Press Release 14 March 2016 Art Sheffield announces full artist list for 2016 festival programme: Up, Down, Top, Bottom, Strange and Charm
16 April – 8 May 2016 Media and Professional Preview: 15 April 2016
Still from Duvet Brothers, Blue Monday, 1984, Courtesy the artist and LUX
Art Sheffield today announced the full artist list for the 2016 festival programme, entitled Up, Down, Top, Bottom, Strange and Charm. The festival is curated by Martin Clark, Director of Bergen Kunsthall, and runs from 16 April – 8 May 2016. The artists are: Marie Angeletti, Michel Auder, Charles Atlas, Anna Barham, Steven Claydon, Mark Fell, Beatrice Gibson, Pat Hearn and Shelley Lake, Florian Hecker, Hannah Sawtell, Richard Sides, Paul Sietsema, Jean-‐Michel Wicker. Scratch video works will be shown by George Barber, Nick Cope, Jeffrey Hinton, Duvet Brothers, John Scarlett Davis, Gorilla Tapes, John Maybury, Kim Flitcroft and Sandra Goldbacher. Conceived as an ‘exploded’ group show, Art Sheffield will present a carefully selected programme dedicated entirely to sound and moving image, exhibited across Sheffield’s galleries, venues, industrial and urban spaces. Highlights of Art Sheffield will include three new commissions by British artists Steven Claydon, Hannah Sawtell and Richard Sides, who will each produce site-‐specific work. Central to the festival is a collection of rarely seen ‘scratch’ videos, a short-‐lived but influential phenomenon that emerged on the underground scene in the mid-‐1980s. Other works address themes around politics, economics, music, technology, the ubiquity of the Internet and the material reality of the physical world. The title, Up, Down, Top, Bottom, Strange and Charm is taken from the six flavours (or types) of quark: the elementary particles that make up every atom, and the fundamental building blocks of matter. Through film, video and sound, the fabric of the city itself will be explicitly activated and inhabited by the exhibition dispersed in and around Sheffield city centre.
New Commissions
Steven Claydon will present a new video and sound work in the iconic Grade II listed Moore Street electricity substation. Working directly with scientists at IBM, Claydon’s work will draw on research into materiality and matter at an atomic level. Using footage produced by IBM’s sophisticated atom-‐moving technology, Claydon will create a large-‐scale video work projected within the 18,000sqft venue, which will be accompanied by audio samples of atoms being moved. Claydon will work with local steel manufacturers to create a large plate reverb panel that will amplify the sound to create a fully immersive installation that situates the viewer amongst the building blocks of matter.
Hannah Sawtell will draw on Sheffield’s industrial, musical and leftist political heritage to develop a new multi-‐disciplinary work that explores the concept for a new ‘people’s currency’ for Sheffield, modelled on alternative currencies like bitcoin. Using open source apps and software, as well as CGI and electronic sound, she will create a work that builds a new idea of community, value and exchange -‐ one very directly engaged with and informed by the economic realities and rhetoric of the present.
Richard Sides is a multi-‐disciplinary artist with a background in electronic music, who was born and raised in Rotherham. Richard Sides will be producing a new work on Eyre Street that will combine video, audio and sculptural elements into a large-‐scale collaged installation. He has been working with actors to produce pseudo-‐advertisements that will play throughout the space. Scratch Video
Art Sheffield 2016 draws on the various political, social, cultural and material histories of Sheffield in order to address more universal themes. These include the city’s prosperous industrial past built around manufacturing, steel and light industry, and its rapid decline in the 1980s; Sheffield’s long history of resistance, socialism and independence -‐ from John Ruskin’s utopian initiatives for workers in the 19th century, through to its present as one of the UK’s longest-‐standing Labour strongholds; and its proud musical heritage which includes bands such as Cabaret Voltaire, Human League and Pulp. The 1980s were defined by industry decline and the Thatcherite politics that accelerated it, the cold war, nuclear threat and the boom and bust of burgeoning global capitalism. At this time, new video editing technologies became available at various arts schools, including Sheffield, leading to a number of artists and musicians experimenting with the medium in very politically engaged ways. This led to the development of a new visual language and technique – ‘scratch video’.
