Click here to see images of the work in situ (link to Flickr.com)

Click here to watch the video podcast for Sheffield Institute of Arts Gallery, which shows the work in situ and features Art Sheffield’s co-curator Frederique Bergholtz talking about Ruth Buchanan’s Several Attentions, and artist Maud Haya Baviera sharing thoughts about her video pieces Summer Wine and Happy.

Katarina Zdjelar
One Or Two Songs, On Someone or Something, In Particular, 2007

For this piece Zdjelar films a person who just moved alone to another country, got an electric guitar and started getting familiar with it. The piece celebrates the very possibility and desire of getting to know something over mastering any particular skill. This work highlights the way our bodies can be totally involved in occupying an unfamiliar territory and how one’s insecurity but also persistence in doing something (which one doesn’t really know how to do but still does it) proposes and produces alternative modes of being.

Born in 1979, Belgrade, former Yugoslavia
Lives in Rotterdam

Image credit: One Or Two Songs, On Someone, Or Something, In Particular, Katarina Zdjelar, 2007

Maud Haya Baviera
Summer Wine, 2007 and Happy, 2008

Summer Wine and Happy represent the artist’s long lasting interest in reinventing and dramatising behaviours and relationships. These video works present the observation of impossible couples while imagining oneself as a multiplicity of conflicting identities. Both works play with the idea of a double, a twin image reflecting distortion more than accuracy.

While being inspired by the visual and symbolic impact of films such as Vertigo (Hitchcock) and books such as Despair (Nabokov), Summer Wine and Happy can also be compared with surreal comedy where misunderstandings and illusions infiltrate the work and create a sense of burlesque decadence. The restricted filming and the bareness of the decor highlight the characters’ performance and focus on the physical division. The musical flamboyance of Summer Wine is a device allowing the artist to play with the characters’ exaggerated expression of seduction and deception.

Happy uses a banal conversation to reinvent the conflict between thinking and acting. Its characters’ over reaction in opposition to restrained manners infuse the work with equal amounts of the comic and the uncanny.

Born in 1980 in Annonay, France
Lives in Sheffield, UK

Image credit: Happy, Maud Haya Baviera, 2008

Ruth Buchanan
Several Attentions, 2009

This film Several Attentions takes the 1928 essay A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf as its departure point. The essay sets out to address the relationship between women and fiction but equally becomes an investigation into the conditions under which the production of a work of art can occur. Buchanan takes what she understands as the turning point in the essay as a catalyst for the film. In Woolf’s essay, ‘the character’ sets out for the British Museum in the ‘pursuit of truth’ and compiles an unnerving collection of quotations and thoughts after making a catalogue search under ‘Woman and Poverty’. The books she cites are now housed at the British Library and it is from these same citations that Buchanan constructed the film.

After spending a summer sourcing each excerpt in the library, Buchanan made a microfilm compiling all of these ‘references’ and in the resulting 16mm film Several Attentions, the artist is seen from the back working with the microfilm. She distorts and manipulates the material, shifting the way in which it is perceived; flipping and turning it upside down, moving from a detail to an overview, reorganising and obscuring it with her own body. These processes of obscuring, reversing and movement are crucial in this piece as Buchanan instigates physical relations that recalibrate relationships with the space of history, and the many voices and positions that create an artistic practice.

Born in 1980 (Te Ati Awa/Taranaki), New Plymouth, New Zealand.
Lives in Berlin, Germany and Wellington, New Zealand

Image credit: Several Attentions, Ruth Buchanan, 2009. Commissioned by The Showroom

In the upstairs foyer:

No Fixed Abode
Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City, 2010

For some, including Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland for whom this was a first recording, Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City was ostensibly a love song. Others however, heard it as a lament on urban deprivation and hopelessness. Primarily, for No Fixed Abode, it is neither. Instead, its resonance is metaphysical. A ghost of the view of the city as organism, this lament is one of infinite ruminations on urban life which become ever more intricate through continual lyrical and stylistic re-appropriation.

No Fixed Abode’s interest here arrives as a sense of recognition that this sentiment is tangible to them in their own city, with its own narrative. Alternatively, within Art Sheffield 2010 – Life: A User’s Manual this lament provides the point of departure for a visual cartographic work (free to take away) which looks at the play of various collective identities that are being manufactured for Sheffield at the moment.

