Curator's Recollections

On Saturday 5th July at 2pm, curators Rob and Darien will be leading a guided tour of the exhibition Ruinous Recollections. Meet at Upperspace in the gallery, all welcome!

Ruinous Opening

Last Friday saw the successful opening of Ruinous Recollections: Artistic Drifts Through Post-Industrial Manchester at Upperspace, Newton Street, Manchester. Massive thanks and congratulations to everyone who helped us put the exhibition together, especially to our artists.

The exhibition runs until Tuesday 22nd July, come visit!

Searching for Sebald

Victoria Lem's photographs trace memories of place, the remnants of past activities. For Ruinous Recollections, Vic is searching for Sebald, the German author who discovered echoes of his own traumatic past in Manchester and Salford's industrial shadows. The image above from Castlefield basin represents the initial experience of Vic's exploration of Sebald's spatial memories. Visit her blog for more insight into her thoughts on the project.

http://victorialem.blogspot.com/

Flyering Recollections

Above is the great new flyer for Ruinous Recollections at Upper Space Gallery, opening Friday 27th June 2008. Special thanks to Nick for designing it and to Bec for letting us use her work in progress photograph of Cecil Street. Please come along to the exhibition, and see what our five fantastic artists have been discovering & creating!

Loiterers Resist

Drifting through the city of Manchester one finds fellow wanderers walking in the same direction, or perhaps just loitering…like our friends from the Loiterers Resistance Movement, whose Second Accidental International Festival of Psychogeography is on now. Have a dérive across to the address below for more details…

http://www.nowhere-fest.blogspot.com/

Xaverian Orange

Barney Francis has joined Ruinous Recollections. Barney will present proposals for transcriptions in the city drawing on the memory, literature and presence of Anthony Burgess. Burgess grew up and studied at Xaverian College in Manchester, before leaving the city to fight in WW2. Barney's art will work dystopian palimpsests of the city, mixing the sites of Burgess' childhood with the images of his later writings.

Dissecting the Map

Illustrator Nick Hamilton will be producing new work for Ruinous Recollections. Nick is part of the Sketch City collective of urban artists, and will be looking at the Manchester links of Peter Mark Roget, who is famous for devising the Thesaurus. Roget first drafted his Thesaurus whilst a doctor in the city, using the lists he compiled as a personal therapeutic device. Drawing on influences from anatomical illustrations, linguistics and mapping Nick will produce illustrations that re-imagine Roget's Manchester in multi-layered personal narratives. Above is an example of Nick's bold graphic style.

Streets Dissolve

Using a Holga Camera, Bec Garland has taken haunting photos of the sites where Engels and the Burns sisters used to live in Manchester. The Holga gives the images their distinctive diffuse edge, creatively suggesting the dissolution that these streets have experienced in the 150 years since Engels lived there: an archaeology of memory layered onto buildings past and present.

Stories from the City

Behind the visible built environment of the city lurk fictions and memories latent within urban space. The abandoned stories and neglected narratives that echo through the red-brick ruins of post-industrial Manchester represent a drift of deleterious dereliction, a literary psychogeography of the city where spectres of a forgotten past ghost-write their tales onto the decaying urban fabric. Part of Ruinous Recollections is unearthing these stories, and connecting them with contemporary artists, who through their work can elaborate upon the myths of city space.

Ruinous Beginnings

Ruinous Recollections is an art project established by two Manchester-based curators, Darien Jane Rozentals and Robert Knifton. Taking multiple stories of the city as its start point, it will create works that etch memories into Manchester's urban canvas, re-imagining and adding layers to an already fluid city. This blog will document the project as it evolves...