The annual festival for deaf and disabled artists has a particularly strong collection of visual art exhibitions this year which is also the first time DadaFest has gone International. Taking place in the A Foundation galleries Ju Gosling’s ‘Abnormal’ is a fantastic mixed media exhibition musing on the medical profession’s definitions of normality and proposing a new “Scientific Model of Disability” – a fabulously challenging and confrontational work. Tanya Raabe presents ‘Who'S Who - Defining the Faces of an Arts Movement’, a collection of portraits challenging the notion of portraiture using disability aesthetics and visual language.
There are videos by Wolfgang Temmell and Alison Jones presents a sound installation produced from a series of audio-interpretations of selected work including erotic drawings by Gustav Klimt at Tate Liverpool.
DASH, a rural arts project based in Shrewsbury features Jenny Brown an artist maker using found objects to create art works about her vision of the world. David King is a digital artist using 3D computer graphics and digital photography, concentrating on anatomical form and the metamorphosis of mathematics for DaDaFest Exhibitions.
The annual festival for deaf and disabled artists has a particularly strong collection of visual art exhibitions this year which is also the first time DadaFest has gone International. Taking place in the A Foundation galleries Ju Gosling’s ‘Abnormal’ is a fantastic mixed media exhibition musing on the medical profession’s definitions of normality and proposing a new “Scientific Model of Disability” – a fabulously challenging and confrontational work. Tanya Raabe presents ‘Who'S WhO - Defining the Faces of an Arts Movement’, a collection of portraits challenging the notion of portraiture using disability aesthetics and visual language.
There are videos by Wolfgang Temmell and Alison Jones presents a sound installation produced from a series of audio-interpretations of selected work including erotic drawings by Gustav Klimt at Tate Liverpool.
DASH, a rural arts project based in Shrewsbury features Jenny Brown an artist maker using found objects to create art works about her vision of the world. David King is a digital artist using 3D computer graphics and digital photography, concentrating on anatomical form and the metamorphosis of mathematics for his images. Joy Tudor has a background in textiles and uses her love of colour, texture and form to move and manipulate in a digital world. Gus Cummins presents his short film – Ictal about the invisible condition of epilepsy.
Venture Arts - is a small visual arts centre in Hulme, Manchester. The idea of ‘Globe’ is to show a world of different textures and subtleties through an art piece. This piece will rotate and be touchable by the general public and will challenge the senses.
Also, Martin Bauch - Window / three movements and Kevin Connolly who is a photographer who has no legs and uses a skateboard for transportation. He has recorded people’s reaction to him across 15 countries, 31 cities, with 32,000 photos that result in 1 stare.
is images. Joy Tudor has a background in textiles and uses her love of colour, texture and form to move and manipulate in a digital world. Gus Cummins presents his short film – Ictal about the invisible condition of epilepsy.
Venture Arts - is a small visual arts centre in Hulme, Manchester. The idea of ‘Globe’ is to show a world of different textures and subtleties through an art piece. This piece will rotate and be touchable by the general public and will challenge the senses.
Also, Martin Bauch - Window / three movements and Kevin Connolly who is a photographer who has no legs and uses a skateboard for transportation. He has recorded people’s reaction to him across 15 countries, 31 cities, with 32,000 photos that result in 1 stare.
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Simparch 07
Richard Wilson 07
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A glimpse of Liverpool's new cultural foundations
A Foundation's transformation of Liverpool's Greenland Street building into a vast exhibition space bodes well for the next European City of Culture.
The press fraternity aboard the coach collectively gasp as the vehicle passes SIMPARCH's wooden tunnel just visible through the open doors of A Foundation's vast Greenland Street building at Liverpool's old port. A net fixed to the back of this element of the US collective's two-part Drum and Basin sculpture might serve to lessen the risk faced by the troupe of skater boys riding its curves or simply just the terror of their captive audience. The kidney bowl shaped vessel set in a false floor behind offers a similar spectacle: "I'm just here for the weekend down from Scotland," comments one game albeit bruised rider as he heads down once more into its boat-like midst.
It might not offer such a "rad" municipal proposition as the graffitied bowels of London's South Bank, but this temporary installation - as impeccably crafted as a Richard Deacon and arguably more locally embedded than a Carsten Höller - goes a long way to bridging the gap between art and the public. A sensible move, then, to position this work (one of three new commissions for the organisation's second autumn programme) front of house given the way it neatly connects the area's industrial past and gritty urban present while hinting at the regenerative options of the future.
One cannot fail to be impressed by the scale and redesign of this former boatyard site into a 2,500sqm exhibition space. The spotlight is on Liverpool as host for this year's Turner Prize in the lead up to becoming European City of Culture 2008, and this tightly curated, well-suited group of projects is certainly raising the bar on what the city has to offer.
But this is no MDF-panelled box. For an artist, the unique creative and funding possibilities afforded by the project space (financially assisted by A Foundation through the Nigel Moores Family Charitable Foundation, the Arts Council and a clutch of private supporters) must be exciting and daunting in equal measure.
Brian Griffiths, though, is an expert at colonising odd-shaped public spaces, as anyone who witnessed his Life is a Laugh at Gloucester Road tube station earlier this year will likely testify. The Furnace space at Greenland Street is no exception.
Griffiths has divided the former heart of this post-industrial beast into chambers with a motley assortment of large-scale architectural props and subtly doctored tarpaulins. The resulting sideshow oriented homage to bric-a-brac is a joy to negotiate. Neither monuments nor functional structures, these works appear to make physical the process of experiencing a recycled joke.
Upstairs in the Blade Factory, above the elegantly sickly photorealist paintings of fruit and flora on the ground floor by Mustafa Halusi (currently representing Cyprus at the Venice Biennale), Catherine Sullivan's epic film installation Triangle of Need poses a very different spatial proposition. Sullivan is known for her interest in performative and behavioural conventions. While this ambitious, visually stunning work provides fertile ground for discussion on the appropriation of filmic technique as a means of questioning historical "truth", the socio-political narrative is overly complex. An exhausting array of geographical locations, cinematic references and human ticks and quirks from evolution to the present make the extraordinary moments of action and composition difficult to digest. Simply navigating the moving image in this eerily portentous space is filmic reality enough.
Through the dusky tinted windows at the top of the building cranes appear to be rising from every direction across the city's skyline. The sense of possibility is palpable. With plans for a temporary takeover of a derelict warehouse in Stanley Dock next year, A Foundation is well positioned as a leading cultural player within this regenerative story about to unfold.
The Guardian online
www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/art
© Rebecca Geldard 2007
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