Using rapid cuts and repetitions, as well as new digital effects, this work was often screened in clubs or music venues, or made as stage visuals or music videos for bands. Art Sheffield includes a number of these rarely seen ‘scratch’ videos by filmmakers including George Barber, Nick Cope, Jeffrey Hinton, Duvet Brothers, John Scarlett Davis, Gorilla Tapes, John Maybury, Kim Flitcroft and Sandra Goldbacher. In the way their work very directly sampled and subverted found footage from TV news, films, advertising and popular culture, they can be seen to have anticipated many of the techniques and visual languages that are now so ubiquitous across the internet, social media and platforms like YouTube. Scratch Video is presented in association with LUX and the BFI National Archive, as part of major touring film project THIS IS NOW: FILM AND VIDEO AFTER PUNK. The UK tour of THIS IS NOW has been developed with the support of the BFI, awarding funds from The National Lottery. City-‐wide Programme
The city-‐wide programme has been developed and delivered in collaboration with Sheffield’s leading visual arts venues -‐ Bloc Projects, S1 Artspace, Museums Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam University and Site Gallery. In addition, a number of off-‐site venues have been very specifically selected including: former steel and cutlery works; nightclubs and music venues; the iconic Park Hill, a controversial brutalist housing estate and now the largest listed building in Europe; and Moore Street Substation, a famous modernist landmark which will be opened up to the public for the very first time. Shown alongside the scratch videos, the contemporary works demonstrate and develop similar ideas and attitudes, still as politically and aesthetically relevant today: from an interest in the sub-‐atomic reality of the physical world to new
economic models and patterns of risk; from virtual and constructed realities to the subversion and distribution of open source digital tools; from the politics of neo-‐liberal capitalism to communities created through music, labour and resistance. Throughout Art Sheffield 2016, video, film and sound are explored in their various material forms, on the one hand as a mechanical, digital or virtual medium, but on the other as kind of collective unconscious or reverie, evoking the past only to reflect on the current state of Britain today and our saturated and fragmentary internet-‐state-‐of-‐mind.
ARTIST PROGRAMME MARIE ANGELETTI – VENUE TBC Angeletti uses photography and video to re-‐present and re-‐frame discordant yet familiar genres of representation. She photographs her objects and subjects, then the resultant images are often re-‐photographed, scanned, in some places abstracted, confusing both the original source and author of the image, creating a pictorial ambiguity through association and presentation. MICHEL AUDER – S1 ARTSPACE , PARK HILL French-‐American artist Michel Auder has been working in film and video for over 50 years. He will present of group of video works in S1 Artspace’s new temporary gallery at The Scottish Queen, a newly refurbished space (once a notorious pub) on the Park Hill Estate. Despite his influence on a new generation of artists, Auder’s experimental video works have rarely been seen in the UK. His work strongly evokes the strangeness, banality and beauty of the visible world, which he records with a compulsive almost voyeuristic gaze. CHARLES ATLAS – 156 ARUNDEL STREET A pioneer of 80s video, Atlas often collaborated with dancers and choreographers including Michael Clark and Merce Cunningham to develop ‘media-‐dance’ – dances specifically produced to be captured on film and video. Atlas will present a recent immersive video installation in Arundel Street warehouse space, as well as two earlier videos made with Cunningham, which experiment with ‘state-‐of-‐the-‐art’ digital video and film effects at that time. ANNA BARHAM – VENUE TBC Barham will present video and sound work The Catwalk (2015). Barham created the work by corrupting the code of a jpeg image by typing selected quotes by quantum physicist David Bohm directly into the image code. The corrupted code produces a distorted image, with shift, colour, panning and sound all randomly generated by the intervention at the jpeg’s structural level. STEVEN CLAYDON – MOORE STREET SUBSTATION Claydon will present a new video and sound work in the iconic Grade II listed Moore Street electricity substation. Working directly with scientists at IBM, Claydon’s work will draw on research into materiality and matter at an atomic level. Using footage produced by IBM’s sophisticated atom-‐moving technology, Claydon will project his video work within the 18,000sqft venue accompanied by audio samples of atoms being moved. MARK FELL – THE LINK PUB, PARK HILL Legendary DJ, producer and artist from South Yorkshire, Fell will create a new site-‐specific installation in the derelict Link Pub at Park Hill. Evoking Sheffield’s music and club culture of the 90s, Fell will create an immersive sonic and visual environment using recordings of a pirate radio show broadcast out of Park Hill in 1992. As part of the installation, Mark will interview Richard Hardcastle of Solid State, who is DJing on the recording. BEATRICE GIBSON – BLOC PROJECTS Gibson will show two films at artist run project space, Bloc Projects. F for Fibonacci (2014) and Crippled Symmetries (2015) collapse together ideas of economics and experimental music, risk and chance, and draw connections between the abstraction of money and that of music or art.
