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Showing posts from 2011

Asia Triennial Manchester

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The projects are coming thick and fast at the moment; immediately after the re-launch of the Irwell Sculpture Trail, we go into the Manchester Asia Triennial . To coincide, Bury Art Museum presents its second 5 Places manifestation, with guest curator Australian Irene Barberis programming UK based photographer Dinu Li (first picture) alongside Tam Wei Ping (picture 2 and 3). There is an interesting dialogue between the two artists' presentations: Tam Wei Ping's Pilgrim's Journey series questions whether all the places are the same; and where the boundary, identity and praxis to ascertain location and cultural identity rests. Dinu Li has four works from his series documenting the possessions of Chinese illegal immigrants in Liverpool.

Ron Silliman on the Irwell Sculpture Trail

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 Ron Silliman's Bury Text was installed yesterday in the Tram station.

Irwell Sculpture Trail

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Who would have thought that my idea for a 33 mile long public art project back in 1993 would be re-launched as a major UK attraction in 2011?  Back then although there was a computer on my desk it only dealt with finance and purchase ordering. I used some project budget to buy a stand-alone PC which could connect to the new fangled internet - the first person in the Authority to be online - and told everyone I met that the internet was going to be a big thing (this wasn't California). Tomorrow the Irwell Sculpture Trail (IST) launches its new website http://www.irwellsculpturetrail.co.uk/  - there's also a facebook page and a twitter feed through which you can follow more immediate developments. It's a big job gathering all the data to put up online but it should all be there in the next 6 or 8 weeks. In this sense, the re-launch is a little bit of a misnomer, as the commissioning of artists has been and is a continuous process. I've lost count of how many artworks I

No Time at the moment

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I've not blogged for weeks due to the volume of projects I am involved in. As well as preparing to relaunch the Irwell Sculpture Trail, I am pursuing projects in China, Korea and Japan. I'll be in China in September and hope that will throw up opportunities to report here.
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arthur+martha have launched their first twitter poem - in collaboration with homeless people in Manchester and Bury. During the course of their map of you project they spoke with many homeless people. These interviews were edited by various writers to produce a long collaborative poem, which appears in tweet form four times a day at http://twitter.com/#!/tweetfromengels These 'verses' are snapshots in text of homeless lives, in all their moods - joy, terror, humour, resilience, anger. Famously, Engels wrote about the harshness of 19th Century Manchester; people today who live a comparable existence are the homeless. The writing imagines a dialogue between Engels and the homeless people of Manchester. Interspersed through the poem is found material from Engel's correspondence with Marx, and his classic The Condition of the English Working Class. The idea of the poem was developed with Candian Steve Giasson - who suggested a kind of anti-epic, inspired by Louis Zukovsk

Berlin

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My disrupted internet access and the forthcoming house move delayed me putting this up. The conference of Festivals covered much of the ground one would expect. There was the usual sharing of recent project ideas and much discussion of destructive cuts to literature funding across the globe, with representatives farthest stretched to Chile in the West and the Ukraine in the East. A lot of  Balkan Festivals too. The Text Festival was the only overtly non-literature festival. Pleased to see Eduard Escoffet (Barcelona) again.

Berlin again

It’s been a while since I thought about blogging; a mixture of Text Festival exhaustion, illness, holidays, buying a new apartment and kicking off a major new international project (which I will be setting up with a visit to China in September) put it to the back of my mind. Tomorrow I set off for the Berlin Poetry Festival http://literaturwerkstatt.org/index.php?id=1016  – I was invited to be part of the festival’s ambition to establish collaborative programming and joint projects between various international festivals. I was quite looking forward to this dialogue until today when I received the agenda for the sessions. The second presentation of Saturday is fucking Poetry Parnassus. http://tony-trehy.blogspot.com/2010/11/olympics-and-poetry.html So we are in a sharing environment with an organisation with which you have to keep your copyright close to your chest. I find this hugely annoying and now am not optimistic at all. I guess, as with most conferences, the best links will b

Text Festival: the last event!

Featuring Geraldine Monk (UK), Adeena Karasick (USA), bill bissett (CAN), Iris Garrelf (UK) @ The Met Arts Centre Friday 3rd June 2011 / 7.30pm The last gig of the 2011 Festival, featuring : Adeena Karasick is a poet, media-artist and the award-winning author of seven books of poetry and poetic theory. Marked with an urban, Jewish, feminist aesthetic that continually challenges normative modes of meaning production, and engaged with the art of combination and turbulence of thought, her work is a testament to the creative and regenerative power of language and its infinite possibilities for pushing meaning to the limits of its semantic boundaries. She is Professor of Global Literature at St. John'sUniversityin New York. Geraldine Monk is one of the most exciting and provocative writer-performers on the British scene. Her readings a witty, warm and dynamic drawing on a prolific career which has spawned fourteen major works in the last twenty five years. bill bissett is a famo

