrating how everywhere has the potential to become a place of creative learning.
The festival is organised by Art Fund with Castlefield Gallery, HOME, Manchester Art Gallery, the Whitworth and The Manchester College.
Starting at 10am, there will be plenty to do, get involved with and see, with new artworks and installations popping up across the city, at Manchester Art Gallery, The Manchester College (Shena Simon campus), in St Peter’s Square, in shops and at Sackville Gardens, on billboards, at a tram stop and even on the pavements. In the afternoon visitors can join a march for art, watch maypole dancing with suffragette sashes or make badges in Sackville Gardens.
Art Fund presents a live event at HOME led by comedian Russell Kane and a panel of special guests from11am -12.30pm. Russell will dive into the festival’s theme, City as Art School, in conversation with Art Assembly artists, and MC, writer and theatre-maker Testament, who’s been exploring what the artists are up to on the streets of Manchester. The event includes a sneak-preview of what’s in store at the festival, artist interviews and a special performance by Testament. The event will be recorded and featured as an episode of Art Fund’s award-winning podcast Meet Me at the Museum. It promises to be an exciting kick-off to a day of fun and learning across the city.
Using film, painting, textiles, installation, performance and music, ten Greater Manchester artists have developed and produced eight new art works in collaboration with students and learners in the city.
4×4 XeroX is a guerrilla photography exhibition that takes place on the street, referencing zine making and publishing history. Robert Parkinson with photography students from The Manchester College are hauling a Xerox printer around the city to three locations where they will paste up photographs created on the day.
Sally Gilford with students from School of Arts, Media and Creative Technology at University of Salford have created large scale bobbins shown in the window of Fred Aldous. Prior to becoming the most loved supplier to the city’s makers and creatives, Fred’s was originally a producer of baskets used to carry these items which were intrinsic to textile production. The bobbins are engraved with the phrase First in the Fight, referencing the Suffragette banner, unfurled in Stevenson Square on 20th June 1908, Bobbins! also nods to the northern slang of the term meaning nothing or rubbish. Bobbins! hopes to raise awareness about women’s issues that are hidden, taboo or ignored in both a historical and contemporary context.
Parham Ghalamdar’s co-commission with Art & Design students from The Manchester College has created digital works and paintings capturing the less obvious spaces and beauties of the city. An A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) engine was trained to study student’s drawings alongside drawings and maps of Manchester held in Manchester Art Gallery’s collection to find patterns and similarities in shapes and colours. The results are videos and still images depicting a third inventive apparition of Manchester looking like a shifting cityscape in fluctuation.
Anna F C Smith and Helen Mather with fashion students from The Manchester College have created textile designs on windows, pavements and fabric. The Botanical Society: Look Between the Cracks in The Pavement was inspired by 19th Century working class Botanical Societies. These autodidactic radical societies defied the expectations of their class to learn about their changing environments.
Sam Owen Hull with students from Abraham Moss Community School have created Listen, a collaborative typeface designed to generate messages about the climate emergency. They can be spotted on billboards and in venues across the city. They even feature on the Abraham Moss tram stop close to the school.
An Unconventional Legend takes inspiration from the Wizard of Oz, the local area and the interests and experiences of young people from Manchester Secondary PRU. An interactive augmented reality map was designed by the young people over a series of workshops with David McFarlane, Raheel Khan and visual artist Rachel Forster. Scanning the QR code beside the plinth allows viewers to see the map come to life and hear the young people’s story narrated by them.
Respawn refers to responses the children gave to the question artist Olivia Glasser posed: “Would you rather live in the online world or the real world forever?” Taking the video screen as a blank space, the children from Plymouth Grove primary school devised repeat actions to fill it with. Suspended in an eternal loop, the children explore ideas around texting, telling off, falling over, love letters, sleeping, control, freedom, re-birth, money, fandom and school.
Students from Manchester School of Art with artist Maya Chowdhry consider the value and importance of ‘space as a gift’ for everyone living and passing through the city. Taking Up Space, Taking In Space is a live art installation and performance in St Peter’s Square and Manchester Art Gallery highlighting opportunities for people to use space as they would like. Outside the gallery, there will be a plinth that will be a space for ‘free exchange’ of donated, scavenged or gathered materials. Not limited to physical matter it will include the ‘exchange’ or ‘gifting’ of knowledge, shared experiences, and thoughts.
Alongside these new commissions, an ongoing project with artist David Blandy and young artists at Venture Arts where new worlds are created, and Manchester is imagined 8000 years into the future, is transformed into Three Worlds, an immersive installation at Manchester Art Gallery. The public are invited to join them in speculative world-building and share their own vision for Manchester.
City as Arts School is a collaboration with MADE, schools and cultural organisations across the city in partnership with Curious Minds. Manchester Art Gallery and The Manchester College will be showing eight new films exploring why the arts matter to young people in Manchester schools.