No Fixed Abode is a collaborative project by artists Robert Quirk – born in 1983, Wigan, UK and Terry Slater – born in 1983, Matlock, UK. They live in Sheffield, UK

Image credit: Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City, No Fixed Abode, 2010

Video podcast for Sheffield Institute of Arts Gallery

Click here to see images of the work in situ (link to Flickr.com)

Click here to watch the video podcast for Yorkshire Artspace, which features Art Sheffield’s co-curator Frederique Bergholtz talking about the installation, and an audio extract from the exhibition.

Rachel Koolen
Admin goes pomo, 2010

In her work Rachel Koolen brings into play and confronts administrative society. She engages with bureaucratic structures, the residue of modernism sometimes found within them (such as prefab design structures) and finds a certain elegance in their attempts to implement and make concrete ‘ideologically’ driven policies.

For Art Sheffield 2010 – Life: A User’s Manual she showed work that took this subject matter to act like a chameleon in the reception area of Yorkshire Artspace; speaking the rational, dry language that she recognises as her own and simultaneously evoking a specific humour.

One image in the installation, which is also the departure point, refered to her research into the Welfare system – an ink-jet print from a video still which documents an interview between a client and a social worker (1986). Even though everything seems quite familiar in this scene, it functions like an index for this sort of administrative space. By rendering this moment as matter (an ink-absorbed print), the original incident seeps into its own documentation and the technocratic space of history.

Born in 1979, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Lives in Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Image credit: Wavy Line, Rachel Koolen, 2009

At Site & Collectable postcards available free at each venue:

Ruth Ewan
Moderately Wrathful, 2010

Through manipulated or redirected situations Ruth Ewan’s projects bring lesser-known histories back into circulation. Working with print, performance and installation she examines the ways in which individuals and groups have utilised creative forms in an attempt to redefine their world.

Developed for Art Sheffield 2010 – Life: A User’s Manual, drawing on Sheffield’s radical history, Moderately Wrathful consists of a series of images distributed via all Art Sheffield venues. In a pamphlet published by Sheffield’s Holberry Society, a man called Sam Holmes describes how, at the age of 14, upon becoming a builder’s apprentice, he was presented with a copy of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914) by Robert Tressell (1870-1911). Holmes refers to the giving of this particular novel as a common gesture towards new apprentices, not only as a welcoming gift but also a handbook of sorts. Referencing the work of Robert Tressell, Moderately Wrathfulcombines images and text, cross referencing polemic extracts from Tressell’s novel, with several lesser-known drawings by the author of early aircrafts and hot air balloons.

Born in1980, Aberdeen, Scotland.
Lives in London, UK

Supported by the Yorkshire Artspace Residency Programme
Image credit: Fire Balloon, Robert Tressell, 1902, Courtesy The Robert Tressell Family Papers

Video podcast for Yorkshire Artspace

Click here to see images of the work in situ (link to Flickr.com)

Click here to watch the video podcast for S1 Artspace, which features Haegue Yang talking about her work Intro Motion Ditch.

Haegue Yang
Intro Motion Ditch, 2010

Haegue Yang works with various media, ranging from large-scale sensorial installations to juxtaposed graphic works, semi-documentary photographic pieces to small-scale objects. Despite her diverse range of media our attention is captured by her continuous conceptual focus on the notion of abstraction, even if an underlying sentiment manifests quite specific narratives, such as her subjective reflection on specific historical figures or concrete domestic environments. This particular language of abstraction is characterised often by utilising the sensorial aspects of devices such as moving lights, scent emitters, fans and so on, which enable the artist to translate her narratives into physical experiences in space.

She showed a newly commissioned piece, which embraced her previous interest in emotional and sensorial translation. It required her to trespass upon nationalism, patriarchal society as well as recognised human conditions, elaborated with an artistic strategy of abstraction and affect.

Born 1971, Seoul, Korea
Lives in Berlin, Germany and Seoul, Korea

Supported by The Henry Moore Foundation
Image credit: Gymnastics of the Foldables, Haegue Yang, 2006. Commissioned by If I can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution. Courtesy of Gallerie Barbara Wien, Berlin

At Site & Collectable postcards available free at each venue:

Ruth Ewan
Moderately Wrathful, 2010

Through manipulated or redirected situations Ruth Ewan’s projects bring lesser-known histories back into circulation. Working with print, performance and installation she examines the ways in which individuals and groups have utilised creative forms in an attempt to redefine their world.

