Educational Project #2 (adult programme): Concluding Panel, “Role of Aesthetics in (re)-Shaping a Cosmopolitan Manchester”

Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester

Panelists include: Dr. Piotr Bienkowski, Deputy Director, Manchester Museum, Professor of Archaeology and Museology, University of Manchester; Jaheda Choudhury, member of Sphere, educator, and co-producer, “Mixing It Up”; and Andrew Stokes, Chief Executive, Marketing Manchester, Chairman, Manchester Pride Ltd., & Acting Chair, queerupnorth. Moderated by Alpesh Patel, producer, “Mixing It Up”

This panel will include a lively conversation among artists, university and museum professionals, and representatives from local marketing bodies on the role of aesthetics in (re) shaping the city of Manchester as it sheds its “industrial” persona. In particular, the panel topic will be filtered through the following viewpoints: audiences, artists, institutions, temporary festivals, and marketing.

What are the challenges of simultaneously elevating the city onto a “global” stage and also celebrating the “local”? Can events such as the Manchester International Festival and organizations such as Marketing Manchester simultaneously bring in new visitors into the city whilst incorporating “indigenous,” Mancunian subjects?

And, how can differences of gender, race/ethnicity, class, faith and sexuality within Manchester be most effectively mobilized towards creating a new model of a “cosmopolitan” city?

Education Project #1 (school programme): Mapping Art: Psychogeographies

Psychogeographies produced by Lymm High School Y12 students of their tours of exhibitions at Cornerhouse (click on image for a closer look).

Cornerhouse

How does who you are change as you walk through different spaces? How do we change the world around us as we navigate the world? This is an activity which involves students going through the museum to make a map which reflects their favorite places, interesting objects, and the thoughts and connections prompted by certain objects in the collections. The emphasis is not on a literal map, but a map of one’s own journey which may not actually follow the layout of the museum and that makes use of the museum spaces and collections to springboard into other personal spaces and memories. The project is aimed at empowering students to think about how they can shape spaces, as well as how spaces might shape them.

MIXING IT UP Project #3: Queer, Urban Walking Project/Rusholme and Canal Street

Queer, Urban Walk, Rusholme, October 12, 2007

Doorstep Collective (Lisa Beauchamp, Poppy Bowers, and Kate Day)

Doorstep Collective is an interdisciplinary, arts collective focused on promoting more active, personal engagements with urban, creative resources. The organization’s most recent project at Cornerhouse explored the city of Manchester’s cultural networks through a mind map to which visitors were asked to contribute any space they deemed to be creative. The resulting map exhibited a complex web of creative spaces that ranged from the quirky and personal, to bars and clubs, and to more traditional institutional venues.

Building on this project, the Collective will organize directed, “queer, urban walks” in and around the geographical area roughly bound by Canal Street and Curry Mile. The artists elucidate the ways in which Mancunian subjects (re-)write spaces, emphasizing issues as diverse as gender, race, and sexuality, for instance. They also explore "creative" spaces beyond the institutional.

One walk will place on and around Canal Street; another walk will take place on and around Curry Mile.

Queer, Urban Walk, Canal Street, October 2, 2007

MIXING IT UP Project #2: Generosity Cake Project

Produced by artist Paul Stanley & Doorstep Collective’s Lisa Beauchamp

Stanley and Beauchamp appropriate an image of a chicken tikka kekab, heavily associated with "South Asian" communities, for the surfaces of their cakes to confuse what might be the expected bodily sensation of such visual stimuli. The bodily sensation typically evoked by such an image is confounded by that of the sugary sweetness normally expected of the confectionary on which the image is found. The artists draw attention to the connection between visual and socially constructed knowledge embedded in the body, itself, by subverting how urban subjects habitually respond to visual stimuli, for instance, of perceived, “South Asian” or “gay” subjects in the city.

The artists also interrogate larger questions of what makes an image “South Asian” (its author, audience, geographical location, or content) and who can and cannot deploy such images. Further, they explore the centrality of generosity in re-working maligned or marginalized identities (the queer in South Asian and the South Asian in queer).

Cake will be given out around the end of Ramadan, the month of fasting and a Muslim religious holiday that encourages just this kind of generosity. The artist underscores the role of each citizen in creating, or re-shaping collective and individual urban identities.