The Turner Prize - Tramway, Glasgow

During my recent trip to Glasgow I stopped at Tramway to visit The Turner Prize exhibition. The nominees this year are Assemble, Bonnie Camplin, Janice Kerbel and Nicole Wermers. It was the London-based collective known as Assemble that caught my attention, and I was delighted to hear that they were announced winners last night.

The collective, comprising of 18 members, were nominated for their ongoing collaboration with the local community in the Granby Four Streets area of Liverpool.

"The Granby Four Streets are a cluster of terraced houses in Toxteth, Liverpool that were built around 1900 to house artisan workers. Following the Toxteth riots in 1981, the council acquired many of the houses in the area for demolition and redevelopment. Hundreds of people were moved out the area and houses subsequently fell into disrepair.

Local residents consistently fought plans for demolition and battled to save the houses. Over the past 10 years they have cleaned and planted their streets, painted the empty houses, organized a thriving monthly market, founded a Community Land Trust and shown their area in a different light.

 

Assemble worked with the Granby Four Streets CLT and Steinbeck Studios to present a sustainable and incremental vision for the area that builds on the hard work already done by local residents and translates it to the refurbishment of housing, public space and the provision of new work and enterprise opportunities."

For the Turner Prize exhibition Assemble present a life size replica of one of the houses that they are helping the local residents redevelop. The replica house has become a showroom for the products created at the Granby Workshop. Granby Workshop is a social enterprise in Granby that equips local people with experimental manufacturing skills and enables them to create an appealing range of handmade household features designed to replace those items that were removed from the properties during the demolition. These include door knobs, ceramic tiles, fabrics and furniture.

Seizing the opportunity that the Turner Prize presents, the products on show in the workshop are available to pre-order throughout the exhibition. It is hoped that the proceeds will assist in the launch of the business which will live on after the art prize.

To see the full catalogue of products available visit

http://www.granbyworkshop.co.uk/collections/all

New Work Scotland Programme Symposium

Looks like this event will be really interesting...

New Work Scotland Programme
Symposium | Part 2 

New Work Scotland Programme Symposium

Part 2

Thursday 25 April | 6-8pm

Collective

This event will consider how international organisations and curators support and work with emergent practitioners and how a residency opportunity can develop an artist's practice and networks.

Speakers will include; Devrim Bayar, curator WIELS, Brussels; Daniella King, recently curator, MASS Alexandria, Egypt and Fiona Jardine, artist and writer.

A selection of work by artists who participated in the MASS programme will be screened as part of the event.  

Devrim Bayar is curator at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre and teaches contemporary art at La Cambre School of Visual Arts in Brussels. She was editor-in-chief of CODE Magazine between 2005 and 2009.

WIELS Contemporary Art Centre focuses on presenting temporary exhibitions by national and international artists, both emerging and more established. In addition to regular exhibitions, WIELS houses nine residencies for young artists and an active education programme. WIELS Residency Programme is an international laboratory for talented emerging artists from all over the world. WIELS provides a unique framework for artists to pursue their practice and engage in current debates and research, which examines the potentials of contemporary artistic production.

Fiona Jardine is an artist, writer and curator based in Glasgow. Fiona studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, Dundee and is a graduate of the MFA at Glasgow School of Art. Since graduation in 2003, she has exhibited widely in cities in the UK as well as Rotterdam, Mexico City, Athens, Antwerp, New York, Paris and Montreal. Fiona is currently pursuing a PhD programme of research at the University of Wolverhampton.

Fiona completed a residency in Beijing as part of Collective's, How to Turn the World by Hand programme, which formed part of her research in her exhibition Five Foot Shelf that took place at Collective in 2012.

Daniella King is a curator and writer, currently resident in London. Most recently she was Programme Curator at MASS Alexandria, an independent study and studio programme for artists in Egypt. She recently contributed to The Right Dissonance (London, 2011) a collection of interviews between emerging curators and artists and Hatje Cantz's, On One Side of the Same Water: Artistic Practice between Tirana and Tangier (Germany, 2012) and has written for Frieze, Art Monthly, Ibraaz (where she is an editorial correspondent), Universes in Universe - Worlds of Art, Portal 9, and Harper's Bazaar Art.

MASS Alexandria was founded in 2010 by the Alexandria artist Wael Shawky and provides an opportunity for independent study and learning for artists in Egypt. Through its programme, MASS Alexandria aims to complement existing art education schemes, with a focus on the conceptual aspects of artistic production. Monthly workshops, seminars and lectures are led by artists, art educators and curators. Through the exploration of contemporary artistic practices, the programme also encourages students to work closely with cultural, artistic and scientific ideas in the fields of art history and theory and inter-disciplinary studies.