Developed for Art Sheffield 2010 – Life: A User’s Manual, drawing on Sheffield’s radical history, Moderately Wrathful consists of a series of images distributed via all Art Sheffield venues. In a pamphlet published by Sheffield’s Holberry Society, a man called Sam Holmes describes how, at the age of 14, upon becoming a builder’s apprentice, he was presented with a copy of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914) by Robert Tressell (1870-1911). Holmes refers to the giving of this particular novel as a common gesture towards new apprentices, not only as a welcoming gift but also a handbook of sorts. Referencing the work of Robert Tressell, Moderately Wrathfulcombines images and text, cross referencing polemic extracts from Tressell’s novel, with several lesser-known drawings by the author of early aircrafts and hot air balloons.

Born in1980, Aberdeen, Scotland.
Lives in London, UK

Supported by the Yorkshire Artspace Residency Programme
Image credit: Fire Balloon, Robert Tressell, 1902, Courtesy The Robert Tressell Family Papers

Video Podcast for S1 Artspace

Click here to see images of the work in situ (link to Flickr.com)

Click here to watch the video podcast for the Millennium Gallery, which shows the work in situ and features Art Sheffield’s co-curator Frederique Bergholtz talking about Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s Après la reprise, la prise.

Imogen Stidworthy
Barrabackslarrabang, 2009-10

In this film Imogen Stidworthy interweaves standard and subverted English (backslang) with tropes of class and race, trade and desire in the hidden backwaters and idealised forms of the voice.

Backslang developed as a linguistic disguise to protect speakers, especially from the ears of the law. Liverpool slang has absorbed fragments from the language streams of global trade, passing through the docks: Spanish, Dutch, Yiddish, Chinese and African languages.

Like all languages Backslang is also a space of identification, spoken proudly. It could be seen as a sign of economic and social conditions and as a form of resistance – a necessity, or a possibility for different social paradigms. In Barrabackslarrabang, the voice criss-crosses social borders to reflect the mirroring of structures and desires through ostensibly opposing spaces of language, legality and culture. The work continues Stidworthy’s ongoing concern with the social landscape of the voice, its space and borders.

Born 1963, London, UK
Lives in Liverpool, UK

Image Credit: Barrabackslarrabang, Imogen Stidworthy, 2009. Coutesy Akinci Gallery, Amsterdam

Jo Spence
Various poster works, 1979 – 1995

Jo Spence pioneered a range of photographic practices from work on self-image and the family album to the uses of photography as a therapeutic and political tool. She believed that everyday life is the fundamental source of all meaningful art ‚ that photography is a tool that can be used by everyone in any situation for self-knowledge, personal growth and above all for social criticism. In insisting that we should consider the politics of hidden and personal suffering as suitable subjects for public presentation, she helped put important health and illness issues firmly in the public domain.

The works exhibited included posters and documentation from the many collectives she helped establish – Photography Workshop, Half Moon, Camerawork magazine, the Hackney Flashers and the Polysnappers as well as a number of publications, such as Spare Rib magazine, which frame her socially engaged practice.

Born in 1934, London, UK
Died 1992

Image credit: Various poster works, 1979 – 1995, Jo Spence. Courtesy Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow & Terry Dennett

Wendelien van Oldenborgh
Après la reprise, la prise, 2009

This recent project takes as its point of departure, the conditions of work and more specifically the changing nature of these, which is having its effect on the contemporary ’self’. The artist combines three at first sight diverging themes: manual labour, women and production of culture. The piece is made in collaboration with two women who were former assembly line workers of one of the Levi’s jeans factories in Belgium which closed in 1998, leaving all of its (female) workers unemployed. Many of them had spent their whole working life – from a young age – with Levi’s. A group of these women had found new roles as actresses after putting forward their experience in a theatre production. For this slide piece they share their story with students of the Royal Technical Atheneum Mechelen, Belgium.

Born in 1962, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Lives in Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Image credit: Après la reprise, la prise, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, 2009. Courtesy Wilfried Lentz, Rotterdam

Haroon Mirza
An_Infinato, 2009

In his work Haroon Mirza attempts to isolate the distinctions between noise, sound and music and explores the possibility of the visual and acoustic as one perceptual mode. These ideas are examined through the production of assemblages and sculptural installations made from furniture, household electronics and found or constructed video footage combined to generate audio compositions that flirt with the idea of being music. The subject matter of his work pivots around socio-cultural systems such as religious faith or club culture and their relationship with music.

This installation incorporates existing work by other artists (unedited video rushes from Memory Bucket, 2003 by Jeremy Deller and damaged off-cuts from Guy Sherwin’s 16mm film Cycles #1 1972/77, both by permission of the artists) and explores an ongoing interest in sound spillage.

