The Event
Saturday 31 March to Sunday 15 April 2007
A series of artist run activities in permanent and temporary spaces throughout central Birmingham.
Launch: Saturday 31 March all venues open 12.00pm to 6.00pm
Launch Party: Saturday 31 March 6.00pm to 9.00pm
Curzon Street Station, Curzon Street, Digbeth, Birmingham B4 7XG
(opposite Millennium Point)
Participating organisations:
a.a.s., Capital Art Projects, Colony, [insertspace], International Project Space, Modulate, Periscope, 7inch Cinema, Spectacle, Springhill Institute
Over the last few years there’s been an unparalleled rise in artist-run activity in Birmingham. This has affected the culture of contemporary art in the West Midlands in a dramatic way. The number of artists choosing to stay and work within the city has increased, and an intensification of artistic production has taken place. Birmingham has a unique sense of identity, and it’s easy to see that the city holds great potential. Its ever-expanding population of artists – together with the inhabitants of the city as a whole – provides a vibrant set of influences for cultural production, and it’s primarily this situation that has started to affect the way that a new network of contemporary art spaces work and position themselves.
As the UK’s second largest city, it seemed important to highlight this increase and acceleration in activity, so in the summer of 2006 Birmingham Contemporary Art Forum (BCAF) was formed to organise a festival to celebrate and amplify this emerging culture. Discussions were translated into the organisation of a set of projects under the umbrella name ‘The Event’.
Consisting of exhibitions and performances devised by ten of the brightest young visual art organisations in Birmingham, this sixteen-day celebration focused on a myriad of event-based practices and exhibitions in such a way as to implicate the whole city into its logic. The organisation a.a.s., for example, presented ‘KR-36’, incorporated the entire population of Birmingham in an urban game so secret it can only be initially accessed through ‘The Event’s website. In turn, Periscope’s project ‘Chinese Whispers’ took a.a.s.’ ‘KR-36’ as its starting point, and used – like other organisations such as Colony, Modulate, Spectacle and Springhill Institute – a set of collaborative ideas to formulate new ways of presenting work within their exhibition space. Colony, for example, presented video work that tested the potential of the medium, while Modulate hosted an audio art ‘sound café’ on various days throughout the festival. Spectacle presented a show of sculpture by new practitioners, and Springhill Institute exhibited new projects alongside evidence of recent artists’ residencies.
[insertspace], 7inch Cinema and Capital Art Projects took things in another direction. Over one weekend, 7inch Cinema showed the entire sequence of Gangsters, the 1970s TV series that was set in Birmingham, to question the transitory nature of the city’s landscape and geography. [insertspace] asked a number of artists to make interventions and performances in Birmingham’s network of pubs, while Capital Art Projects’ ‘KIOSK’ – which was devised as a mobile meeting place – accommodated a wide range of uses, including audio broadcast, and the distribution of food and printed material. While the aim of 7inch Cinema’s screening was to celebrate the city’s mythical history, [insertspace]’s project rejoiced in the city’s fast disappearing traditional pub culture. Capital Art Projects’ venture involved the distribution of propaganda as a socially engaged enterprise within the aforementioned context of the contemporary urban environment.
The launch party pushed this theme of urban drift or Situationist dérive further with performances organised by International Project Space. After durational actions in the city centre by Simon O’Sullivan and David Burrows, and Aaron Barschak and Mark McGowan, the event culminated at the party within the decayed grandeur of Digbeth’s Curzon Street Station, which included spectacular activities by the collaborative group !WOWOW!.