Unearthing Stories
Work on the first series of artist commissions concluded at Snibston Discovery Park in Leicestershire. The work was showcased in May. You can find an online version of the stories for downloading on this page along with a photo-book extra. Enjoy! More jottings on the development of this project on this web page…

Interchatting…

I presented aspects of  work of the recent Intercultural Dialogue project at an event at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow, alongside Professor Ryszard Kluszczynski  from the Department of Media and Audiovisual Culture at the University of Łódź – who spoke about aspects of collaboration in the context of Biennales and ‘cultural exchange between Europe and Asia’. The Symposium – ‘Mashing Up: Curating Practice’ – was part of a series of events organised by the Centre for Russian, Central and East European Studies with the University of West Scotland and the University of Glasgow.

Unearthing Stories
Work continues with Snibston Discovery Park in Leicestershire, part of a series of artist commissions, creating images and accompanying texts.  The work will be showcased at a multi-media event on May 15th, followed by a Professional Development programme for a group of local practitioners in June. More jottings on the progress of this project on this web page…

Me, Myself and Everything Else
A new photographic exhibition was launched at Phoenix Court Sheltered Housing in Castle Vale – loops of over 500 photographs taken by participants on the project, housed in ten digital screens mounted on a specially made stainless steel frame. The exhibition tours to various venues over the summer. The project was commissioned by Active Arts. View the project blog pages pages here: myaee.posterous.com.

Fourth Practice Exchange for Intercultural Capacity-Building
The report for this event is currently available online at Platform for Intercultural Europe. The Practice Exchange involved over 50 participants from fields of arts and education and from diverse cultural backgrounds in the UK, along with guests from Austria, Belgium, Slovenia, Sweden and Italy. Artists’ intercultural work with ethnic minorities was showcased and discussed by participants made up of theatre practitioners, art consultants, anti-discrimination activists and academics. The final report, by yours truly – with excellent editing support from Sabine Frank – covers it all. (You’ll find plenty of other interesting material on the Platform web site.)

Unearthing Stories
I’m currently working with staff at Snibston Discovery Park in Leicestershire, as part of a series of artist commissions, creating images and accompanying texts.  Our starting point is to investigate objects in the stores collection, those objects currently not on (or never on) display. There are over a million objects stored in the Leicestershire museum service collections. In one room is stored a dismantled ‘panopticon’ or – more accurately – the Kaiser Panorama, a large circular wooden device invented by August Fuhrman in Berlin in the 1880′s.  ‘Left in store temporarily in 1969 by a Polish gentleman for about two weeks but never collected. Ownership vested in County council under Section 41 of the Local Government (Misc Provisions) Act 1982.’ Around its circumference would have been 24 viewing stations, where you would sit and peer into stereoscope lenses of rear-illuminated  stereoscopic photographic views, sometimes hand-tinted. An internal mechanical drum rotated every minute, so the viewer watched the views in sequence. These were images of what we might call ‘wonders of the world’.  (A working example exists in Warsaw, there called a ‘fotoplastikon’ – look at www.fotoplastikon.stereos.com.pl which has some useful background to stereoscopy). This particular model left in Snibston appears to have been still touring Austria between 1917 until as late as 1929, at a time when these kinds of viewing devices had been completely supplanted by moving pictures and the cinematographic technological supremacy of Eastman-Kodak.  The work will be showcased at a multi-media event on May 15th.

Me, Myself and Everything Else
An inter-generational photographic project on the Castle Vale estate in Birmingham, working with Geoff Broadway,  commissioned by Active Arts. One of the recent outcomes was a special issue of Vale Mail in December. Vale Mail is a free monthly newspaper distributed to over 4100 homes in the area.  The December issue featured a special wrap round about the ‘Me, You and Everything Else’ project. View the pages here on the project blog: myaee.posterous.com/vale-mail.  We’re now working on an exhibition of the project which will be opened at Phoenix Court Sheltered Housing on March 31st.

Fourth Practice Exchange for Intercultural Capacity-Building
I recently undertook the role of rapporteur for an event organised by Platform for Intercultural Europe and Border Crossings in association with Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance. The Practice Exchange involved over 50 participants from fields of arts and education and from diverse cultural backgrounds in the UK, along with guests from Austria, Belgium, Slovenia, Sweden and Italy. Artists’ intercultural work with ethnic minorities was showcased and discussed by participants made up of theatre practitioners, art consultants, anti-discrimination activists and academics. The finalised report will be made available online soon. Meanwhile you may be interested to read their Rainbow Paper - Intercultural Dialogue: From Practice to Policy and Back. Endorse the outcome and increase its impact at: rainbowpaper.labforculture.org

Transform
I will be working on a project called Unearthing Stories at Snibston Discovery Park in Leicestershire as part of a programme of new artist commissions. The work will be showcased at a multi-media event in April, 2011.

Items Collected
An intervention at Wolverhampton Art Gallery, with a local arts group of Asian women and items from the gallery collections, commissioned as part of the Art of Ideas regional programme. Full information here…

Me, Myself and Everything Else
An inter-generational project on the Castle Vale estate in Birmingham, working with Geoff Broadway,  commissioned by Active Arts. The project blog is www.myaee.posterous.com.

People’s Portraits, curated by Brendan Jackson and Beverly Harvey at The Public in West Bromwich from Wednesday 6 October to Sunday 31 October.