Born in 1977, London, UK
Lives in Sheffield, UK

Image Credit: An_Infinato, Haroon Mirza, 2009

Phil Collins
hero, 2002

Phil Collins’ video hero turns tables on a New York journalist who, like so many other ‘lifestyle’ columnists, found himself having to cover the reality of the lives of those caught in the aftermath of 9/11. Every so often Collins’ arm enters the frame with a mug of whisky, from which the genial hack is obliged to drink, like some terrible reality TV forfeit or an endurance piece of performance art. In the background we can intermittently hear an instrumental version of the Mariah Carey 9/11 hit Hero. Oddly, what begins as an inchoate ramble becomes more cogent as the video proceeds, since segments of the footage have been reassembled in reverse order. In hero the techniques commonly used by the media to manipulate interviewees and viewers becomes the work’s content, along with the journalist’s soliloquy: the off-screen loosening of an interviewee’s tongue with alcohol, the colouring of the sentiments of a story through soundtrack and the strategic distortion of a sequence of events through the editing process.

Born in 1970, Runcorn, UK.
Lives in Berlin, Germany

Text by Alex Farquharson
Image credit: hero, Phil Collins, 2002

Katarina Zdjelar
Shoum, 2009

Katarina Zdjelar’s practice consists of making video, sound and text pieces, performances, book projects and creating different platforms for speculation, knowledge building and exchange. Her work explores notions of identity, authority and community and revolves around individuals who, challenged by simultaneous inhabitation of different languages, perform themselves through practicing, remembering or reinventing themselves.

The video piece Shoum focuses on an act of translating one‚’s experience of listening into uttering. A young man in his mid 30s from Belgrade is writing down and learning the lyrics of Shout, a song by Tears for Fears. The mishearings that often happen when one just hears a song without reading the lyrics are compounded by issues of mistranslation from the original language – English, in this case – which creates a kind of new phonetic language. Finally he performs the song in this new language, in which original words take different ’shapes’, as the title of the piece Shoum (which is the way he hears the word Shout) suggests.

Born in 1979, Belgrade, former Yugoslavia
Lives in Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Image credit: Shoum, Katarina Zdjelar, 2009

Susan Hiller
Dedicated to the Unknown Artists, 1972-76

Dedicated to the Unknown Artists is an installation of 305 postcards showing coastal views of rough seas presented alongside charts and notes documenting the difference between the visual representation of the  ’rough seas’ and the written descriptions of them.

The work employs but also undermines an anthropological approach to materials. The exhaustive logging and organising of material (the cards’ location, caption, message) threatens to be swamped by the sheer amount of subject matter. It uses a minimalist and conceptualist format of grids and charts but deals with popular imagery  - visually beautiful views of perfect storms bombarding Britain‚Äôs coastline (also a self-reflexive joke on the British love of bad weather). At the time of its production Hiller was accused of inappropriately bringing elements of kitsch, the sentimental and the Romantic into a pure conceptual form which dealt with control and rationality. Hiller talks about the potential for classic conceptual work to be ‘flat – there’s no affect, it doesn’t introduce any contradictions’. This work marries the contradictions of the conceptual and the emotional, allowing space for the minute differentiations of a multitude of unknown artists’ work to be brought to light.

Born in 1940, Tallahassee, USA
Lives in London, UK

Image credit: Dedicated to the Unknown Artists, Susan Hiller, 1972-76. Courtesy of Timothy Taylor Gallery, London

Kateřina Šedá
Der Geist von Uhyst (The Spirit of Uhyst), 2009

Kateřina Šedá’s work uses performance, staged activities and public interventions to reactivate communities and create social interaction. For Der Geist von Uhyst (The Spirit of Uhyst), Šedá worked with people from the village of Uhyst in northern Germany to discover and capture its essence and inner energy. Šedá sees this spirit as something which is shaped and affected by all of its residents, but which tends to be elusive.

Šedá asked each villager to use a single line to depict that which he or she regarded as being special about Uhyst. The result is a large-scale collective drawing, an accumulation of all of these individual lines, signed by all contributors. By examining community rituals and behaviour, geography and landscape, Šedá uncovers Uhyst’s complex history and generates a sense of belonging.

Born in 1977, Brno, Czech Republic
Lives in Prague, Czech Republic

Šedá will be creating new work for the city’s Visual Art collection, as part of the Contemporary Art Society’s inaugural Commissioning to Collect annual award. Her work on the commission will start during Art Sheffield 2010.

