NAVIGATING THE MANCHESTER ART SCENE
The Doorstep Collective
Cornerhouse Projects
Friday 13 April 2007 - Sunday 2007
Cornerhouse Projects presents Navigating the Manchester Art Scene. This is a conceptual and interactive exhibition initiating investigation into Manchester's cultural networks.
Navigating the Manchester Art Scene asks Cornerhouse visitors to think about the existence of a cultural network in the city. This network could be made up of any number of creative spaces. For example, art galleries, an individual's studio, libararies and theatres. When walking around the city are we aware of this network that we are participating and existing in? What is this network and crucially, whatis our role within it?
Navigating the Manchester Art Scene will create a visual representation of this network in the form of a mind-map on the walls of the Cornerhouse. Visitors to Cornerhouse will be asked to contribute to this mapped network by thinking about the creative spaces that they visit, their navigation around these and what they understand a creative space to be. By enabling the visitor to place themselves in this centre of this maze of connections, links and sites, the exhibition will initiate investigation and debate into Manchester's cultural networks and everyone's personal roles within it.
Doorstep Collective is an interdisciplinary arts collective focused on promoting a more active engagement with the creative resources in the city. We believe that every individual's creative space is as valid as that displayed through an institution and our project will attempt to provide a new way of addressing these spaces.
Doorstep Collective has been set up by four recent postgraduates in the fields of arts and humanuities and Navigating the Manchester Art Scene will be our first public project.
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Who we are....
- Doorstep Collective; Lisa Beauchamp, Kate Day & Dena Bagi (Manchester based). Poppy Bowers (London based)
- Doorstep Collective is a Manchester-based visual and critical arts collective. Doorstep Collective was founded in 2006. After completing postgraduate courses in art history and museum studies we decided to form an arts collective that was inter-disciplinary in its approach and outcome. As a group we are focused on creating a socially engaged practice, utilising new spaces and contexts in different ways to create artworks and events that are unique in the combination of site-specificity, performance and participant interaction. Collectively we carry out a number of investigative and experimental projects promoting a more active engagement with local cultural resources. Without a fixed workspace we are able to explore some of the variables for exhibiting, such as audience and location, and take the opportunity to make the most of Manchester’s existing resources. Not wishing to label ourselves under specific categories such as ‘artist’, ‘curator’, ‘critic’ or ‘art historian’, we are developing a visual and critical process that both references those terms and interrogates them.
Doorstep Collective's walks through Curry Mile and Canal Street....
Queer Urban Walks 07 (stay tuned for news of more DC walks - "Art is all about the walks!" (LB)
Last autumn Doorstep participated in a three-month exhibition and site-specific project entitled Mixing It Up: Queering Curry Mile and Currying Canal Street from Sep '07 produced by Alpesh Patel, co-produced by Sphere's Jaheda Choudhury, Doorstep Collective's Lisa Beauchamp; Sangam Restaurant, Curry Mile, The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester Museum, Cornerhouse, Taurus Bar and Restaurant, Doorstep Collective and artist Paul Stanley.
Mixing It Up presented a series of aesthetic projects that challenge the perceived identities of some of the city of Manchester's most well known and trafficked urban spaces - Curry Mile, Canal Street, and the area that connects the two: Oxford Road. Artists question the homogeniety of urban spaces by subverting, confusing, or "mixing up" our habitual expectations of them. In turn, this mixing up shifts expectations about the people generally found in these spaces potentially transforming preconceptions about "gay", "South Asian" and other kinds of Mancunian subjects.
Featured projects included:
Dreamz, Sphere, 2006. (Sangam Restaurant, The Whitworth Art Gallery, Cornerhouse Projects).
Generosity Cake Project, Lisa Beauchamp & Paul Stanley, 2007. (Sangam Restaurant, Taurus Bar, Cornerhouse Projects).
Performance by Beyond Da Box, 2007. (The Joseph Perrier Lounge, Taurus Bar).
Psychogeographies: Personal Spaces, Educational Project [1], 2007. (The Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester).
Seminar: Role of Aesthetics in (re)-Shaping a Cosmopolitan Manchester, Educational Project [2], 2007. (Manchester Museum - Panelists to be confirmed).
Connecting Threads, Educational Project [3], 2007. (Cornerhouse).
Postcard Project, Doorstep Collective; Lisa Beauchamp, Poppy Bowers & Kate Day, 2007.
Queer Urban Walking, (an off-shoot from Walking the Manchester Art Scene by Doorstep Collective's Lisa Beauchamp & other members of the collective), 2007.
Artworks and visual documentation from the above selected projects featured as part of Cornerhouse Projects for a two-month duration from September 2007.
Last autumn Doorstep participated in a three-month exhibition and site-specific project entitled Mixing It Up: Queering Curry Mile and Currying Canal Street from Sep '07 produced by Alpesh Patel, co-produced by Sphere's Jaheda Choudhury, Doorstep Collective's Lisa Beauchamp; Sangam Restaurant, Curry Mile, The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester Museum, Cornerhouse, Taurus Bar and Restaurant, Doorstep Collective and artist Paul Stanley.
Mixing It Up presented a series of aesthetic projects that challenge the perceived identities of some of the city of Manchester's most well known and trafficked urban spaces - Curry Mile, Canal Street, and the area that connects the two: Oxford Road. Artists question the homogeniety of urban spaces by subverting, confusing, or "mixing up" our habitual expectations of them. In turn, this mixing up shifts expectations about the people generally found in these spaces potentially transforming preconceptions about "gay", "South Asian" and other kinds of Mancunian subjects.
Featured projects included:
Dreamz, Sphere, 2006. (Sangam Restaurant, The Whitworth Art Gallery, Cornerhouse Projects).
Generosity Cake Project, Lisa Beauchamp & Paul Stanley, 2007. (Sangam Restaurant, Taurus Bar, Cornerhouse Projects).
Performance by Beyond Da Box, 2007. (The Joseph Perrier Lounge, Taurus Bar).
Psychogeographies: Personal Spaces, Educational Project [1], 2007. (The Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester).
Seminar: Role of Aesthetics in (re)-Shaping a Cosmopolitan Manchester, Educational Project [2], 2007. (Manchester Museum - Panelists to be confirmed).
Connecting Threads, Educational Project [3], 2007. (Cornerhouse).
Postcard Project, Doorstep Collective; Lisa Beauchamp, Poppy Bowers & Kate Day, 2007.
Queer Urban Walking, (an off-shoot from Walking the Manchester Art Scene by Doorstep Collective's Lisa Beauchamp & other members of the collective), 2007.
Artworks and visual documentation from the above selected projects featured as part of Cornerhouse Projects for a two-month duration from September 2007.
Doorstep Collective's Previous projects!
Queer Urban Walks, Mixing It Up: Queering Curry Mile and Currying Canal Street, (various venues across the city), Sep - Dec 2007.
Walking the Manchester Art Scene, July 2007.
Navigating the Manchester Art Scene, Cornerhouse Projects at Cornerhouse, Manchester.
Fri 13 April - Sun 17 June 2007.
Please view adjacent images on the blogspot!
Walking the Manchester Art Scene, July 2007.
Navigating the Manchester Art Scene, Cornerhouse Projects at Cornerhouse, Manchester.
Fri 13 April - Sun 17 June 2007.
Please view adjacent images on the blogspot!