Preparing for the next Text Festival weekend

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A week of preparations for another big Text Festival weekend. On 19th, 20th and 21st May, Station stories is a unique, site specific, live, literature performance event using digital technology and improvised electronic sound. Taking place at Piccadilly Station, moving from platform to platform, café to café and shop to shop, six writers read specially commissioned stories that guide the audience on a creative journey.The writers include: David Gaffney, Jenn Ashworth, Nicholas Royle, Peter Wild, Tom Jenks and Tom Fletcher. Sound Artist: Daniel Hopkins. For more information and tickets, go to www.stationstories.com Guest curators Helen Kaplinsky & Maurice Carlin of Reading for Reading’s Sake bring New York based Rainer Ganahl to the Transport Museum. Ganahl, who represented Austria in the 1999 Venice Biennale, arrives on Wednesday though installation of his exhibition at the Bury Transport Museum starts on Monday. Ganahl has ambitious plans to create various works this week in

Books Launch

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Text Festival opening weekend

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An intensely packed and exciting opening weekend in Bury and Manchester for the Text Festival - various reviews, images, recordings, videos and reports will appear in the next few weeks but here is a selection of images to start it off here. Many of my photos look like there was no-one there, mainly because I was able to take shots before everyone arrived and once they did I was often too busy to think about the camera . (above: gallery view - foreground: I TELL YOU THE TRUTH by Kate Pickering) Ron Silliman, Tony Lopez, Me, Barney and Christian Bök . Sarah Sanders' beautiful performance from the ring balcony Liz Collini's great wall drawing in the Bury Transport Museum. As an encore following the Ursonate performances, an amazing world first - Christian Bök and Jaap Blonk improvise

The Bury Poems

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In 2008, when Robert Grenier was in Bury for his reading at the "Irony of Flatness" exhibition, an interview had been set up with him conducively located in a local cafe-bar. Unfortunately the interviewer was taken ill, which we didnt hear about for a few hours and with Bob not carrying a mobile phone it took a while to let him know. In those hours of waiting, he wrote 6 poems responding to the local rural landscape, north of Bury, where he had requested to be billeted because he can't sleep if there is any urban noise. They were called the "Ramsbottom Poems" from the village where he was staying.  This got me to thinking about the poetic responses that could be accumulated from artists' involvement in working Bury - and thus was born the idea of the Bury Poems. Initially, I commissioned Phil Davenport, Carol Watts and Tony Lopez to create new Bury Poems - which all 3 performed at the 2009 Text Festival. Also during that festival, while Ron Silliman was h

Curating the Text

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Although I have only written about my curatorial conception of the Text Festival exhibitions once before they actually open, it feels like it is a tradition that I should continue with the forthcoming displays. In this, I’m mainly thinking about the Bury Art Gallery shows, Wonder Rooms and Sentences . I’ll write about A Map of You, TradeStamps , and Requiem another time. Preparing for this the third festival, it occurred to me that while previous TF displays included examples of visual poetry, no show so far has directly addressed the question of the location of visual poetry in a gallery. My conception for the show has developed from my responses to the dynamics and location of visual poetry itself. The first thing that seemed obvious is the disconnection of visual poetry from visual art. I am not aware of many (any?) exhibitions of visual poetry qua visual art curated by a curator in an art gallery. Since the 1960’s and conceptual art, text-based work in contemporary art galleries

The London Delivery

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I've been looking forward to today for some time: the day when the art movers delivered the artworks collected from artists, galleries and collectors in London. It's a great moment when works that you pursued get unwrapped of their packing. Invariably they are bigger or smaller than you expected, which is also fun, because you have to re-think how things fit together. It was a very intense day while the main focus was on working out the Sentences show, there was still installation work going on in the Fusilier Museum too.

The Team working hard on continuing installations

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Chris and Scott hanging a work by Márton Koppány. Another Márton Koppány work being transferred to the Transport Museum. Sarah Kerrison (Transport Museum Curator) checking out a work by Marco Giovenale and another Márton Koppány. Helena Ho sorting out Geof Huth's vispo cards Kat and Richard installing vispo...

Language Moment

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The trailblazer event of the Text Festival took place last night at the Green Room. I was pleased with how the juxtapositions of artists worked - a great gig. These pictures were taken during the sound checks. More pictures, films and a soundtrack will be available in due course. Maggie O'Sullivan Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl Phil Minton

Text Festival

The Language Moment Featuring Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, Maggie O’Sullivan, Phil Minton and Ben Gwilliam & Phil Davenport, Sarah Sander, and Sarah Boothroyd @ The Green Room, Manchester Friday 15 April 2011 In a pre-festival partnership event with the Green Room, Manchester, the Text Festival presents an evening of virtuoso vocal performance and groundbreaking sound art. Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl is an Icelandic poet and author of three novels. He works with performance and sound-poetry, and regularly appears at poetry and music festivals, as well as dabbling in the dark arts of the concrete. In the recent years he has explored the possibilities inherent in the European and North-American avant-garde traditions, and focused on disassembling language into its visual, social and linguistic units. Nothing can prepare you for the power and dexterity of his performance, the sonically richness of his sound poems, and his amazing control of his material. His huge contortions twist his mouth

Wonder Rooms hang

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 The curation and installation start in earnest for the Wonder Rooms visual poetry show.