Image credit: Der Geist von Uhyst (The Spirit of Uhyst), Kateřina Šedá,  2009. Photograph: Michal Hladik

At Site & Collectable postcards available free at each venue:

Ruth Ewan
Moderately Wrathful, 2010

Through manipulated or redirected situations Ruth Ewan’s projects bring lesser-known histories back into circulation. Working with print, performance and installation she examines the ways in which individuals and groups have utilised creative forms in an attempt to redefine their world.

Developed for Art Sheffield 2010 – Life: A User’s Manual, drawing on Sheffield’s radical history, Moderately Wrathful consists of a series of images distributed via all Art Sheffield venues. In a pamphlet published by Sheffield’s Holberry Society, a man called Sam Holmes describes how, at the age of 14, upon becoming a builder’s apprentice, he was presented with a copy of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914) by Robert Tressell (1870-1911). Holmes refers to the giving of this particular novel as a common gesture towards new apprentices, not only as a welcoming gift but also a handbook of sorts. Referencing the work of Robert Tressell, Moderately Wrathfulcombines images and text, cross referencing polemic extracts from Tressell’s novel, with several lesser-known drawings by the author of early aircrafts and hot air balloons.

Born in1980, Aberdeen, Scotland.
Lives in London, UK

Supported by the Yorkshire Artspace Residency Programme
Image credit: Fire Balloon, Robert Tressell, 1902, Courtesy The Robert Tressell Family Papers

Video Podcast for Millennium Gallery

Click here to see images of the work in situ (link to Flickr.com)

Click here to watch the video podcast for Bloc, which features Art Sheffield’s co-curator Frederique Bergholtz talking about the work.

Nina Canell

The installations of Nina Canell present themselves as a series of sculptural interludes that question the reliability and fixity of physical forms. Hinged upon a fabric of electromagnetics, communities of objects quietly interact with each other through small arrangements of ramshackle radiation, balancing careful ambitions to sustain certain frequencies, movements and altitudes.

An improvisational methodology and a flexibility of form highlight Canell’s quest for sculpture, which exists somewhere between an event and an object, addressing our empirical understanding and willingness to engage with multiple and complex readings.

Born 1979 in Växjö, Sweden
Lives in Berlin, Germany

on Bloc Billboards:

Kate Davis / Jimmy Robert
A conversation between A and B, 2010

Kate Davis and Jimmy Robert have both previously produced works that use art historical moments as points of departure, often re-presenting existing material combined with representations of their own bodies.

Informed by successive waves of feminist art and theory, Davis has rethought representations of the female body in response to art historical fragments through photography, printmaking, sculpture, drawing and film. Working across a range of media that includes photography, film, sculpture, print and collage, as well as performance, Robert has a similar interest in exposing the fragility of representation by exploring the relation between image and object, drawing attention to the dynamics of different surfaces and making subtle transitions from an image to its concept and from a text to an idea.

A conversation between A and B, is a new collaborative work developed specifically for the context ofArt Sheffield 2010 – Life: A User’s Manual. Presented as poster works on the outside of Bloc, it is at once a public and private dialogue, prowling the parameters of the life room to unpick a linear reading of that floorspace and beyond.

Kate Davis – born in 1977, Wellington, New Zealand, lives in Glasgow, UK.
Jimmy Robert – born in 1975, Guadeloupe, France, lives in Brussels, Belgium.

Supported by The Elephant Trust
Image credit: A Conversation between A & B, Kate Davis/Jimmy Robert, 2010

At Site & Collectable postcards available free at each venue:

Ruth Ewan
Moderately Wrathful, 2010

Through manipulated or redirected situations Ruth Ewan’s projects bring lesser-known histories back into circulation. Working with print, performance and installation she examines the ways in which individuals and groups have utilised creative forms in an attempt to redefine their world.

Developed for Art Sheffield 2010 – Life: A User’s Manual, drawing on Sheffield’s radical history, Moderately Wrathful consists of a series of images distributed via all Art Sheffield venues. In a pamphlet published by Sheffield’s Holberry Society, a man called Sam Holmes describes how, at the age of 14, upon becoming a builder’s apprentice, he was presented with a copy of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914) by Robert Tressell (1870-1911). Holmes refers to the giving of this particular novel as a common gesture towards new apprentices, not only as a welcoming gift but also a handbook of sorts. Referencing the work of Robert Tressell, Moderately Wrathfulcombines images and text, cross referencing polemic extracts from Tressell’s novel, with several lesser-known drawings by the author of early aircrafts and hot air balloons.