A three screen projection selected from photographic documentation of Black and Asian history in the region, part of Sandwell’s Black History Month. Taken in the period 1988-93 during Jubilee Arts’ People Portraits Project (of which we were both a part), the images now function as a historical document of everyday life in the community at that time. Jubilee Arts championed communities to control how their shared identities could be represented by sharing aspects of their life experiences and achievements.

The show includes images from ‘Bickle’ (1989), a large scale exhibition containing photographic portraits and interviews with Afro-Caribbean elders, ‘Sandwell in Black & White’ (1990), a mass participation project in which diverse groups of residents were invited to document their life using a camera over the whole year, and ‘My Mother, My Daughter, Myself’ (1992) a collection of oral histories and portraits of three generations of Asian woman living in Smethwick.

An introduction to the exhibition can be downloaded here… People’sPortraitintro.pdf

Image above: editorial sessions with participants of ‘Sandwell in Black & White’ project, 1990
Below: Three screen installation.

We no longer talk, 136 pages, hardback.
Editor: Brendan Jackson. Publisher: Borderland Foundation, June 2010.

The book is a series of essays, photographs, reflections and quotes, which give a snapshot of some of the places and people worked with
over the past two years on an Intercultural Dialogue project – these include Wolverhampton, Birmingham, Leeds, Bela Rechka and Hania. We couldn’t include everything (sorry Warsaw, Sejny, Skopje, Baku and Walsall), but I hope it gives a flavour of the work and inspires further dialogues.

For details of availability, in Poland contact pamelawells@googlemail.com or in UK/elsewhere contact brendanjack@googlemail.com

Here’s a pdf of the introduction from Steve Trow. we-no-longer-talk-intro

Curated by Brendan Jackson, a re-presentation of 111 photographs selected from the archives of the Express & Star newspaper, Jubilee Arts and Sandwell Council. The Express & Star was founded in 1880 and is still one of the biggest selling regional dailies. Jubilee Arts was a community arts organisation, founded in West Bromwich in 1974, the same year Sandwell Council came into being. The images in the show are a small personal selection from browsing through these archives, found in boxes and basements, images from West Bromwich and slightly further afield. Though there are a few photographs from the very beginning on the 20th century, the majority are within my living memory or that of my parents. Visitors can add their own photographs and stories…

On show at The Public, West Bromwich, West Midlands, UK, 11th May – 12th July. For details go to www.thepublic.com

As a follow up to interchat event, and as part of the Birmingham bid for UK City of Culture 2013, on Friday 23rd April and Saturday 24th April we had team of social reporters out on the streets documenting life in the City of a 1000 Accents. You can see the whole blog as it happened at birminghamculture.org

Or you can check bj and simon’s contributions which are compiled on the Laundry site here: http://www.laundryline.co.uk/news/24-hour-blog-the-results/

April 7th and 8th, 2010
The Drum, Birmingham, UK

Further information and booking: www.the-drum.org.uk/event/interchat

Featuring Airan Berg, Linz 2009 European Capital of Culture (Austria); François Matarasso (UK); Fundacja Pogranicze (Poland); Laundry (UK); Nova Kultura (Bulgaria).

Wednesday 7th April, 2pm – 8pm
Artist-led sessions to explore good practice in community engagement projects, with local and international examples from Birmingham, Bulgaria, Crete and Poland, aimed at artists and practitioners wishing to develop their community practice with an international perspective.

Thursday 8th April, 10am – 4pm
A dialogue with Airan Berg and François Matarasso, exploring European approaches to artistic practices that invite social engagement, followed by case studies and interactive sessions led by Birmingham arts organisations. This day will be of interest to artists and agencies addressing cross-cutting agendas through the arts.

The trans-pennine express left Leeds on time, despite the ice and fog
and utter and complete disruption in the whole of the country. Just the foreboding of snow, you understand. BIG FREEZE ON THE WAY! announced news placards outside the station.

They drank coffee and stared intently at their i-phones. At first, for what seemed an eternity, reception was not good, lost in the tunnels through the granite hillsides outside the city. The train soon passed Dewsbury, where most people departed, and then Huddersfield, which had a station façade once called the most splendid in all of England.

Outside, the sky a gun-metal grey, the sleet spitting down, dirty cream coloured stone houses along the valleys emerging from the mist then disappearing again, and tall windows of the old mill factories still lit with electric light, though who knows what they contain these days.

I can access the wi-fi now, she said finally. She let out a long sigh of relief.

Mine’s still struggling, he said.

Cape Town, 21 degrees, Adelaide, 18 degrees. Singapore, 28 degrees. She reeled them off. Each destination, a shake of his head, eyes down, fixed on his screen. Moscow, minus 21. I don’t think we’ll be going there.

He asked, How about Hong Kong?

I haven’t got Hong Kong, love. Only Singapore. It’s coming up random. Brunei’s 29 degrees. Borneo’s near enough isn’t it? And Bangkok’s 33 degrees. Shanghai, only 7 degrees there. Rio De Janiero, 30 degrees.

Wrong side of the world, he said. He shook his phone, as if that would
cure it.

Singapore would be nice, don’t you think? It’s supposed to be very clean. And it’s an island, like Hong Kong.

Ah, he said. At bloody last! Now I’ve got Singapore. Friday 28 degrees, Saturday 27, Sunday 28. Scattered thunderstorms.

They were not young and perhaps had generous pensions. They both wore the same brand of pristine white trainers with a gold logo. They explored meteorologic conditions around the world together, as the train slowed on its approach to Manchester Piccadilly, steady at 2 degrees, passing avenues of red and orange shipping containers, stacked high, and no doubt bound for similar destinations, weather conditions permitting.