Helen White installs

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Belgium-based poet Helen White arrrived today to install her texts in the Museum. http://www.krikri.be/helen/

Dinner

Could art ever compare to one of Sue's fine dinner parties? Last night, guests Christian Bök, Phil Davenport and Julia Grimes.  On arrival prosecco and sharing platter consisting of bresola, hams, roasted red and yellow peppers, artichoke hearts, various dips and sausages in a spicy sticky sauce. Followed by: A choice of parsnip soup or cauliflower veloute with chorizo and herb garnish accompanied with a Hungarian Furmint to drink. Pan-roasted pork tenderloin, portobello mushroom sauce, cubetti potatoes, carrot puree and spinach accompanied with an Argentinian Bonarda. Cointreau and blood orange jellies, home-made orange ice cream, and home-made orange-scented short breads; with Muscato d’asti to drink. Cheese board followed by coffee and home-made chocolates (and for old times, no doubt some Finnish Cloudberry liqueur)

Text Update

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Another week packed with Text Festival organisation: Printing late submissions from Michael Basinski in Buffalo, Fatima Queiroz in Rio and new tradestamp designs for Wang Jun (CHI) and Satu Kaikkonen (FIN) for the Museum Tradestamps show, which I also spent time talking through with Museum Curator Sue Lord who has done the massive job of researching and pulling together the history and objects for the show – the nearly final installation layout decisions were made on Friday morning; followed immediately afterwards by the installation walk-through at the Transport Museum – for which the Nozomi video piece from Peter Jaeger and Kaz was confirmed yesterday. Phil Davenport was having such good ideas for this show that I invited him to take over its curation. Then quickly across the road to the Fusilier Museum with incomparable Curator Kat McClung-Oakes and Technician Chris Holland to look at the siting and technical issues of Steve Giasson’s 246. Finally found Brazilian sound artist Bruno

molto semplice e cantabile

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In 2009 during the Bury Art Gallery exhibition "Not at this address", the UK sound artist Ben Gwilliam performed a new work using ice casts of Beethoven's molto semplice e cantabile. Today, we received the conceptual conclusion of that work with delivery of a limited edition of the disc cast in transparent vinyl. Ben will be performing at the Green Room on 15 April with Phil Davenport as the opening gig of the Text Festival. molto will be available for sale at the Festival shop (£15) - I would suggest that your art collection is incomplete without a copy of this work. In molto semplice e cantabile Ben Gwilliam taps into the traditions of harmonic music of the classical period, the Cagean rejection of what Beethoven stands for, sound artist turntablism, the physics of the anomalous expansion of water, the metaphysics of time, the counter-continuous diagram of creation through entropy, the very ontology of the listener. The plenary space fills with more than the sound o

Textual Excitement mounts

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I often comment in conversation that by the time Text Festival arrives it will already be over for me as I will have seen all the exhibitions before anyone else arrives. Obviously I won’t have seen buzz of so many artists hanging out or experienced the performances – but sadly I am able to enjoy these less than most because I have the stress of carrying the event and hopeful making sure it all comes together. The run up to the last festival wasn’t so good for me because I had an agonising broken tooth so preparations for the shows were a little distracted. Without that pain, this time round is doubly exciting because the Text has achieved a presence in many artists’ thinking so lots more practitioners than previously have engaged with it. Each time I walk into the receiving office at the gallery there are tables full of newly arrived works, packages wait to be unwrapped, fresh printed digital submissions: beautiful visual poetry from Japan via Vienna, the first 50 of 100 vispos b

The Other Room

The Other Room 3rd birthday & launch of The Other Room Anthology 3; would love to see you there. 6th April 2011, The Old Abbey Inn, Manchester, M15 6AY, FREE entry Ken Edwards, Carrie Etter, Alec Finlay & Derek Henderson (live stream) Ken Edwards is the editor and publisher of Reality Street. He has had numerous books and pamphlets published including: Good Science: Poems 1983-1991 (Roof Books, NY, 1992), No Public Language: Selected Poems 1975-1995 (Shearsman Books, 2006), Songbook (Shearsman, 2009). Carrie Etter is an American poet based in the UK. Her first collection, The Tethers, was published by Seren Books in June 2009 and in 2011 Divining for Starters was published by Shearsman. She is the editor of the important Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets and is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing for Bath Spa University. Alec Finlay is an artist, poet & publisher. Born in Scotland in 1966, he now lives in the North-East of England. He is author of coun

50 Heads Revealed

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I thought that this would just be a blog that pointed to Phil Davenport's review of my book of 2006 50 Heads , http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2011/03/never-to-have-compromised-with.html which I would illustrate with an image from the installation of one of my texts at the Dubai Drawingspace (above). At the last minute, I thought of adding one of my favourite 50 Heads poems; then came the surprise. On opening the folder, I uncovered maybe another 8 'Heads' poems that I decided not to include because the structural mathematics of the whole only required 49. I had completely forgotten these existed - as my dad jokes the upside of Alzheimer's is you are always making new friends. So here is a new Head: Distance 0. How long ago it was. Closeness is measured by how many fluents change. The place and the placing matter little and for clarity, for order, for certainty. When sweat can move you through the air, stochastic on the way, the heresy lays inside dedication to