Born in1980, Aberdeen, Scotland.
Lives in London, UK

Supported by the Yorkshire Artspace Residency Programme
Image credit: Fire Balloon, Robert Tressell, 1902, Courtesy The Robert Tressell Family Papers

Video podcast for Bloc

Click here to see images of the work in situ (link to Flickr.com)

Click here to watch the video podcast for Site, which features Art Sheffield’s co-curator Frederique Bergholtz talking about Emily Wardill’s Fulll Firearms, and artist Charlotte Morgan talking about her bookwork, Lookout.

Hito Steyerl
Red Alert, 2007

Red Alert is a new media translation of a work by Aleksandr Rodchenko, which was first exhibited in 1921. He did three monochromes, each in one of the primary colours and called them: Pure Yellow, Pure Red, Pure Blue. He believed that he had taken leftist painting to its logical conclusion and refers to this work as ‘the end of painting’.

Red Alert is an attempt to translate this piece into the present. But at the moment there is just one primary colour, namely the red-orange used by US Homeland Security to indicate the highest threat level on their colour based terror alert scale. The work uses computer screens, which are chosen to replicate Rodchenko’s proportions as faithfully as possible, to project a single video still.

Red Alert is a reflection on the end of video; as well as a crisis of representation, which affects the aesthetic as well as the political and refers to a collapse of the distinctions between both spheres.

Born in1966, Munich, Germany
Lives in Berlin, Germany

Image credit: Red Alert, Hito Steyerl, 2007

Emily Wardill
Fulll Firearms, 2010

From the use of allegory within stained glass windows to the intermeshing of status symbols with evidence of crime and theatrical props within melodrama, Emily Wardill makes films which explore the way ideas materialise. Her work is concerned with strategies of communication; how they utilise the concrete and how this relationship might be parallel to methods of filmmaking.

Fulll Firearms is a film based on footage from improvisational workshops. The story is of a woman who inherits a fortune from her father’s firearms company and uses the wealth to build a house to accommodate the ghosts of people killed by the guns. Squatters, who the woman sees as the ghosts that she had hoped would move into the property, inhabit the house. Trickery: the house’s architect’s trickery of her, her trickery of the ghosts and the squatters trickery of each other wind through the film, twisting and gathering up all that happens when ideas are met with their realisation.

Born in 1977, Rugby, UK
Lives in London, UK

Image credit: Fulll Firearms, Emily Wardill, 2010. Courtesy Fortescue Avenue, STANDARD (OSLO) and Altman Siegal Gallery. Photographer: Polly Braden

Charlotte Morgan
Lookout, 2010

For Art Sheffield 2010 – Life: A User’s Manual, Charlotte Morgan produced a limited edition bookwork comprising new and archival images and writing, continuing her interest in the structure and experience of built environments and the fields of art writing and self publishing.

The work focuses on the space between two prominent residential buildings, overlooking each other on the edge of Sheffield centre, The Velocity Tower, a 22 storey new build, which stands unfinished and only fractionally occupied, and the Hanover Tower, a 1960s social housing block. Morgan’s interest lies in their expansive views of the city, a much sought after commodity, their suggestion of distance, stillness and gazing; a state of inertia, suspense and possibility. These high rise buildings mark the boundary of the commercial, economic and cultural hub of the city and the outskirting suburbs, and map a shift in ideology and aspiration.

Lookout explores the vistas afforded by the flats placing intimacy with haunting vacancy and artifice, interrupted by a pictorial archive of high points, watch towers, radio towers, tree houses and platforms. Oddments, associations and narratives are compiled as layers of physicality, memory and suggestion, a place between the buildings, a critical assemblage coming together to address the boundaries of urbanism, culture and access, conscious of the book’s nomadic form.

Born in 1985, Worksop, UK
Lives in Sheffield, UK

Image credit: Lookout, Charlotte Morgan, 2010

Yael Davids
The Hand is Quicker than the Eye, 2009

Yael Davids developed a project with inmates at Mechelen City Prison, Belgium which included a series of workshops around the idea of ‘circus’ (including theatre, magic, illusion, acrobatics and storytelling) given by professionals in the field. The project developed from looking at the parallels between the institutions of the circus and the prison, both of which have traditionally been pushed to the periphery of cities. However, while the architecture and function of the prison is designed to enclose and hold its inhabitants, the circus is conceived as a space of fantasy and imaginative escape. These workshops culminated in a final performance inside the prison – footage from this performance forms this video piece.

“In the book – Life: A User’s Manual… the writing circles around details of the lives and objects in a single apartment block, creating the sensation of an eye travelling around the space… When it comes to rest on a detail such as a painting, the eye focuses, gradually zooming in on each little detail, opening up a vivid narrative spectrum. In film, often a close up; either of another part of the body or an inanimate object, is used similarly as a replacement for the face.”* In this work, this encounter with another through the close up, through a detail, is transposed to a live moment. Davids replaces the close up with a spotlight, lighting up certain details of the performance. The inmates perform magic – silently with balls, ropes and cards.The spotlight illuminates their hands, the surface where the magic trick takes place.

Born in 1968, Kibbutz Tzuba, Israel
Lives in Amsterdam, The Netherlands

* From the text The Hand is Quicker than the Eye, Yael Davids
Image credit: The Hand is Quicker than the Eye, Yael Davids, 2009. Commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA)

Wendelien van Oldenborgh
Divertimentos, 2010

“Nothing is more comfortable in the world than the idealistic and metaphysical position, which can go in any direction and does not take objective reality into account, avoiding its control” ~ Lina Bo Bardi

In this project, which is in development, Wendelien van Oldenborgh is taking the work of the Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi and her interest in social reality and the popular to reflect on the relationship of cultural production and active spectatorship. In her design for the MASP (Museo de Arte de S√£o Paulo 1957 -1968) Lina Bo Bardi speaks about “removing the ‘aura’ from the picture, so that we can display the art as work with a high reputation, but still as work”. Her revolutionary exhibition model proposes both the paintings and the spectator as actors in a space of relationships.

Born in 1962, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Lives in Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Image credit: Picture gallery MASP. Photograph by Paulo Gasparini / Lina Bo & P.M. Bardi Institute Archive

In the upstairs foyer:

No Fixed Abode
Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City, 2010

For some, including Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland for whom this was a first recording, Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City was ostensibly a love song. Others however, heard it as a lament on urban deprivation and hopelessness. Primarily, for No Fixed Abode, it is neither. Instead, its resonance is metaphysical. A ghost of the view of the city as organism, this lament is one of infinite ruminations on urban life which become ever more intricate through continual lyrical and stylistic re-appropriation.

No Fixed Abode’s interest here arrives as a sense of recognition that this sentiment is tangible to them in their own city, with its own narrative. Alternatively, within Art Sheffield 2010 – Life: A User’s Manual this lament provides the point of departure for a visual cartographic work (free to take away) which looks at the play of various collective identities that are being manufactured for Sheffield at the moment.

No Fixed Abode is a collaborative project by artists Robert Quirk – born in 1983, Wigan, UK and Terry Slater – born in 1983, Matlock, UK. They live in Sheffield, UK

Image credit: Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City, No Fixed Abode, 2010

Video podcast for Site Gallery

Yael Davids
Learning To Imitate

Performance – Sat 24 April, 6pm CANCELLED
DUE TO BE POSTPONED: contact SCAF for more details

By asking questions such as “what is a lecture?” and “how to give a lecture as an artist?” Learning To Imitate can be positioned in relation to the current reactivation of the genre of the lecture performance as well as its legacies. It is also connected to a recurrent trope in Yael Davids’ work namely: the voice.

Learning To Imitate forms a pretext for contemplating the idea of ‘having a voice’. The emancipatory connotations are addressed, as well as the relation of the voice to the body and to vision. Divergent examples of the manifestation and affects of the voice in theatre, cinema, literature and law are reviewed and shown in manifold ways.

With the prospect of having to speak and perform herself, Davids decided to approach the lecture as an exercise. She trained herself to learn the text by heart and analysed the lecture in relation to its constitutive parts, such as audience, stage, voice, text and positions in space. Putting ‘work’ at the core of the action, Learning To Imitate circumvents the lecture and its representational characteristics and instead, articulates both ideas and delivery in their original state.

In this performance for Art Sheffield 2010 – Life: A User’s Manual, Davids will further develop an existing lecture. This new performance will involve a sense of community and examine the possibilities of the plural to share and carry a single voice.

Born in 1968, Kibbutz Tzuba, Israel
Lives in Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Image credit: Learning to Imitate, Yael Davids, 2009. Original lecture performance. Commissioned by If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part of Your Revolution. Courtesy Akinci Gallery, Amsterdam

Becky Shaw
A: The Christmas Party, 2010

A: The Christmas Party is a play script, written in 2005 during a residency with Age Concern, Chelsea and Westminster. The script records the six times that a care worker and artist visit an elderly dementia-sufferer in her home. ‘A’s language has been severely disrupted by dementia and when the carers try to engage her, ‘A’ speaks in rhyme, combining a small number of popular songs and nursery rhymes in ever-varying combinations. Through her limited words ‘A’ manages to communicate many things, most obviously that she is lonely, frustrated, tired and bored. Through her cheeky responses and strange observations, ‘A’ also manages to repeatedly embarrass her visitors. The efforts of the care workers to engage her fail many times, and end with a Christmas party, designed to stimulate ‘A’s senses, but ending in near-disaster. The play is intended to communicate a number of things: firstly it presents the tragedy and, often surreal, comedy of care, and the extraordinary determination people have to communicate.