PAT HEARN & SHELLEY LAKE -‐ DINA A video by Pat Hearn and Shelley Lake will be shown at DINA, an ex-‐nightclub turned DIY arts space with a focus on digital arts. Made before Hearn became one of the most influential art dealers in New York in the 1980s, the video shows Hearn dancing naked with a strobe light experimenting with new ‘portapak’ video technology. During the session she suffers an epileptic fit, brought on by the strobe. The rest of the video captures the ambulance crew and paramedics attending her at the scene and the subsequent brain scans she received at the hospital. FLORIAN HECKER – PORTLAND WORKS Hecker will present synthesized sound installation at Portland Works, the factory where stainless steel was invented and manufactured. Portland works was threatened with closure in 2009 but now operates as a workspace for small businesses, artists and craftspeople. Hecker is an experimental sound artist whose installations, live performances and publications explore specific compositional developments of post-‐war modernity, electro-‐acoustic music, and other, non-‐musical disciplines. HANNAH SAWTELL – SITE GALLERY Sawtell will draw on Sheffield’s industrial, musical and leftist political heritage to develop a new multi-‐disciplinary work that explores the concept for a new ‘people’s currency’ for Sheffield, modelled on alternative currencies like bitcoin. Using widely available, open source apps and software, as well as CGI and electronic sound, she will create a work that builds a new idea of community, value and exchange -‐ one very directly engaged with and informed by the economic reality and rhetoric of the present. Site Gallery is Sheffield’s contemporary art centre. RICHARD SIDES – EYRE STREET Sides is a multi-‐disciplinary artist with a background in electronic music and was born and raised in Rotherham. Sides will make a new installation at Eyre Street using moving image, sculpture and sound, which he describes as time-‐based expanded collages combining media simultaneously to create environments for others to inhabit. PAUL SIETSEMA – BIGGINS BROTHERS LTD American artist, Sietsema will present ‘Abstract Composition’ at Biggins Brothers, an electro-‐plating workshop established in 1856. The 35mm film projection pictures a highly complex CGI animation of a simple piece of cardboard, slowly rotating in space. After rendering, it is returned to this almost obsolete analogue medium, now situated somewhere between film, computer animation, sculpture and concrete poetry. Operating as a kind of generator or ‘engine’, the work describes various objects and artefacts that are caught in a virtual network of commerce and exchange. JEAN-‐MICHEL WICKER – S1 STUDIOS The book as both object and idea is central to the French artist Jean-‐Michel Wicker’s varied oeuvre. Along with other printed media such as fanzines, flyers, posters and low-‐tech mechanical sculptures, it functions as a parallel space (both literally and metaphorically) where information is constantly re-‐edited and collapsed together. Wicker will show a number of works on paper, as well as 'anti-‐books', video, text and printed materials -‐ expanding the idea of ‘moving image’ through an interplay between video, the page and kinetic works. SCRATCH VIDEO – SHEFFIELD INSTITUTE OF ARTS Scratch was a short-‐lived but influential phenomenon born out of a disparate group of artists experimenting with newly available video editing technologies introduced into a number of art schools in the UK in the mid-‐80s, including Psalter Lane art school, Sheffield. Sampling footage from TV news, advertising, films and popular culture, these videos were often structured musically or rhythmically, ranging from highly political to more satirical or playful works. A specially presented showreel will be screened of works by artists George Barber, Nick Cope, Gorilla Tapes, Jeffrey Hinton, Kim Flitcroft, Sandra Goldbacher and Duvet Brothers. This part of the programme is presented in association with LUX and the BFI National Archive as part of the touring project THIS IS NOW: FILM AND VIDEO AFTER PUNK (1978-‐85).
