Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
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Layla Curtis, ‘Souvenirs from Manchester, (detail Police Cards)’, 2002.
Photo: the artist.
Cube, Manchester 11 September – 2 November
Reviewed by: Jo Manby
Commissions in response to a three-year body of academic research by the Urban Memory in Manchester team at Manchester University's School of Art History and Archaeology gave six artists carte blanche to mine this extensive resource on the history and architecture of the city. Selection on the basis of relevant focus in their individual practice (already high profile and diverse) guaranteed distinct reactions from Sarah Carne, Adam Chodzko, Nathan Coley, Layla Curtis, Lubaina Himid and Sarah Waring.
Coley's I don't have another land stands alone in the first room at the immaculate Cube. A black lacquered MDF skeleton of the Marks & Spencer building post-IRA bomb makes a last ditch attempt to communicate the incident via twenty whitewashed windows bearing the letters of the work's title. Ironically, perhaps sorrowfully, there is another land – a charred lonely blank plot behind the structure itself.
For Remixer, Chodzko also calls in at street level, merging the city's dance scene of the 1980s with the consequences of the IRA bombing in 1996. His audio-visual installation plays Flight by A Certain Ratio (1980) whilst fly-posters on the wall track the path from the old Hacienda club to the site of the bomb.
Himid exhibits historically more distant subject matter, Cotton.com, refers to Manchester's cotton workers and Carolinian cotton-picker slaves. A hundred monochrome pattern-painted squares mount the gallery wall, in a matrix not inappropriately tinged by a sense of hysteria. Opposite, Himid displays a brass panel reading, "He said I looked like a painting by Murillo as I carried water for the hoe gang just because I balanced the bucket on my head." You can almost hear the pompous patronise the bonded.
Writer detail:
JO MANBY
is an artist, curator and writer.
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