Rather than a dramatic performance, A: The Christmas Party is simply a reading. All six acts were read in one reading, with no rehearsal. It was intended to capture the genuine effort of endurance, the highs and the lows of a long distance effort, without the need for acting. It is hoped that the context of the reading, rather than a performance, abstracts the text, focuses on words and circumvents the need for characterisation and the inherent danger of parody.

The readers are:
A: Terry O’Connor
Becky: Rhiannon Armstrong
June: Song MinJong
The Carer: Becky Shaw
The Optician: Daryl Peat

Sound recording and editing by Daryl Peat. Recorded at Sheffield Hallam University

A limited edition text version of A: The Christmas Party is available to order from Sheffield Contemporary Art Forum.

Each act of the play was broadcast on consecutive six Friday mornings during Art Sheffield 2010, on 93.2fm /www.sheffieldlive.org

Born in 1971, Dudley, UK.
Lives in Sheffield, UK

Thanks to Terry O’Connor – member of Forced Entertainment and AHRC CreativeResearch Fellow at Roehampton University, and to Sheffield Live! FM
Image credit: Dialogue from A: The Christmas Party, Becky Shaw, 2010

Collectable postcards available free at each venue:

Ruth Ewan
Moderately Wrathful, 2010

Through manipulated or redirected situations Ruth Ewan’s projects bring lesser-known histories back into circulation. Working with print, performance and installation she examines the ways in which individuals and groups have utilised creative forms in an attempt to redefine their world.

Developed for Art Sheffield 2010 – Life: A User’s Manual, drawing on Sheffield’s radical history, Moderately Wrathful consists of a series of images distributed via all Art Sheffield venues. In a pamphlet published by Sheffield’s Holberry Society, a man called Sam Holmes describes how, at the age of 14, upon becoming a builder’s apprentice, he was presented with a copy of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914) by Robert Tressell (1870-1911). Holmes refers to the giving of this particular novel as a common gesture towards new apprentices, not only as a welcoming gift but also a handbook of sorts. Referencing the work of Robert Tressell, Moderately Wrathful combines images and text, cross referencing polemic extracts from Tressell’s novel, with several lesser-known drawings by the author of early aircrafts and hot air balloons.

Born in1980, Aberdeen, Scotland.
Lives in London, UK

Supported by the Yorkshire Artspace Residency Programme
Image credit: Fire Balloon, Robert Tressell, 1902, Courtesy The Robert Tressell Family Papers

On billboard sites outside Bloc

Kate Davis / Jimmy Robert
A conversation between A and B, 2010

Kate Davis and Jimmy Robert have both previously produced works that use art historical moments as points of departure, often re-presenting existing material combined with representations of their own bodies.

Informed by successive waves of feminist art and theory, Davis has rethought representations of the female body in response to art historical fragments through photography, printmaking, sculpture, drawing and film. Working across a range of media that includes photography, film, sculpture, print and collage, as well as performance, Robert has a similar interest in exposing the fragility of representation by exploring the relation between image and object, drawing attention to the dynamics of different surfaces and making subtle transitions from an image to its concept and from a text to an idea.

A conversation between A and B, is a new collaborative work developed specifically for the context of Art Sheffield 2010 – Life: A User’s Manual. Presented as poster works across the city of Sheffield, it is at once a public and private dialogue, prowling the parameters of the life room to unpick a linear reading of that floorspace and beyond.

Kate Davis – born in 1977, Wellington, New Zealand, lives in Glasgow, UK.
Jimmy Robert – born in 1975, Guadeloupe, France, lives in Brussels, Belgium.

Supported by The Elephant Trust
Image credit: A Conversation between A & B, Kate Davis/Jimmy Robert, 2010

Some venues, studios and artists in the city will be continuing to coordinate their own programmes and activity during Art Sheffield 2010 – Life: A User’s Manual.

Visit artsheffield.org/listings for more exhibitions and events that are taking place at the same time, including fringe activity and responses to the event