PUBLIC PROGRAMME Panel Discussion Saturday 16 April, 1.00pm -‐ Sheffield Hallam University A panel discussion exploring the themes of the festival in more detail – Artistic Director, Martin Clark, will introduce the broader themes of the festival, which will be followed by a discussion and Q&A with selected exhibiting artists. THIS IS NOW: FILM AND VIDEO AFTER PUNK Screening, Parts I-‐IV THIS IS NOW: FILM AND VIDEO AFTER PUNK is a major new touring programme rediscovering key underground films from the post-‐punk era in the UK (1978–85). Developed by LUX in partnership with the BFI National Archive. The Showroom will present the first of a four-‐part series of screenings with an introduction from LUX's Special Projects Curator, Nicole Yip. www.thisisnow.org.uk (Part I): Wednesday 27 April, 6.00pm -‐ Showroom Cinema (Part II): Saturday 30 April, 6.00pm -‐ Bloc Projects (Part III): Wednesday 4 May, 6.00pm -‐ Venue TBC (Part IV): Saturday 7 May, 6.00pm -‐ Bloc Projects Young People's Weekend: Shut Up! See Art! Friday 29 April -‐ Sunday 1 March -‐ Site Gallery and Millennium Galleries A free weekend of events showcasing and celebrating youth and creativity in Sheffield. Parallel Programme After-‐hours Tour Friday 6 May, 6.00pm – The Washington, 79 Fitzwilliam Street An evening tour around some of the highlights of this year's Parallel Programme; projects developed by local artists and curators as a fringe to the main festival. Weekly Saturday Tours Alongside the public programme, free weekly tours of the main festival exhibition will take place every Saturday from 12pm, beginning at the Festival Hub at Site Gallery. www.sitegallery.org
About Art Sheffield Art Sheffield brings together new commissions, exhibitions and performances by international, UK and Sheffield-‐based artists at locations across the city alongside a programme of events, talks and discussions. It was established in 1999 to further the presence and awareness of contemporary art in Sheffield through joint programming, audience development and profile raising activities to achieve an ambitious, world-‐class festival and events programme. Art Sheffield is delivered through a consortium of leading visual arts venues across the city: Bloc Projects, S1 Artspace, Museums Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam University and Site Gallery. The Art Sheffield consortium members share a fundamental belief in the power of art and culture to change lives; collectively championing Sheffield’s reputation regionally, nationally and internationally as a centre for contemporary art. Art Sheffield is supported by Arts Council England and Sheffield City Council. www.artsheffield.org About Martin Clark Martin Clark has been Director of Bergen Kunsthall since September 2013. Previously he was Artistic Director at Tate St Ives (2007-‐13), Curator of Exhibitions at Arnolfini, Bristol (2005-‐7), and Curator and Exhibitions Tutor at Kent Institute of Art and Design (now University College of the Creative Arts) (2002-‐5). Clark graduated in Fine Art from Sheffield Hallam University in 1998 and was a founder member of S1 Studios, Sheffield. Over the past 16 years he has curated and organised over 60 exhibitions and projects, including solo shows by Simon Starling, Linder, Jean-‐Michel Wicker, Giorgio Griffa, Lily van der Stokker, Alex Katz, Robert Overby, Will Benedict, Carol Bove, Simon Ling, Heimo Zobernig, Brian Griffiths, Adam Chodzko, Hannah Sawtell, Deimantas Narkevicius, Lucy McKenzie and Albert Oehlen, as well as a group exhibitions
including: ‘The Noing Uv It (2015) (curated with Steven Claydon), ‘Aquatopia: The Imaginary of the Ocean Deep’, (2013) (curated with Alex Farquharson), 'The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art' (2009) (curated with Alun Rowlands and Michael Bracewell), and 'Pale Carnage' (2007). The exhibitions he curated of Mark Titchner (2006) and Dexter Dalwood (2010) were both nominated for the Turner Prize. He has edited numerous publications and catalogues, as well as writing widely on contemporary art and artists for publications including Frieze, Mousse Magazine and Art Review. Art Sheffield 2016 is generously supported by: