SHEFFIELD.- Art Sheffield today announced the first details of the 2016 festival programme, entitled Up, Down, Top, Bottom, Strange and Charm. The festival is curated by Martin Clark, Director of Bergen Kunsthall, and runs from 16 April – 8 May 2016.
Conceived as an ‘exploded’ group show, Art Sheffield will present a carefully selected programme dedicated entirely to sound and moving image, exhibited across Sheffield’s galleries, venues, industrial and urban spaces. Highlights of Art Sheffield will include three new commissions by British artists Steven Claydon, Hannah Sawtell and Richard Sides, who will each produce site-specific work.
Central to the festival is a collection of rarely seen ‘scratch’ videos, a short-lived but influential phenomenon that emerged on the underground scene in the mid-1980s, driven by early pioneers like George Barber, Jeffrey Hinton, Kim Flitcroft, Sandra Goldbacher and Sheffield based Nick Cope. Other works address themes around politics, economics, music, technology and the material reality of the physical world, including international artists Michel Auder, Charles Atlas and Jean-Michel Wicker, and British artists Beatrice Gibson and Mark Fell. More artists will be announced in the coming weeks.
The title, Up, Down, Top, Bottom, Strange and Charm is taken from the six flavours (or types) of quark: the elementary particles that make up every atom, and the fundamental building blocks of nature. Through film, video and sound, the fabric of the city itself will be explicitly activated and inhabited by the exhibition dispersed in and around Sheffield city centre.
Commissions
Steven Claydon will present a new video and sound work in the iconic Grade II listed Moore Street electricity substation. Working directly with scientists at IBM, Claydon’s work will draw on research into materiality and matter at an atomic level. Using footage produced by IBM’s sophisticated atom-moving technology, Claydon will create a large-scale video work projected within the 18,000sqft venue, which will be accompanied by audio samples of atoms being moved. Claydon will work with local steel manufacturers to create four large plate reverb panels that will amplify the sound to create a fully immersive installation that situates the viewer amongst the building blocks of matter.
Hannah Sawtell will draw on Sheffield’s industrial, musical and leftist political heritage to develop a new multi-disciplinary work that explores the concept for a new ‘people’s currency’ for Sheffield, modelled on alternative currencies like bitcoin. Using open source apps and software, as well as CGI and electronic sound, she will create a work that builds a new idea of community, value and exchange - one very directly engaged with and informed by the economic realities and rhetoric of the present.
Richard Sides is a multi-disciplinary artist with a background in electronic music who was born and raised in Sheffield. Sides will make a new site-specific installation at a former funeral parlour on Eyre Street using moving image, sculpture and sound.
Scratch Video
Art Sheffield 2016 draws on the various political, social, cultural and material histories of Sheffield in order to address more universal themes. These include the city’s prosperous industrial past built around manufacturing, steel and light industry, and its rapid decline in the 1980s; Sheffield’s long history of resistance, socialism and independence - from John Ruskin’s utopian initiatives for workers in the 19th century, through to its present as one of the UK’s longest-standing Labour strongholds; and its proud musical heritage which includes bands such as Cabaret Voltaire, Human League and Pulp. The 1980s were defined by industry decline and the Thatcherite politics that accelerated it, the cold war, nuclear threat and the boom and bust of burgeoning global capitalism. At this time, new video editing technologies became available at various arts schools, including Sheffield, leading to a number o f artists and musicians experimenting with the medium in very politically engaged ways. This led to the development of a new visual language and technique – ‘scratch video’.
Using rapid cuts and repetitions, as well as new digital effects, this work was often screened in clubs or music venues, or made as stage visuals or music videos for bands. Art Sheffield includes a number of these rarely seen ‘scratch’ videos by filmmakers George Barber, Nick Cope, Gorilla Tapes, Jeffrey Hinton and Duvet Brothers. In the way their work very directly sampled and subverted found footage from TV news, films, advertising and popular culture, they can be seen to have anticipated many of the techniques and visual languages that are now so ubiquitous across the internet, social media and platforms like YouTube.
City-wide Programme
The city-wide programme has been developed and delivered in collaboration with Sheffield’s leading visual arts venues - Bloc Projects, S1 Artspace, Museums Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam University and Site Gallery. In addition, a number of off-site venues have been very specifically selected – including former steel and cutlery works, nightclubs, and the iconic Park Hill, a controversial brutalist housing estate which was saved from demolition by the National Trust in 1998 when it was given Grade II listed building status. Shown alongside the scratch videos, the contemporary works demonstrate and develop similar ideas and attitudes, still as politically and aesthetically relevant today: from an interest in the sub-atomic reality of the physical world to new economic models and patterns of risk; from virtual and constructed realities to the subversion and distribution of open source digital tools; from the politics of neo-liberal capitalism to communities created through music, labour and resistance. Throughout Art Sheffield 2016, video, film and sound are explored in their various material forms, on the one hand as a mechanical, digital or virtual medium, but on the other as kind of collective unconscious or reverie, evoking the past only to reflect on the current state of Britain today and our saturated and fragmentary internet-state-of-mind.
